Eagle Eyes

Last MTC day at the cabin. Weston has been doing so well. It is fun to hear him talking in Spanish, cracking jokes with the other missionaries, conducting meetings and learning how to be the best missionary. I am glad Stockton got to go to the regular MTC though. I think home MTC would be so hard.

Elder Weston Smith 

Mike and I took the jet ski out on the lake. Steve and Shannon took the boat with three of their kids. I wore my wet suit Mike got me for the first time today. I was a fan. I spent the entire time on the jet ski today. The first time I had been on it. I wasn't ever cold. The wet suit made a huge difference. Mike and I came back early while the rest finished wake boarding. On the way back the water looked much smoother than on the way out. Hope they had a great time! Sounds like they did. Brandon even rescued someone. They had fallen off their jet ski and were left behind. Brandon saw a tiny dot waving. They picked him up. The family said they were about to call search and rescue. Glad Brandon has eagle eyes!

Mike

Mike & Stephanie

Mike took Stockton, Jorja and Bear home. Stockton is going through the temple with Gavin on Wednesday. Jorja has school and work. Bear likes Mike. Mike will bring Stockton and hopefully Maysen back up with him. Maysen has still been feeling sick. She says she is doing a lot better and she is hopeful for the Wednesday drive. Steve and Shannon's family left a bit later. Weston told me this is his favorite place and that he loves it here. Awe. That's awesome. This place is the best.

Elder Weston

Elder Weston & Shannon

Preston and I are now at the cabin by ourselves. My brothers and their families will come tomorrow. I had Preston take a shower and hang out in Mike's bathrobe while I washed his clothes. Mike will bring up all the clothes Preston packed on Wednesday. Glad we have a washing machine here now!

Smith Homecomings

Erica and Brandon both had their mission homecoming today, even though they have been home for months. What a weird year! Mike, Maysen and Jorja all watched it on zoom. I taught my lesson at the exact same time. Preston is in my class, so I made him be with me. Mike recorded it so we are planning on watching it later though.

We had sacrament before Mike and I went to church. Preston took a shower after and I asked Jorja to do his hair. This is the picture she sent me with the caption, "I'm not good at hair." Haha. Jorja said Preston was laughing the entire time, but wanted to look serious in the picture. I love them.

Jorja & Preston

Blessing and Homecoming

Kaylee was blessed today. Over zoom. It was pretty cool. All of my family was on there, and a lot of Sam's. Matt and Sam's bishop was on there too. It was awesome that my brothers that live far away (and their families) still got to be there. It was weird seeing Matt as the only one in the circle as the blessing was being given. Weird times we live in now. Kaylee is exactly four months old today. She is still on oxygen a lot of time, but is getting stronger and healthier. Definitely don't want her to get the coronavirus. After the blessing we were able to talk to my brothers and their families for a bit. We even played some Jackbox over zoom. Not as easy to do it that way. We had to say goodbye so we could get on our next zoom call.

Brandon is home from the Chicago Illinois mission, Spanish speaking. We had a 'homecoming' with all of Mike's family. Pretty much Brandon told us about his mission and we asked him some questions. It was fun. Aimee was there with her brand new baby!!! Jonathan Levi. He was beautiful. Spencer even got on. And his wife! I'm not sure how to spell her name. I know it starts with an X. She is so beautiful! Anyway, it was great to be able to connect with both sides of the family today!

Jorja also got to do another meeting after that. They had a zoom presidency meeting with the young woman's president. Busy day but so nice.

Brandon's Home!

Jorja got up early again this morning to go on a hike with Madison. She works with her almost every day, so she is one of the few people Jorja is allowed to hang out with. The two of them had a great time.

Madison & Jorja

Mike took the day off of work. He has been working longer hours now that he works from home. When he drove to work, he had to get home before dark because his headlights don't work right now. Here, he gets carried away and it is 9:00 at night before he realizes it. So, today he took an official day off and spent it filling the dumpster. We got rid of lots of stuff. Even fun stuff like the basketball hoop and the air hockey table. Preston's room looks so big now! It's great! I started going through our filing cabinet and throwing away things we don't need. The bonus was I found some fun gems. Like Grandma Honey's Furby trick list. She LOVED those Furbies. It was adorable. This will take me several days to get through. Hopefully I find some more fun stuff. I did send my brothers a copy of a letter John wrote his first week in the MTC. It was funny.

Brandon came home from his mission today. His 24 months would have been up on July 24, but because of corona, they are sending lots of missionaries home early. His mission was changed to 21 months. We drove by his house and waved to him. I didn't get a picture though. We then went to Chick-Fil-A to see Jorja in her new mask. They had to start wearing them today. Jorja is not a fan.

Jorja

Bear on a bear rug

 Preston and Bear

Chinese Ordering

Jorja didn't have to get up because there was no drivers ed today. Although, she did have to get up early because it is the 24th of July and we are assigned to do flags. She was tired. I was proud of our flags, none of them fell down. Most of the flags fell down on our street the last time they were up. We took down our street and then we took down the flags for the Liu's. They were going on vacation and couldn't get anyone to switch. It took a long time to take them all down! 

Brandon left to the Mexico MTC today. Weird! Crazy that he is old enough to be on a mission!

Mike had work today, so our day was pretty normal. Mike did get his taco train working, so he was happy about that!

 Maysen & Preston

 Mike

Jorja had work today. She was taking orders when someone came up who didn't speak English very well. He got frustrated and started using Google translate. He turned the app around and Jorja saw Mandarin at the top. Jorja spoke to him in Chinese and said, "Do you speak Chinese?" His head jerked up and he answered her in Chinese. Jorja then took his entire order in Chinese. Apparently the entire staff by the drive thru window stopped and watched Jorja. How cool is that? I bet that guy loved it. No one said anything to Jorja after that happened, she just went on like it was a normal every day thing. Chick-Fil-A closed early today, so Jorja was able to help with that. (Because she isn't 16 she is not allowed to stay after 9:00.) Anyway, while they were cleaning up one of the girls said, "Wait, can we just take a moment and talk about how Jorja took someone's order entirely in CHINESE?"

Meanwhile, down in Texas, Stockton had his one meter competition today. He texted me during it and said, "Did an awesome 303c!" That's a reverse 1 1/2. How fun! He said he was happy with all of his dives, but the judges failed him on his twister. Everything was fine except his FEET over twisted so they gave him a zero. He said he doesn't understand how you can over rotate and get scored, but if you over twist a tiny bit they will fail you. Everyone on Stockton's team failed at least one dive today. Stockton was still happy though. If he had failed a non-twister dive I think that would be a different story.

Stockton's room setup looks nice. Nate texted me a picture. The kids are playing Tiki Topple. This is the room Stockton sleeps in. Nate and Gavin have an adjoining room. Perfect setup. The kids can play, but they are somewhat supervised, and Stockton isn't all alone.

Dani, Stockton, Gavin

Brandon's Farewell

For some reason my computer really doesn't want me to post about today's events. I keep getting 'beach balled'. Maybe I just have too many tabs open. These pictures are probably just up in random order, but oh well.

We were able to leave bright and early this morning. We had most of the cleaning done last night. Stockton and his friends were a great help and it went fast. Maysen offered to clean both bathrooms, that was great! We had a little traffic when sheep wouldn't get out of the road. The car in front of us had a Georgia license plate and did not want to move, even when they could. They were taking videos out of their car window. The car behind us got mad and passed. It looked like he was going to run over the sheep. The silver van was mad at that van and made it known. Other than the sheep, the rest of the time was smooth sailing.

We dropped Dani and Noelle off in Salt Lake at a gas station where their dad met us. We dropped Gavin, Gage and Connor off at Gage's house and he took them home. We got home just in time to hurry to church. First, I had to go pick up Jorja from Madison's house. They wanted a quick photo shoot first. I was stressing a little, but it was fine.

Hannah (in window), Madison & Jorja

Jorja and Madison doing some weird hand thing Stockton taught them.

Madison & Jorja

 Being serious

We made it to Brandon's farewell just in time. We sat in the very back with the folding chairs. Lots of people were there. Shannon was making the rounds saying hi to everybody. She saw us there and said she had a seat saved for us up front. Yay! We had perfect seats. Gavin and his dad came too. Stockton loved Brandon's talk and said it was the best farewell he had been to in a long time. We went to Steve and Shannon's afterwords. We hung out and stuffed our faces. There was so much to eat!

Brandon & Stockton

 Weston, Jorja, Brandon, Jacob, Stockton

 Maysen

 Jorja

Maysen

Jorja

Jorja

 Jorja & Preston

 Maysen

 Mike

 Maysen

 Mike

 Preston

Mike and Jorja went out driving today. She hasn't been too fond of driving since her car accident. She has her range tomorrow and is pretty nervous. Hopefully this time with Mike calmed her nerves. I did as much laundry as I could. Stockton is leaving for a week tomorrow afternoon. Crazy summer!

Chicago, Illinois

Today was Missionary Sunday! First we had a mission farewell in our ward. Thomas Mogensen is going to the Alpine Mission. I think it covers Germany and Switzerland. It is actually the mission his dad grew up in, so that is awesome. Thomas gave an amazing talk. I loved it. He talked about the saxophone. There are two different bad performance classes at Alta. Wind Ensemble, which is the super hard class to get into and Concert Band, which is not as hard to get into as Wind Ensemble. Thomas was in Concert Band and he wanted to be first saxophone so bad. He practiced and practiced. He asked for advice from everyone he could think of. He prayed and prayed. When the chairs were announced, he was third chair. He was devastated. Then he found out that you could challenge and move up chairs if you work hard. He worked and worked, but he never moved up. Around November his band teacher talked to him. He said he noticed how hard he was working and that a spot just opened up in Wind Ensemble. Until this time Thomas thought there would be no possibility of him being in that class. If he had gotten first chair like he wanted, he wouldn't have put in as much work as he did and wouldn't have been able to have an opportunity that he thought was out of his reach. Anyway, he did great. The bishop remarked afterword about how far Thomas has come. His talk when he moved into the ward was about 45 seconds long and just a disaster. Big difference this time. We went to the Mogensen's afterwords. Mike and Stockton are their home teachers. Thomas and his dad have also been coming to my Gospel Essentials class. 

Speaking of Gospel Essentials, while we were there Stockton was looking at his phone. He was on Instagram and saw a story saying Brandon was opening his mission call. What! We didn't even know he had his papers in! Well, we knew he was working on them, so it wasn't a huge surprise. Brandon is two months older than Stockton, which makes it just a little bit crazy/scary. We went down to watch Brandon and make our guesses. Maysen even texted in her guess....and she won. She won when Taylor was leaving too. We brought home a giant bag of gummy bears as her prize.

Preston

 Preston, Stockton, Mike, Jorja

Brandon has been called to Chicago, Illinois and will be on a Spanish speaking mission. He goes into the Mexico MTC on July 24th. How exciting for him! I think he was happy with his call.

Stockton and Brandon

Stockton and Jorja also had another friend opening his call today. They toyed with the idea of going over to watch it, but there was snow and we got home late. They watched him open his call live on Instagram stories. Technology is awesome!

First Day of Campaigning

I dropped Stockton off at school early so he could get his signs and shirts handed out to the people who agreed to wear them. Stockton said everything went really well today. People really loved his signs and his campaign. I was a nervous wreck today. Stockton had a $150 budget. We needed six signs for the posters. They were $13 each, $20 to get them laminated. That would have taken most of his budget. Mike decided against lamination while we were at the dive meet. We were thinking we needed the lamination to help the posters stand up. Mike got a foam poster board that Stockton rubber cemented the signs to. It worked great. What we didn't think about was how the lamination would help in the rain. Around 10:00 it started raining really bad. Pouring hard. I was so worried that someone who was holding his sign would have seminary and the signs would be all the way ruined. Turns out, Ryuhei had seminary. He broke one of the handles running and trying not to ruin the sign. That's okay, the handles could be fixed. He ended up leaving the sign in a teacher's classroom because the handle broke. That was weird because it was only the sword part, not anything that you really had to hold. I wonder when he had seminary. Hopefully it was at the end of the day. Mike and Stockton were able to fix the handle when they got home.

Stockton seemed really happy with how the campaigning went today. Yay! Stockton's cousin, Brandon, is also running for a student body office at his school. Their campaigning started today too. Shannon sent me this picture of Brandon's booth. The difference is, they only get one day to campaign. Maybe just lunch, I don't know. Brandon found out after school that he didn't make it. That's too bad. All that work for just a few minutes chance.

Brandon's booth

Stockton was telling me about his drama class today. They were doing improve at the end and had to do a worst parent ever skit. When it was Stockton's turn he yelled, "Honey, I'm going to 'take your child to work day'!" He then leaned down and picked up an imaginary baby. He talked to the baby as he was walking away saying, "You get to see what your daddy does at Planned Parenthood." Stockton said the class busted up laughing, even the teacher. It is always good to get the teacher to laugh at you! As Stockton was taking his seat he heard a kid say, "I'm voting for him for sure now!"