Estomago lleno de Pavo

We got matching hats and we already had matching CCM shirts...

matchy matchy cutie cutie

Hola Everyone! Hope y'all had a great Thanksgiving! This week was super awesome!

First of all, the work is going great. We've been picking up so many new investigators these past couple weeks, I can barely keep up with all of them. Also our 16-year-old Guatemalan investigator Diego is on baptismal date for the 21st of December! And we have a couple other really solid ones that hopefully will be on date soon!

Wednesday was the first day of snow this winter! And it snowed a lot! We were supposed to have our district meeting that day but it got cancelled because it was too dangerous to drive in the snow and all the missionaries were told they couldn't drive that day. Not that it really affected us since we don't have a car... so we were walking around Union City in heavy snow! Sooooo that was lovely.

Thursday was Thanksgiving! All morning long there was a Turkey Bowl with all the missionaries in this area of Jersey... there were probably like 60 of us. And it was about 30 degrees and it was snowing almost the whole time. Two things I usually am not very fond of are 1) Football and 2) Snow. And I did both of them, at the same time, for 3 hours! So I was pretty proud of myself for putting on a smile and just doing it haha.

Playing football in the snow and trying to have a good attitude about it

And of course, we had to pay tribute to our favorite place :)

My district at the Turkey Bowl

Elder Bryce Davis, from good ol' Temecula

Then in the afternoon we had dinner at the home of the Quiles family. The wife is from Ecuador but the husband was born in New York and he's just about as white and American as someone in a Spanish-speaking ward can be. So he cooked us a very good and very American Thanksgiving dinner. The mashed potatoes were the best potatoes I've ever had ever... probably because there was 2 cups of sour cream in them haha. We ate so much and they kept telling us to eat more. It was a struggle! Then after we finished eating we watched the Prince of Egypt on their TV. There's a list of certain movies missionaries here are allowed to watch on Pdays and holidays and Prince of Egypt is one of them! And we had been wanting to see it forever so finally getting to watch it made our Thanksgiving that much better :) And of course they sent us home with approximately 10 pounds of leftover food. Later, we went and ate again at the home of a sweet Dominican lady in the ward named Hermana Lara. This was a very Dominican meal... rice and plantains haha. Then we were almost out of time but we also got to stop by and meet the family of our recent convert Emilio. By that time we were so full so we literally only had a roll.

A very American Thanksgiving.

It was good to have American food at a member's house for once!

Thanksgiving Dinner # 2 - This time, very Dominican

Marisol's Farewell! She has gone on so many team-ups with us and we don't know what we will do without her! But sweet home California needs her!

There's a girl in the ward named Marisol and this weekend was her farewell. She leaves this week for the California Ventura Mission. Lucky girl! On Friday there was a big farewell party for her at the church building and there was SO MUCH FOOD... as if we hadn't already eaten enough this week. And there was a cake there that was made at the famous Cake Boss Bakery in Hoboken! But alas, I was not able to eat it because the missionaries had to go home and get to bed before the people in the ward got to the cake </3