Pearly whites Italian style
Friday morning we left early to go to the dentist, Dee for a followup to see how the tooth extraction site was doing (just fine, thank you), and I to get my teeth cleaned. I had never been to an Italian dentist, but they seemed competent, and the place was clean. I'll get one more cleaning here in about six months. Parking was a bit of a challenge, but we did find a spot a couple of blocks away. When we returned to our car, somebody had double parked right behind us; a honk brought them out in a minute or two to let us out. Strange system for us, but it seems to work.
We got to the Institute plenty early after that, so I walked over to the bank nearby to get some cash. I then finished up my lesson prep, while Dee started shredding the chicken she had cooked the day before. When Donatella showed up, the two of them made apple strudel, which looks very elegant but isn't actually all that hard. Donatella loves cooking! It was a very popular dessert for the Seminary class later that afternoon.
In addition to the scripture game with plates (golden ones this week!), we studied a few new scriptures and then played a doctrinal mastery bingo game. You can watch the video of the plate game here. Bingo was also a lot of fun for them. This time we had six students, so the word is spreading.
My Institute lesson went pretty well, I think. We started with only five GANS in the room, plus two online, but the kids kept trickling in, and it was pretty full by the end. There was a lot of participation and good discussion, a bit out of control at times, but in a good way. We covered Alma 36-42: Alma's letters to his sons. At the end we watched the 10-minute video of the parable "The Mediator", based on Elder Packer's 1977 conference talk. It's quite well known in the US, but most of these youngsters hadn't seen it before. Ugo had to help me find it in Italian, as it's not available on lds.org. During class time, the Sorelle taught two missionary lessons to some of our non-member girls.
Afterwards, Dee's chicken/sausage/pasta/cheese/ranch casserole was very popular, though several of our biggest eaters weren't there, so there was actually some left over, which rarely happens. She also made rice pudding and Reeses bars.
After the food was consumed, the party started. There were a whole bunch of kids there, mostly staying until much later than when we left about 10pm. They were doing group karaoke and having a great time together.
It was quite late for us when we got home, and we were both exhausted, having been out since 9am. But of course, I stayed up a bit later to write the blog and Dee did yet another load of laundry. She went through two aprons at the Institute today and wanted to catch up. Since our washer has a small capacity, it means laundry is usually a twice-daily event.
