Six Months

We left for Utah on February 26th to help Melody with the delivery of her baby.  Melody had been pretty sick with this pregnancy.  Since she has Cerebral Palsy and uses a wheelchair to get around, when she started having problems close to delivery we knew we needed to return to Ephraim for the delivery and our Mission President agreed.

  Melody is amazing!! We took her into the hospital for high blood pressure (160/110) on March 4th and she had already dilated to a 2. She had no idea that she was already in labor, so they kept her and started watching her.  She was having contractions every two to three minutes, but they weren't doing anything.  The doctor decided to do a C-Section late in the afternoon on March 5th. She asked her sister, Cass to go in and take pictures of the baby in the nursery and asked Michelle to go into surgery with her. Tyler was born at 4:53pm weighing in at 6 lbs 14 oz and 19 inches long.  A pretty good size for being three weeks early.

  While visiting Utah, once again, we fell in love with Ephraim and the mountains around it.  It has a very slow, laid back pace and everyone seems to know everyone else.  The Church is strong there and the members are so considerate of each other's needs.  We even found a "Miracle Relief Society".  In all our years, we have never seen a Relief Society take care of someone with such care and concern, much like we would see the Savior do.  Her Relief Society is ministering to her physically, emotionally and spiritually.  They are truly on the Lord's errand and we are so grateful for all they are doing for her.

  We returned to New Orleans and wonderful weather.  In the high 70s and sunny.  With the high humidity it feels like Hawaii. What a difference it makes if you head east instead of west.  We are still trying to catch up with the jet lag, but seem to have made it back home without the bad colds that all of the grandkids shared.

  We went to Church today and got some sad news.  One of the High Priests in our little Spanish ward was hit by a car and killed shortly after we left for Utah.  His family was living in Washington D.C. and he was there visiting when it happened.  Brother Barahona was one of the happiest men in our ward.  He didn't speak much English, but we always enjoyed playing charades with him.  Since we have very few High Priests this is also a great loss for our ward.

  We also have transfers this week and get to go to the Baton Rouge Temple with a couple of our favorite missionaries.  Elder Andrade and Elder Homer.  Elder Andrade is one of the best missionaries we've seen here.  He has learned a lot from his mother and has been training new missionaries for awhile.  One of his secrets - he bakes a few cookies everyday and takes them out to his investigators. We shared our cookie dough secret with him. We don't look forward to transfers this week, since many of our missionaries have been here for a few months.

  We will also have Don do the temple work for my father and have my parents sealed to each other and my brother and myself. Yeah!!!  I've been trying to get this done for a few months and with the "New Family Search" program, our Temple was able to help us get the paperwork done.

  While we were gone these past two weeks the missionaries had 16 baptisms.  They had more baptisms than we have active families in our ward.  By "active family" we mean - a husband and wife who both come to Church regularly and hold callings.  We have a lot of men (married to someone in another country) or women (single parents or widows). The Castillos were finally married and baptized.  They came to the New Member Meetings last fall, but didn't want to get married.  They've both kept coming to church all this time and finally made the commitment to each other and the Lord.  This was a very good thing!!

  One thing we both noticed today at church is that our Spanish got real rusty while we were away. (What little of it there was to rust.) It was very hard to come up with the words to say normal things.  We will have to work a little harder on our Spanish to make up for lost time.  Still it seems like it takes forever to learn.  Don seems to do much better at it when the words crossover from French.  (He's so lucky.)

  Speaking of time - we've been in the Mission Field for 6 months. We love being together and it seems strange when we have to separate for Priesthood and Relief Society.