I love you soooooooo much! It sounds like it's been a pretty exciting week for you! And thanks for sharing all that exciting news with me. Brooke is so lucky to be going to Seattle and I'm so jealous of Brittan going to Jerusalem. Lucky girl! I'm glad to hear that Cam looks good wrestling. Is he still cutting weight? Mostly though, I'm super happy for you that you're done with school! I'm so jealous that you get Christmas break! I was thinking about that this week too, that I would be home right now if I had been at school. I tried not to think about that too long though because it made me a little bit sad to not be home for Christmas. What was I thinking being gone for two?! The good news is, we found a family that we can go to for Christmas that has internet so we can Skype! We're thinking about sometime in the afternoon because of the time difference so that you will have time to wake up and do all that Christmas morning stuff. So let me know what time works best and if we'll be able to do it with Brady too.
We get our packages forwarded to our apartments, so you don't have to worry about me not getting it until zone conference. We usually get it a day or two after it gets to the mission office. And the weather this last week has been so weird. It's hit 70 at least once and hasn't been that cold, just wet and rainy. But everyone keeps talking about how January and February are the worst. And I'm sure this nice little heat wave won't last too much longer. My bedding isn't too bad, I bought a fleece blanket from Target a couple of weeks ago, and we got the heat to work a little better in our apartment, so I'm not sleeping in twelve layers anymore. We also put our Christmas tree up last week as well! Not as much work as the one at home. It's a little baby one we found at Target. We were really tempted to just cut down someone's bush outside their house, but we figured that wouldn't be very Christlike. So we didn't.
To answer the companion question, yes. I love my companion. I can't believe we get along as well as we do. We balance each other out in lessons and we laugh all the time. I'm scared for when we're not companions because now I have really high expectations. I just showed her the story about Nathan and Santa and we got some dirty looks for not being reverent enough in the library. Oops. We laugh so hard we cry probably on a daily basis. The Spanish is coming amazing. I don't know how it's happened, but I can speak Spanish! It's a great feeling to know that people understand what I'm trying to say.
The best part of the week...hmmm. It was a pretty hard week, we didn't feel too successful. But, a kind of neat thing happened yesterday. Saturday night we stopped by a recent convert, Ana's house. She the one with the three terrifyingly naughty little kids. When we pulled up we saw a man walking into their apartment and we were worried that she wouldn't want to talk to us. But she did. I started talking to the man, Cristobal, right as we were getting ready to leave. I didn't really want to, but I felt like I needed to invite him to church on Sunday. So I asked him what he was doing tomorrow and invited him. We invite a lot of people to church and hardly anyone ever comes. But he came! I was so excited. He couldn't stay for the whole thing, but he stayed for sacrament meeting and Sunday school. And he's going to let us teach him some more! It felt really good to have followed that prompting and seen the fruits of it. We also have started teaching a lady named Priscilla and she's come to church a couple times and wants to know how to become a member!
This is probably the funniest part of the week though. The mission just started doing a new thing called Walk About Wednesday, where don't use our cars at all on Wednesday. It's kind of terrible when your area covers an entire zone and you can't use your car, but we're doing the best we can. We had walked for not even half a mile when we ran into this guy who let us start teaching him. We ended up going into a restaurant because we were standing in the parking lot and it was really windy. We started teaching him. He was so weird and maybe a little drunk. He smelled like alcohol. But he told us that he wanted to change but that he didn't think he could. He said a lot of things that were kind of weird. And then he just kept staring into my companion's eyes and saying "Your eyes. There's just something about them." I just thought, yeah, they're blue. And you can probably see the light of Christ in them. So we kept trying to teach him, and he kept commenting on her eyes. One time he told me that I was pretty too, but that I just didn't have eyes like Hermana Stewart. At the end we exchanged numbers so we could try to teach him more. Except we actually gave him the district leader's number. Hermana Stewart was kind of creeped out by him and that it would be better for the Elders to have a stalker than us.
Our other story is that we were teaching one of our recent converts, Sebastian, and we asked him what the role of a prophet is. He said, "A prophet brings peace and balance to the world." I couldn't help but picture President Monson with long hair and bell bottoms because it just sounded like such a hippie thing to say. But I guess he's kind of right. Ish.
For Pday today we went into DC. It was so fun! We went to almost all the memorials and the White House and we went to the Natural History Museum. We loved it. I wish we could go more than every other transfer.
I also started driving this week. Driving in downtown Alexandria during rush hour is the worst thing I've ever done in my life. I've never been so stressed out. And Hermana Stewart even told me that I'm not as funny when I'm driving. Duh! It takes all me energy to keep us from dying. I can't be witty too! It's been so scary, but hopefully by the end of 18 months I might turn into a good driver. Maybe.
As for Christmas list, I think I might like a yoga mat. We've started doing yoga every morning because it's way better than walking to the gym. I don't know if you could send one of those in the mail, but maybe I could just buy one here? Really though, it's not like I really need anything. Our needs are pretty well taken care of. Maybe some chocolate?
I also want to tell you that you're email about Sister Gubler made me cry. Please tell Sister Graff thank you for me. I've always loved Sister Gubler and I've been thankful for her example as I've grown up. I know that she's on the other side of the veil with Brother Gubler and they're working together to accomplish the work Heavenly Father needs them to do there. How thankful I am for the plan of Salvation.
Well family, I wish I had time to write more, but that's about it. Please tell Grandma and Grandpa I love them and I love getting their emails and I'll try to write them a letter soon. I love you so much!
xoxo
Hermana Simpson
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