Wyoming weather & wildlife

Lucy and I were planning a girls weekend in Utah to meet up with Audrey, Lauren, and Emma and spend time with Matt and Van too as well as Susie and my mom.  The weather had other ideas!  We woke up this morning to the news that South Pass was closed with heavy snow.  So did we cry, Goodness No! to quote Pete the Cat.  We went northwest with our friends the Stilson's and saw wonderful wildlife and had great food at a cafe in Cody called Peter's.

In the Stilson's car

Pete and Lou, it was a little chilly

This is the Devil's Elbow in the Shoshone River, it flows out of Yellowstone

Selfie!

Trying to skip rocks in the fast moving Shoshone River

So many Big Horn Sheep!

So close to the road, just outside of Yellowstone

The bison were trying to shed their hair and were scratching themselves on the rocks, they must have been itchy!

Elk herd

Wild horses, very cool!

We drove as far as the road was open up to within 3 miles of Yellowstone National Park.  The only thing we wanted to see and didn't was some moose. 

Elder Edholm -- week 92

Well we had a pretty normal week this week. We had interviews with President Nuckols and those are always great because it really motivates me to be more obedient and work harder. One notable thing that happened yesterday was that we went to an appointment and the person wasn't there, but we were close to a family that used to be investigators of ours. The wife has been in bed sick for about five months now. My companion promised her and the family that if they started to remember the Lord more that she would get better and that everything would start going better with their family. We invited her to say the last prayer, and she broke down and started crying asking for help. Now we just have to hope that they respond to that call, but it was just good to see that they understood, and that they want the Lord's help.

Besides that we have Oliva's baptism coming up on the eighth. She's doing really well and she's super excited, she loves the Book of Mormon. Another good thing that happened was that this partial family that we've been working with for a long time are finally progressing really well. The wife was pregnant, but lost her baby. I saw how happy she was when we shared Moroni 8 with her. The husband is a member and he has never wanted to get married with her, but finally yesterday he agreed to it! So no we'll just start working with that to get them married, it really was a huge blessing because I haven't had the privilege to marry anyone or baptized a family yet.

Today we did a lot of service, I chopped up a huge trunk with a horribly dull hatchet, it really killed me, but I was glad that I learned how to us one in boy scouts!

Eric's last wrestling meet of the year

Saturday Eric and Peter wrestled here in Worland which is always nice not to have to travel.  Eric placed first in his weight class and pinned his guy twice.  Peter lost all his matches.

Eric in the red

Eric did really well today!

Andy had his opening soccer game in Powell.  He is the keeper for the JV team.  They lost 1-0.

Lucy and I watched the General Women's Meeting together at the church, it was wonderful.

Elder Edholm -- week 92

So I didn't tell you guys this but we had a conference with all the missionaries in the country on Tuesday and Elder Andersen went! My first time seeing an apostle! Elder Maynes came again too. The whole area presidency was present as well. Elder Cornish left a while ago, our new area president is Elder Gonzalez from Uruguay. It was amazing though, I think what made it even more amazing was that I did my best to go prepared. Some things that really hit me from what he said is that every convert, to stay strong in the gospel, needs two things. First, they need to feel the love of Christ when repenting, they need to really repent and pray on their own, when we're not there. Second, they need to have a love for the Book of Mormon. That helped me so much because now I know better how to prepare my investigators for baptism because we're not baptizing people, we're baptizing converts. Also he told us we need to prepare ourselves now for the people we're gonna be after the mission.

Something fun that happened this week, a power line in front of our house fell, and we didn't know about it, the light left, but we thought it would come back like 6 hours later like it does everyday, but a whole day passed, then another, then another, then we found out what happened, but by the time we found out it was too late. Everything in the fridge spoiled (milk, chicken, salami, soup, pork) I remember when I opened that thing, I had never smelt anything like that in my life, that was definitely the worst thing I had ever smelt. When there's no light, there's also no water, so we couldn't clean anything, we spent the whole day today cleaning the house. It was nasty, we had to carry the fridge to the roof to clean it because we didn't want that death smell filling the house, rotting chicken I'm pretty sure is the smell of Hell.

But besides that fun, USA beat the DR in the world baseball classic who beat them a week ago, but when USA won this time it sent the DR home, everybody was mad at me, haha.

Anyway, that was my week, enjoying my last months in the service of the Lord, love you all!

Oh and heres a picture of Vladimir Guerrero and me, we're tight now, as dad would say.

Future Baseball Hall of famer, Vladimir Guerrero.

Races, kissing pigs, and musicals

It's Pinewood Derby time!!  Peter researched and researched and he and Brian worked and worked and here was the final project:

We combined our Pinewood Derby with the 3rd ward and out of all those boys Peter's red machine came in 2nd!

1st, 2nd & 3rd place winners.  Peter wanted to wear a red shirt to match his car and not his scout shirt.

Here is a recap of one of his great races!

Peter had an amazing week, he got to put lipstick on his principal!

The kids had a reading challenge and if they met the goal the principal promised to kiss a pig and he did, after the kids put lipstick on him of course!

And finally to end our amazing week Lucy got to be in her first ever musical performance!  Missoula Children's Theater comes every year to produce a musical in one week with the school age kids and they do a wonderful job.  This year it was Tortoise and the Hare.  Lucy was a bunny and I got to be the accompanist and play the piano.  It was a lot of fun!

Lucy's "posse" with the Hare in the back center.  Lucy is the bunny fourth from the left. 

My little bunny!

Elder Edholm -- week 91

So, this week was really great, just to say the least. The only kind of bad thing that happened was that the Dominican Republic beat USA in baseball after we were already up 5-0 in the seventh! Everybody was making fun of me on Sunday, but I feel like won too because I'm Dominican now, and USA is pretty much good in every sport, so the dominicans have to have some sport.

Besides that we had a special sunday yesterday that we had planned out for a month that was specifically for visitors. It was a huge success we prepared a ton for it, and it turned out really well in the whole mission. Other than that just small miracles are happening. We are teaching this one lady named Liset, and the custom of the Dominicans is not to get married, it's very uncommon to find a couple that's married. But her husband is living in New York and she's here, and if she wasn't married it would be a huge process to get her baptized because he's really far away. But we found out on Sunday that they're married!!! It was a huge blessing for us. Also we have another investigator that we have been teaching for a long time. He had never gone to church and we decided that if he didn't go this Sunday, we were gonna drop him. He came too!

Well that's all that's really happening right now, the mission life is going great, sorry that this email is a little short, but I love you all!

End of basketball and more wrestling

It's sad to report, but both the Worland girls and boys lost in the state championship basketball game tonight.  They were both the defending state champions having won last year and the expectations were high.  I wasn't there, but Brian and Emma were to see it all go down.  Sometimes second place stinks!

Mid-pass

Andy is in the black uniform

Andy is standing to the right of our 6'8" center.

I stayed home to take Eric and Peter to their wrestling tournament in Powell.  There was only one other boy in Eric's weight class.  He wrestled him twice and lost both times, but still got a medal for second place!  There were 15 in Pete's weight class and he won his first match 14-10 and then got pinned in the next two matches during the second period.  They are both improving all the time and it was fun being with them today.  Lucy stayed in Worland with a friend and was oh so happy not to be going to an all day wrestling tournament.  She's had her fare share of those!

Pete's on the right

Pete is behind this guy, he takes him down pretty quickly.

This is Eric's match, he is in the red singlet. His opponent was from a Montana wrestling club in Red Lodge.

Here is his medal.  Eric thought it should be a wrestling steroid medal from the look of the guy on it!  And he mentioned that he did not want to "die on the mat".

And in closing:

Elder Edholm -- week 90

Well this week along with last week were pretty hard. almost no members left with us, it was hard to find news, lots of people failed us, hid from us, and other things. But I learned an important lesson that is "After much tribulation come the blessings" Doctrine and Covenants 58:4. Because after all that happened we came to church on Sunday to find 10 investigators there! I think that's the most I've ever had! I'm not trying to boast about it at all, I just know that God was showing us His love, that scripture is really true, after passing the tribulation God gave us the blessings.

We had another huge blessing on Sunday. We are teaching a Venzuelan family. They're really great. There is actually a girl that's a member in our branch that's from Venezuela. We mentioned to her that we were teaching that family, and she said that she would want to go with us to teach them. She took our number and everything, but she never called us. Yesterday as we were walking to an appointment we saw her and her husband walking in the other direction, they called us over and they told us that they went by themselves and visited that family, I was shocked because I only told her the area where she lived. I asked her how she found them and she told us that she just went around asking people if they knew a venezuelan family that lived close by, it really shocked me because I had never met a member that would do anything like that. It's a miracle that they found them because there are so many Venezuelans living here. They cleared up the doubts that they had about the Book of Mormon and everything, it truly was a miracle to see members liking that, acting for themselves, and not being acted upon.

Besides that the work is going great, we are finding like crazy because we have a special day coming up in April that's a special day for the mission to baptize lots of people, April 8th, we're trying to find as many people as we can to find the people that are prepared to get baptized on that date.

I love this work and I love all of you too!

Warning! Basketball overload. #welovenumber40

All these pics are from various games throughout the season.

Buffalo, Basketball, and Band

Eric performed in the middle school band concert on Thursday night.  The 7th grade band sounded good and they played one of my favorite songs, the theme song from the Incredibles.

Eric in his band shirt

Thursday - Saturday Andy spent in Buffalo at the region basketball tournament.  Brian went to the games Thursday and Friday and all of us went over the mountain on Saturday to watch the finals.  Both Worland boys and girls were in the finals.  The girls did great and defeated Douglas to win region.  The boys also played Douglas, but had a rough game and lost 35-31 in overtime.  Both teams are headed to state next week which will be in Casper. 

We enjoyed our Saturday in Buffalo, it's about an hour and a half away -- through Ten Sleep over the mountain. 

Lunch at a bbq place that was really good!

Had to check out the library and we were not disappointed, such a classy cool place!  I loved the tunnels to go into the children's section.

This is the teen section, they had cool games and colorful furniture.

Lucy loved the teepee in the children's area.

We walked up and down their nice main street and found some sheep to sit on.

Pete liked the dog the best.

This shot was in the newspaper when Worland was playing Buffalo and beat them.

This is the game against Douglas, we were sitting right behind the Worland bench and I snapped a shot of their time out.  Andy is standing on the very left.

Another time out huddle.  Andy is standing up 5 from the right.

I had to end this post with lovely Emma.  She is doing well in sunny St. George and I loved this picture she took with her friends.