Happy Birthday Dad

Dear Friends and Family,

To start I just want to say happy birthday to the most amazing man I have ever met let alone have had the privilege of being his daughter: my dad. Happy Birthday Dad! I hope Grandma made you some delicious lemon pie and you had a great time on your Timpanogos Hike! (Ya, my dad hiked Timp on his **th birthday, he's the man!) Love you dad!

So is anyone else impressed that I have made it this long without an email-worthy clumsy moment? I sure am! But lest any of you be concerned that this is not the daughter/sister/friend/etc. that you have loved all of your life (or however long we have known each other) I'll just say: though the mission has of course brought its changes (I'm more mature...?), some things never change. Last Tuesday we were going to pick up some new elders for our ward (we now have 4 Elders and 2 sisters in our ward including us, woot woot!) and me and three other sisters were booking it up an escalator to catch a metro...dumb idea I guess. I tripped and fell so hard! An Indian man in front of us just turned around and stared, I don't think he knew whether to try and help or to burst out laughing neither did the sisters I was with. We still had to make it the metro so I just hurried and got up and kept running but later noticed the effects escalators can have on the body, specifically ankles, shins, and hip bones. I've got some pretty sweet cuts and bruises, one bruise which is definitely the least serious of all of the battle wounds I received looks like the canyons logo. I'll send you a picture :)

As I said we now have 6 missionaries which is great. One of the new elders is from Brazil and I can understand about 90% of what he says in Portuguese.

We had a special training conference this last week (kind of like a mini zone conference that we have every three months). It was super good! President and Hermana Pace are amazing. I always learn so much from them! Hermana Walker, Elder Glenn, and Elder Benton, and I sang All Creatures of Our God and King. I sang alto which I LOVE, the alto part to that song is so pretty!

Yesterday all of the lessons were focused on missionary work. It was a great day! All of the members were bearing their testimonies on mission work and a lot of them offered to help us with our visits. We also had a long meeting with the bishop and he gave us a lot of less actives he would like us to teach. I think the ward-missionaries relationship is really going to improve from here and I am so excited!

Today for P-Day we went to the park, had a picnic, played games, tossed around a frisbee and just relaxed in the Dry River, probably doesn't sound exciting but it was super fun with 8 other missionaries.

Life is still going great over here in Valencia. It's starting to cool down a little bit. We have a few people we are focusing on right now: Stella, Mensen, Sandra, and Victoria. They are amazing and we are hopeful that any, if not all, of them might be baptized this month.

Lots of love! Have a great week! Spread the gospel!

-Hermana Tuttle