:)

Querida Familia,

HOLA!!!

Thank-you Lynnfield RS and family for my package!! My tree is up and decorated and it's BIG! It's awesome! It feels like Christmas now, at least in our room. I also loved the stockings. And the shower cap. And everything else. but the shower caps especially. I laughed when I saw those. 

This week has been good- a little crazy as we've been back and forth to/from Arcadia all week. On Monday, I dropped off Hna Mulitalo to the office on her way home and then pick up Hna Anderson who's our comp for another week until she leaves for home. Tuesday afternoon we picked up my trainee! Hna. Connelly is from Tennessee. She's cool, she's a really good missionary and is really excited to be put to work, which I love so we're working hard. It's kinds of interesting to be training already since I still don't feel like I've got it all down, so I don't always feel like I can really show her how it's done yet, but we're both learning and it's been good. It's been super humbling for me as well and I think I just need to trust that Heavenly Father will help us out to do what He needs in Tujunga right now. 

We're trying to work on finding more investigators this week. For alot of reasons. One reason being that we just want to increase our teaching pool so that we have more people to work with. Another being that as part of training, Hna. Connelly should be inviting someone to baptism this week, another because I have a TON of referrals/ people to visit from Hna. Mulitalo (people she'd taught/ met while she was in the area, she was here for 9 months, who she thought we should see after she left) and other referrals that we have to check up on. Also, I think we have a couple investigators that aren't really progressing, so we may have to stop teaching them soon, before they become eternal investigators. It's good to keep the work moving and changing because otherwise our effectiveness goes down really fast. 

And, I'll end with a funny story. We were contacting the neighbor of a less active and talked to him for a few minutes. mostly it was me and Hna. Anderson talking as it was in Spanish, but Hna. Connelly said a couple words. Anyways, we gave him a pass along card with our number so we could set up a return visit. When we were in the car afterwards, we talked about how we thought it went pretty well and someone noted that he really seemed to want to talk to us. He didn't want to shut the door on us. We thought he must have been touched by what we had said. Later on, while we were studying, we got a text from him and again, thought that he must really want to hear about the Gospel. Well, after a reply text, he asked "ustedes estan casadas?" (are you married?!). AWKWARD! we explained that we weren't and that we dedicate our time to the Lord. Well, he apparently thought that Hna Connelly was really pretty and wanted to go out with her. We politely shut him down and told him that if that was all he wanted, we had nothing else to say to us. i still can't believe that happened. It gave us a good laugh. 

Hope you're all doing really well. I love you and thank-you again for the package mom! I'll send a thank-you for the RS today. I loved the Christmas tree too! I'm going to try to attach a couple pictures of it. Thank-you all of you. I love you so much. 

Love, 

Hna. Laree LaPierre