Another really good night of sleep, and today I felt normal all day for the first time in a couple of weeks. My wife is also doing a lot better. Life is good.
In the morning we attended our first zone conference, a large one with missionaries from all over the Rome area and from Naples. They had us stand up and introduce ourselves and bear a testimony, along with all the other new missionaries, and everyone was surprised at how good our Italian is -- all those trips over the past decades paid off! They even laughed at our little jokes. Unfortunately, we had to leave after only a couple of hours to go open up the Institute, so we really didn't get to meet many people yet. Doing so involved driving across the entire city, passing the Vatican and crossing the river. Traffic is starting to feel normal here, which is scary.
It was a fairly slow day at the Institute, which was welcome in a way. We were able to catch up on some stuff from home, and my wife sent out our first weekly attendance report, making a fancy spreadsheet which will be helpful in tracking who is coming. For home evening only a few kids came, which was disappointing, but we think they were a bit overwhelmed after such a long day yesterday.
My lesson consisted of going around the room and having everyone share something brief that touched or inspired them from General Conference. It's always interesting to do that, because we listen to the same talks, but everyone gets something different out of it. Then we played a trivia game about modern apostles and Presidents of the church; I made it up and it was too long and too hard, but they learned some things.
Afterwards we had snickerdoodles again. This time my wife taught me how to make them. We are really enjoying our time together, laughing more than we ever do at home. Things are starting to feel a bit more routine after a rough start.
Our first package from
amazon.it arrived at the office today, bringing a few things we've been
missing. The Balzottis, another missionary couple who live in our
apartment complex and work at the office, brought it home for us to save
us the trip. Since we are big Amazon customers at home, it's comforting
to have the option here, although the selection online isn't quite as good as in the US.