31 - The Week of Thanksgiving

...that ye live in thanksgiving daily, for the many mercies and blessings which he doth bestow upon you. (Alma 34:38).

Lots happened this week, and I know I'm not going to be able to cover all I would like too. Darn. But I'll try to hit the important things.

Tuesday was great because we saw lots of progress with people we are working with! The native family is opening up to us a lot more now. It's been awesome. And what else is awesome is the deaf recent convert that we have been working with, Sunshine? Well, someone was apparently giving her a hard time and telling her to go to a different church, trying super hard to control her. But Sunshine stood up for herself, telling her friend that she was satisfied with her church right now. But her friend was just NOT leaving her alone! But she felt comfortable to call us for comfort and support after that happened! How awesome is that! She's been struggling with her testimony and that just shows how far she's come!

The day before Thanksgiving, we had Thanksgiving dinner with the Taylor family. 

They did Thanksgiving a day early because Sister Taylor was going out of town on Thanksgiving. It was wonderful! 

As you can see by my plate, it was a lot of good awesome Thanksgiving deliciousness. 


And afterward we had a Thanksgiving activity where we made thankfulness turkeys. 

So that was super fun and filling.

Thanksgiving day. I prayed that day to see miracles. In my mind, I reminded myself that this was the only Thanksgiving I would have as a missionary, as a representative of the Lord, and I wanted to tell people what I was thankful for and give them something more to be thankful for! 

I expressed my desire to work hard today to Sister Burt, and I told her we 'would' see miracles today.

The miracle came almost immediately. We had tried knocking on this less active family's door multiple times with no avail, but this morning, the door was opened. We were able to share a Thanksgiving message and set up another time to meet and we have high hopes with meeting with these people more regularly in the future!

We then went back home and were picked up by Sister Thulin to spend Thanksgiving with their family of ten kids all under the age of sixteen! Crazy! I love their family! 

And Sister Thulin is such a saint and even brought little treats to her person that she visit teaches after she picked us up.

Man, Thanksgiving at the Thulin house was so high energy and fun! 

See, I told you it was COLD outside!

Never A Dull Moment At the Thulin's - 10 Kids!

We've been to their house for dinner before, but, and this is so typical of kids, they wanted to give us a tour of the house! Haha. So we walked down the stairs, following the barrage of excited little ones and were shown the big awesome room that is the basement and the playroom. 


And they had a big bean bag that we were playing with, giving them rides on it one at a time, and then we played "Binky Ball" (dodgeball basically with one of those squishy stringy balls) which is totally a game which we in my family as little kids would have made up and played, and it was awesome. 

So much running around!

And then one of the kids wanted to play outside in the like, 10 degree weather, and I was all for that! 

There wasn't too much snow, and the snow wasn't sticky enough to make anything more than a simple snowball, but we had fun playing soccer as best we could while the little ones sledded down the soccer goal haha, and while one of the youngest sucked on a football.


Problem is, I got my camera slightly snowy, aka, slightly wet... and the picture was um, not doing so well... but! It took an awesome picture of pre-digging into Thanksgiving dinner where it made it look like a memory! haha

So that's awesome! But then I just put it in rice and my camera was all good to use again. Yay rice!!!

And we after that just had a good relaxing time. 

It was so homey and nice.

But... we did end up staying longer than we probably should have. I prayed to see miracles and I saw one. I was satisfied with the one miracle and I shouldn't have been satisfied with just one. It was a great Thanksgiving still, but I regret not having set the expectation to leave the member's house earlier. And there's no other Thanksgiving for me to have a second chance. But, I suppose that's what the atonement is for, to make up for those things that you can't repay yourself. What a sacred gift. I will repent as I take advantage of the future holidays. Though, of course, everyday we can see miracles.

Also... guess what....

You'll never believe this, but our Mission President authorized us to go Black Friday shopping, just us sisters in Sioux Falls, (cuz we called and asked haha) and so we did! We switched most of our P-day hours to be on Friday instead of Tuesday so we could shop for a long time!

This was my first Black Friday experience actually haha. How ironic. We got up at 5 and were at Target by 6. It actually wasn't very busy, it was nice. After Target we went to Hobby Lobby. 

And then we went to Style Encore which still opened at 10, and haha, there was a little line five minutes to opening that formed! So we totally stood in a little line on black Friday! How awesome is that!?

My crowning buy was from Style Encore though. I got this coat for just $15.90! Hopefully it will hold me through the negatives. If not, guess I'll just have to find something else haha, but it seems like it should do me good. 

But yes, black Friday was very successful.

And guess what! A less active family who we have been working with, the native family, they came to sacrament meeting on Sunday!!! That's huge!!!

And I am out of time. 

Just because: So cute...Link gnome leprechaun...hahaha

Looking forward to writing next week!