Sunday marked one year since we left home. It has gone fast! We were both very tired when we woke up, not having slept anywhere near enough after an exhausting Saturday. I was still very full, so I didn't have anything to eat until the afternoon. Doug couldn't leave the hot dogs, nacho cheese sauce, chips and pudding dirt cups alone!
Our meetings were all very nice. Ugo gave a great Sunday School lesson on Jonah. He told the story about Jonah being called by the Lord to go and preach in Ninevah and then fleeing on a boat in the complete opposite direction. Then he said that, almost seven years ago when they were contemplating accepting the job offer here in Rome and leaving the home they loved in the US, he applied for jobs elsewhere, including BYU-Hawaii, in the complete opposite direction! In fact, their youngest son Levi was born at that point, and Ugo wanted to name him Jonah 😀. None of the other other job options worked out, so they came here, and the rest is history, for which we are grateful. Dee and I and were both talking in the car about how much we will miss our wonderful and unique ward here. The people are amazing.
With still a bunch of pudding left over from Saturday night, Dee took it all to church and made more dirt cups there, to give out to the Primary kids and to the Relief Society. They had never seen such a thing and loved it. All the pudding got finished. As we were packing stuff left over from the GANS conference in Assisi from Ugo's car to ours to take to the Institute Monday, Joyce "complained" that she used to attend Institute before we got here, but that only with my wife's cooking did she start to put on weight! Everyone agreed that my wife's cooking is awesome.
I was supposed to sub in Primary by leading the music, but I never had a minute to prep. I don't know the Primary songs in Italian, and it's always better if you can look at the children instead of the sheet music. So, Jenna offered to teach them. She is great at keeping them engaged, and in exchange she asked me to be with Levi. This is the same Levi that Doug was talking about. He tends to run out of Primary. This time, he had his shirt off and the Primary counselor was fruitlessly urging him to put it on. She and I switched places and I got to spend that last hour talking with him. It was a blast! First of all, the reason he didn't want to put his shirt on was that he had spilled chocolate pudding down the front from the pudding dirt cup. I asked him if it was a favorite shirt and said the chocolate would probably come out better when it was fresh, so we went to the kitchen and washed it out. Then I told him I didn't care if he put on the shirt, but if he wanted to, his body heat would help it dry pretty quickly. He put it on. He told me how much he likes water and we talked about its marvelous properties both in everyday life as well as for baptism and the sacrament. He told me all kinds of things he likes and doesn't like and we had a great time.
The Hubers brought us a small order from the commissary in Naples, including pumpkin pie filling for our Thanksgiving feast. You have to think ahead to get it before they run out. Last year, we bought cranberry sauce at Castroni's at over $5 a can.
After church we dropped some stuff off at home and changed into more comfortable missionary attire, then headed over to the Rome 2 chapel for stake choir practice. We usually go to Rome 2 maybe once a month, but this week we have been there at least three times. Next Sunday, Bishop Chris Waddell, member of the Presiding Bishopric and our former stake president in California, will be here and thus they are holding a special Stake Conference. Due to the limited notice, we will be singing just one song, "If The Savior Stood Beside Me", with verses in Italian and English, which we sang at the last conference in May. There were only about a dozen of us, but we went through the number several times and I feel pretty comfortable with my part.
We got home before 3pm, and Dee immediately took a well-deserved nap. The rest of the afternoon and evening were spent at home, catching up on various things that have been neglected during our busy past few weeks. For example, I finished writing up the detailed itinerary for the visit from my sister next month, double checking all the details.
In the evening Dee did some Italian family history research for a woman from the US who contacted us via the Lessies back home. Dee loves doing this kind of thing, and she apparently made some good breakthroughs. I can hardly wait to share it with her. With our new family history center coming to the Institute later this month, Dee had offered to a couple of people in our ward that she would be able to help them there. Ugo got wind of this and told us that the Institute should be used just for YSAs or people there to help them, and that this would include the family history center access. Otherwise the kids start to think that the Institute campus is not for them, but for everyone. It is something we hadn't quite thought through, and he has a good point.
I haven't even looked at the blog for more than a week, and hope to review and catch up this week. I don't know how Doug does it, day after day.