First of all, Elisa and I did a stint of babysitting yesterday for the Jacksons. We ended up running around a lot! Their kids are so well behaved that it is hard to say no to them about anything. Chad did most of the work since I couldn’t run up and down the hill by their house. It was so fun seeing how good of a dad Chad already is. He’s very inventive. Both kids thought they were afraid of bugs, but I convinced them otherwise.

Elisa created an amusement-park looking toy for the primary kids. It’s a real attention-getter. The kids have to punch through holes in a board and find the song hidden behind the hole. Chad and I were wondering if the onomatopoeia words were the same in German. As soon as the kids saw the poster their eyes lit up and they knew exactly what was going on! It was awesome.

We had a family visiting from Brazil at church. I tried to translate into Portuguese for them, which is funny because I only understand 20% of the German lesson. (It will just make them appreciate their home ward more). At the end of the lesson, the teacher, Jessica, was looking at me for help calling on someone to say the prayer. But my head was all full of Portuguese, so I couldn’t help her. Then she asked me to say the prayer. I couldn’t remember the first word I knew in German. I walked all the way to the front of the room, hoping that I would remember how to say “Heavenly Father” by the time I got there. I guess it was a really confusing prayer. Elisa told me afterwards some of the things I said, and I was switching languages in the middle of words–German to Portuguese! “Nós… Wir… grat… danken… que… hab-emos… dass… hab-emos….” I was trying so hard not to laugh out loud. He was such a good sport and so brave to try it in German when his mind was so messed up in the first place. It was a great ice-breaker for me.

Right after that came Elisa’s initiation into the ward, with a German talk in sacrament meeting. She has been preparing so well all week. She wrote it in English, then translated it, then had Dani correct it. Last night she read the German to me, and it took 30 minutes to read in German. I was assigned 8 minutes. The English only takes that long. 🙁 So she had to do some last-minute edits. That’s German. Today she was all ready. She sounded very German. I was very nervous but I felt like it went really well. I heard lots of ward members commenting on it. They also liked the stories about us meeting.