Mission Memories

Mom left for Germany today and I hope she has a good time while she’s there and can help Oma, Opa, Patrick & Melitta.  I’m so jealous and wish I was going with her.  After work, I got Autumn & we went to Mom & Dad’s house and made tacos for dinner and worked on Autumn’s  letters.  I worry, b/c she just isn’t learning them very well.  I tried 3 different teaching techniques and she still wasn’t getting it.  She knows some of the easy letters like “s” b/c it looks like a snake and “o” b/c it’s just a round circle.  But we would work on a letter like “p” and sound it out and say words that start with “p” and trace it w/ our finger and then 2 minutes later I’d ask her where “p” was and she couldn’t find it.  I need to make sure to work with her on it every night.

Dad took her outside to play for a little while, and I cleaned up the dishes and put all the food away.  We watched the last few innings of the Ranger’s baseball game and that Grand Slam by Nelson Cruz was AWESOME!  I bet people are glad now that the game went over into 11 innings.

Autumn & I came home around 8:30 and I put her to bed, and should have gone to bed myself b/c I was getting a headache and was tired, but I got started on a project and there was no stopping me.  I have been doing Project Life (a picture a day) this year and have LOVED it.  Becky Higgins is a scrapbooking goddess in my book b/c she’s taken something that is usually so time consuming and made it easy.  So, when the Amber Edition became available last week, I ordered one and planned on using it for my baby book pictures.  But, I realized I have WAY too many pictures from my childhood to use Project Life.  So, I decided to do my mission pictures instead.  But, as you can see from the picture above, I have A LOT of pictures from that 18 months of my life.  But, I’m still going to do it and might just have to have 3 albums instead of 1.

Luckily I had all the negatives from my pictures turned into CD’s a few years ago.  That’s so crazy to think that I’m so old that digital cameras weren’t around when I was on my mission.  Dang, that makes me feel REALLY OLD!  Anyways, I got my all my pictures printed off on my mission, but would use some of them in ego knjigos, so I am missing some good pictures.  I went through my pictures on the CD’s and compared them w/ the physical copies I have to figure out which ones I need to print off.  That took the whole evening, so I watched Whose Line while doing that. 

As you can see, I made quite the mess, but it’s going to be SOOOOOO WORTH it to have all my mission pictures in an album w/ journaling about what happened and what was going on.  It was a joke among us missionaries that I was the camera queen b/c I was always taking pictures.  I usually got a roll of film developed every 2 weeks.  But, now I am SO THANKFUL that I did take so many pictures, and actually even regret a little bit that I didn’t taken more.  You can never take too many pictures, in my opinion.

I know this is going to be a bittersweet trip down memory lane.  It’s going to be bitter, b/c it will make me ache for Slovenija and make me miss it more than I already do.  But, it’s going to be more sweet than bitter b/c I will get to relive all the great memories I had on my mission, the amazing people I got to meet, and the Spirit that I felt as a missionary.