Happy Skyping

This is where Wes was able to Skype from.  They fed him really
well!

His new shoes....

Wesley's BYU garb!

well nothing much more 

the pillow case Morgan made for him...

happened this week besides service for a less active member (it was from a horror movie! there were like spiders the size of my palm everywhere!) and sunday! which was awesome! we had a LA come to church after lots of time working with her. and we had 2 investigators come to church! let me tell you about one of them, Y! she is SOOO awesome!!! :) she is a referral from a member. she is the girlfriend of their son. she came to church with them yesterday and went to gospel principles class and it was the last lesson about exaltation and we were kinda sweating it with all of the deep doctrine going on in there. but when we visited her that night she told us that she loved it and that she learned so much! she already believes this is true, she wants the peace and happiness that she sees in her boyfriend and his family and wants to be baptized too! she really is super prepared and an example of how the lord will prepare people for us as long as we are obedient!

Don't know about the fog.  I am sure he has seen some before...

p.s. the weapons were a bad idea...with 4 men's minds put together we quickly found out a way to make them lethal! we made a crossbow that shoots a skewer through an orange! AAHHHHH!!!!

i hope you have a happy new year and that all goes well!

--

Love Elder Jones

Merry Christmas!

All the girls with their stripey PJ's.  And... Mason's stribey
socks (and cute butt).

Wow, what a year.  We have been truly blessed this year.  Our sweet missionary is doing FANTASTIC!  I think he was a little homesick yesterday, he had a little bit harder time saying good bye this time, than he did in May!  But he looks great.  He is in a great area, and they are feeding him like a hobbit.  He gets elevensies, and lunch and tea and supper etc.  Mason, after learning how to wrestle, can hardly wait to get his mits on "chubby" as he likes to refer to him.  Morgan misses him so much, we have started referring to Wes as "he-who-must-not-be-named".  ha, ha, ha...

We had a relatively quiet Christmas.  Sydney was up early, so she went and got Morgan up, and then they worked on Mason.  Jeff and I were up by about 8:30.  We made our Christmas scones and hot-chocolate for breakfast and then went to start the mayhem.  Mason got his annual "Hoodie" and a ton of Reeses products and a Kindle (which he won't admit that he loves)...  Sydney got her MP3 player, she was thrilled.  Morgan got her running outfits and "UNLIMITED TEXTING".  She was thrilled too.  Jeff got 3 new polachinqua pans, so he was excited too.  We all got new tennis shoes (Thanks Stasi and Katie!) and I am getting a pot rack for all of Jeff's new pans!  Yeah!!!

After we talked with Wes, we made our Spicey Buffalo Bleu Mac and Cheese to have with our ribs and salad.  We have been given so many treats, so I didn't make any desserts for Christmas this year.  Maybe for New Years we will make a fun dessert.  After dinner was made, we headed off to see the Hobbit!

Guess I should have put on a little make-up :/.

When we got home, we had our dinner and watched "Guardians of the Galaxy".  Super chill day enjoying our family! We hope that you all had a wonderful Christmas.  We are so grateful for the gospel in our lives and the example the Savior set for us, to help us return to our Father in Heaven.  What a blessing and true gift.  Have a wonderful Christmas break!

Let it SNOW!!!

Well, Sydney has been all over the weatherman lately.  When he says it is going to snow and it doesn't, she just lights into him.  Oooh, she can be a piece of work sometimes.  But, she finally got her wish.  We woke up Christmas morning to 14 inches of snow.  And... we got an additional 4 inches throughout the day.  CRAZY!  So after we opened presents, we all got our snow gear on and helped to remove the snow.  We are supposed to get some more on Sunday.  As Sydney says, at least it feels like Christmas now!  We will have to figure out how to get a video of Molly "swimming" through the snow.  She is literally underneath as she surfaces and runs through it!

Where the garage door and snow meet!
In the background, the front of the snow blower is
18 inches tall.  Don't see much of it!

Happy Birthday Morgan

My sweet daughter is 18 years old.  Crazy how time flies.  It was just yesterday that she was a screaming, tantrum laying 8 year old telling me that she NEVER wanted to grow up.  And that I couldn't "make her grow-up"!  So much has changed since then.  She is a beautiful talented woman now ready to tackle the world, (at least we are getting closer to this ideal).  We took the family out to dinner last night to celebrate her birthday.  We went to Hu Hot, a Mongolian grill in Spanish Fork.  The kids loved it.  They were passing out tattoos, as you can see from the pictures. As it was all-you-can-eat, Mason went back 4 times and was wanting to go back for a 5th  before we dragged him out of the restaurant.  We met the Wilcoxes there and had a great dinner.  We came home, while Morgan and her friends went to the school stag dance. It was the ugly sweater dance, so Morgan decided that would be too hot, so she and her friend went for ugly leggings. But once they got to the dance, everyone thought they were cute.  Go figure! Unfortunately, the ACT was the next morning, so a lot of the kids I had invited over for dessert couldn't be out that late.  But she has her Kindle now and she is thrilled.  Fully loaded with all of her reading choices as well as all her church books.  Awesome.  Love you darling!

What a Wonderful Life....

so this week was really good! tuesday we had temple service! the temple is closed for 2 weeks so we are just doing tons of work on the grounds! me and a couple other elders got a relay team going and we ripped out all of the concrete borders surrounding the gardens! then we had to break them all in half because they were super long! we were like john henry beating the steam engine! hoorah!

then we had a member present lesson with A. and we taught them the plan of salvation and the law of chastity! it was a lot of stuff to cover and a little crazy but we were able to go over it again later on in the week! we had to change her baptismal date to the 3rd of January just cuz we really want to work with the husband so they can make this step together!  we made a timeline of all the stuff that she needed to do to be baptized and she agreed to do all of it! so she came to church on sunday....and HER HUSBAND BROUGHT HER!!!!! YAYAYAY!!! he had worked an overnight shift and still decided to come! it was awesome! he had a great experience even though i bet he was dead tired!  AND A. also came to the Christmas devotional that night!!!! WOOOHOOO! it was awesome! She is so prepared and is like a sponge just soaking everything up! the work is really accelerating in this area now! we have a new ward mission leader named bro lopes! and he is really ripping it up! 

we had a super miracle this week! so a member had a bunch of left overs from thanksgiving and she wanted to give them to us. but we couldnt come and get them until 2 days later! so we finally get over to her house and it is just a ton of food! so we take it and go to our next appointment which is with J. we talked about faith and it was just really hard cuz they are going through such a rough time. they are getting evicted and they have no place to stay because none of the apartments will accept them cuz of their credit. at the end of the lesson the kids were screaming and she was just super stressed and she let us know that she didnt even have anything in her cupboards to feed her kids. Wow...We ran out to our car and gave them ALL of the food that the member had given us! she was grateful to tears! it is so powerful to see how the lord works through us to bless others!

-- 

Love Elder Jones

Jeff is on a roll!!!

My sweetheart has been gung ho on getting a few projects finished.  He started on the rubber band machine guns.  He is making quite a few.  As you can see from the mess, he has been quite diligent in making some headway here.  We thought about sending one each to Wes and his companion, but then realized this just wasn't a good idea.

Then last night, the girls and I went to see how old fashioned candies are made here at high altitude.  We learned how to make divinity, fudge and toffee.  Morgan is all over making the divinity.  Her label will be "Thanks for being so divine".  So when we came home, we were all on a huge sugar high.  We turned up the music, but the kids keep wanting to listen to Pandora on the computer.  The sound is terrible.  So I came up with hooking it up to my kitchen radio.  That worked, but it was quite ungainly.  Jeff saw what we were doing, and he went to town.  He had gotten these speaker for free and hauled them out.  Hooked them up and now we have great sound in the kitchen that works with the internet.  Wha-hoo!  So we were jamming out to Tony Bennet and the classics.  So much fun.  Hope you are all enjoying the holiday's.  Have a wonderful week.

Christmas Fun...

You know there are times when you know your kids can do a better job of something than you can.  This was one such time.  Jeff wanted some new Polachinqua pans for Christmas.  So I had my sister pick some up at the restaurant supply store before they came down for Thanksgiving.  They are a 12 inch non-stick pan and a 10 inch non stick pan.  So how do you wrap such devilish things.  Well, I posed the question to Mason and he got this funny grin on his face.  I told him to do the best he could and just to figure it out.  I emphasized the fact that it didn't have to be pretty...

This was the result and I laugh every time I see them under the tree.  Hope you have some humor this holiday season!

Thanksgiving!!!

Wes was bored, so he arranged all his change by year!
What a way to use your time!

so this week was actually pretty good! we ran out of miles this week so we had to get rides from members all over the place! like on monday we went riding with a member all over to see people but they kept canceling. but we did end up having a really good lesson with a less active family! Bro F. was super impressed about the cups and knives analogy! then on tuesday it was super awesome! we went out to oakridge to eat with our new ward mission leader! then we visited an active member and helped her set up her christmas tree and then she fed us too! (2 in a row!) and then we went to visit a. our golden investigator! and she was cooking and so she invited us in to eat tambien! but elder jacobsen couldnt fit any more inside his body. they were nice about it (because if a hispanic offers you food, you dont deny it or else they get offended) and they said that they would never force anybody to eat...but as i was eating the little food that i could fit in they kept on INSISTING that elder jacobsen would eat something. haha so in the end they did end up forcing elder jacobsen to eat! so we had 3 dinners within 3 hours! and they were totally unexpected! haha

well we ended up having a super successful day that tuesday and the highlight of it all was a new family that we are now teaching! their names are J, M. J., and J! they are a sweet family from mexico with the cutest darn kids ever! like J. fell down and started crying then he looked at my face and started busting out laughing out of no where! and then every time i looked at him he would start laughing! is something wrong with my face??? haha the gospel becomes so much more real when we teach families! 

then on thursday! we had a thanksgiving video downloaded and so we used that as our approach for every contact! it was sweet and we saw tons of miracles! we got 2 new investigators A., and J.! they are both sweet! then we went and taught M.! she was actually a lot more solid than we had thought! she has a slight concern about being baptized again cuz she doesnt want to play with god, but she told us she had a dream before she met the missionaries about what she described pretty definitively as the inside of one of the temples and the entire floor was covered with books of mormon! how cool is that! so she is really interested about coming to church! she just has to get work off!

then we had dinner with the F.
family! it was great! there was spanish rice! tomales! potato salad! Flan! oh and DELICIOUS TURKEY!!!! spanish people know how to cook! nuff said!

then later that night we had a less active member lesson where we were able to teach really powerfully about repentance! we were able to give him the hope to give up smoking once and for all! in the new testament it talks a lot about the savior healing all manner of enfermities. but not all of them were a literal blessing of health. people had emotional problems and his teaching literally was healing. we have been trying to teach in a way that will heal the scars made by life experiences! it has been awesome!

we had another experience like that yesterday where the difference in the persons attitude from the beginning of the lesson compared to the end really was amazing!

i love the gospel, the holidays, the true meaning of christmas, and you guys!

Love Elder Jones

Happy Thanksgiving

Yes, Grandma was very careful about her diet ;o)

Jeff had as much fun or more with the seige weapons!

What a whirl wind of a week.  We were thrilled to be able to have my mom, her dogs and my sister and her family come for the holiday.  We also celebrated Haden's (my nephew) birthday.  Needless to say, Sydney was not ready to go back to school today.  But we made a bunch of fun food, made way too many "mini-weapons of mass destruction", and we are still cleaning up darts and so forth from all of the contraptions.  But the most important part was that we built relationships, and had a great time with Stasi's kids.  They are sure fun to play with.  They also introduced us to a new game called Strut.  If you are a game officiado, go look for it.  It is painful as well as fun to play.  We played again last night and Sydney was so thrilled to win!

These were worth a good laugh at least!

Our turkey turned out awesome, we finally got the brine just right.  My sister brought her potato ricer, so we had some "creamy, dreamy, mashed potatoes".  I also made a raspberry pie that was the first to be eliminated.  That should tell you something.  I basically made a blind-baked pie shell and filled it with the filling, which is as follows:  8 c. frozen berries, 3/4 c. sugar, pinch of salt and 1/4 c. of instant tapioca.  Cook the filling until it gets thick and the tapioca has absorbed the juices, it will thicken as it cools.  Serve with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.  Very good!  We haven't heard from Wes yet, but I am sure they fed him well for the holiday.  We are working on his Christmas package which will contain a lot of supplies for mini-weapons of mass destruction.  Enjoy the pictures and have a wonderful holiday season!

Shocker on the Street

so this week we commenced operation cookie delivery! we made over 180 delicious chocolate chip cookies to give to all of the members that lived in our area! aint it beautiful??? :) the members (especially the new ones!) just absolutely loved us! their faces just lit up when we were standing there with those golden cookies! that took 2 whole days to get all of those rascals out of the door! then the rest of the week was spent trying to coordinate who was teaching who, what needed to be taught to help all of these other investigators that we havent met yet to progress! lots of telephone calls and going on a whim! we got a really cool investigator from the semoran sisters named J. who really wants to change her life with baptism! she is so awesome but she is living in a very tough situation where it is impossible to teach her in her house because the spirit will not enter there. so we are struggling to figure out what to do...

we have another investigator named O., who lives in orlando! haha who would have thunk! who was taught everything in uruguay but didnt get baptized when his wife did  because of 1 nephi 4 in the book of mormon. he said that with out a doubt he would get baptized as soon as he recieves an answer on the book of mormon! so please pray for him! he is so close and he just needs to take that one step of faith! 

its so hard to work our area because we have one chunk at the north-east part of our area from the semoran sisters, and then we have a chunk at the south west part of our area and we live in the southeast area of the ward outside of our actual area! so we are just chewing right through our mile alottment

we also helped a recent convert get back into church! we had dinner with him one night and he opened up to us about being lonely since his divorce and feeling so down cuz he was the only person living the gospel standards in his life and it was just so hard! but we were able to share a message of hope with him and schedule a service project at his house that saturday! it was sweet we had a ton of the ward come and help as well! and boy did that yard look nice! (you would have been proud dad! you guys taught me well with your gardening slave labor!) 

the only sad news of the week is that rafael after our pass off lesson with the sisters disappeared off the face of the earth! :( please pray for him as well and also the fact that we can keep going and progressing with our area!

random fact! elder jacobsen's parents were in orlando this last week and they dropped off a huge package at the mission office for him. which means that she was 15 minutes away from where we were! haha elder jacobsen was freaking out! it was great!

hope you have a great week! much love!

-- 

Love Elder Jones

Readers Theatre

Of course, we had to do the pose too!!!

Welcome to winter!  It was down to 12 this morning and it is not supposed to get above freezing today.  Brrrr!  We are ready though, we have our pellets and the canning is done.  Halleluja!  Jeff and I were asked to be part of a readers theatre for our stake this fall.  It just finished on Saturday.  Jeff was Samuel Smith and I was his wife, Sweet Mary Bailey.  We were really not thrilled about this to begin with, but after a few weeks we were excited to go and have "our" time to play together.  We are sad it is ended, but we made some really good friends and had some wonderful experiences.  Mason's science teacher from 8th grade was in it also, so that was fun for him to see a different side of others.  Then yesterday, the "bad guy" from the play was our high council speaker and Mason leans over and says "He was the bad guy from last night!"  He was paying attention!!!  Yeah.  Enjoy the pictures.  I am sure they will come back to haunt me some day!  Have a wonderful day!

Whitewashing Our Own Area

so this week was amazing! we saw tons of miracles! on monday we went to the church building by the temple to hang out with all of the other missionaries! when we got back we had dinner with the G family and then we taught P and then we were going to teach another member, bro R, but a whole bunch of his nonmember family was there! so we taught them the restoration! the next day was transfers, but we werent getting transfered so we just sat at our apartment doing studies waiting for the meeting to be over to see where all of our friends had gone! :) well we finally get a call and we find out that none of the spanish missionaries moved!!!! its crazy! (something that we do as spanish missionaries is we try to predict where everyone is going to go even if we dont move!) there are now some companionships that have been together for 4 transfers! that is 24 weeks! like 6 months! i cant imagine how hard marriage would be! she would have to be the best fit in order to live together for the eternities! this is me and elder jacobsens 2nd transfer together now! and we are really excited cuz we are seeing tons of miracles! its weird as a missionary because regular time doesnt make sense anymore! we measure things by 6 week incriments! haha. our new district is us the semoran sisters and the windy ridge sisters! so now me and elder jacobsen are sister training elders! we now have a SISTRICT! haha ;) its awesome though cuz we have our district meetings completely in spanish! wednesday we had temple service again! always super fun! district meeting was on thursday. friday we weekly planned and prepared ourselves for the stake conference this weekend! that night we made a trek all the way out to see these members that live super far away, but it was so worth it! they are the leon family and they are the best! they are both RM's and from venezuela. she cooks the best Arepas ever!!! shoutout to all the missionaries in spanish speaking countries if you like arepas! :) she is insane! when i asked her what her name was the first time i met her she said, "hermana leon, GRRrrrrrrrr!" (lion in english)........ :O

but they were super funny at the end of the lesson when we asked if there was anything that we could do they jokingly said oh wash the dishes and all of that! so we jumped up super quick and started doing them! (that is like unforgivable to let someone else clean your house in spanish culture!) she started laughing and got red in the face and tried to stop us but we were a service train that just wouldnt stop! haha :) it was great and their liking for us just skyrocketed! #membertrust!

then the conference! 

this stake conference was with 2 stakes combined. because they were making a new stake! YAY!!! :) we had Elder Don R Clark of the seventy come and guest speak! he is a fiery old man let me tell ya! and quick off the old whip! He talked a lot to us in the priesthood session about keys and using our priesthood to bless our lives! He challenged us to 1- Get a written fathers blessing. 2- give our wives or moms a blessing of gratitude! it was really inspirational and i left feeling uplifted! he also talked about missionary work and how we should do better! one of his quotes was "When was the last time you bought your wife flowers? something to think about...but what if your wife doesnt like flowers? well tell her that the celestial kingdom is full of them. and that if she doesnt like flowers she can prepare to go somewhere else!" HAHAHA i couldnt believe it!

well now here is the interesting part of the email...with the stake change our branch is now turning into a ward AND our areas are changing. the division in the ward used to be north and south but they changed us to east and west! and when they told us which side we were on we looked at where ALL (and i am not exagerating here when i say all) of the people we were teaching were and they were in the other area....

that means that we have to give R to the sisters 2 weeks before his baptism. that means that we have to give away all of the people we had been making such good process with. all of the people that we had come to love. this is one of the hardest changes i have had to make in the mission. But through prayer and the atonement of Christ i felt his love and peace come into my life and help me realize that this was a revelatory change.  so now we are whitewashing ( a term for when missionaries go into an area without any pre-knowledge or teaching pool or without a companion who was there before.) in our own area! it will be an adventure to say the least!

today we are making cookies for all of the members in our new area! (thanks for the idea mom! :))

i know this church is true and you better believe that we will have some more miracles coming your way next week!

I LOVE YOU ALL!!!!!! :D

Elder jones

Another Week for Wes

apparently, they are standing on a hill and with a little trickery
of the camera, they got the whole midget/giant thing going.

so  a lot happened this week! we went on exchanges with the portugese elders on monday after our district pday. for that pday we had a costume contest and carved pumpkins! and i got another person addicted to the slack line! yay! but when we were at walmart elder jacobsen got his bike stolen....yes we left them on the back of our car unlocked for 20 minutes. shame on us! so elder jacobsen had to get a loaner bike from the mission office. then we had lots of good days and we had our branch trunk or treat. then on halloween we had to stay inside. we couldnt go outside to tract or anything. so we did some planning and only got 2 trick or treaters! talk about lame! but then we had exchanges again and it was my first exchange with the zone leaders yet in my mission. and it was transfer saturday. so i got to see the transfer list and call some missionaries and tell them that they were leaving and stuff. it was super fun! i will be staying here in semoran for another transfer. that will make 4 transfers here! crazy! but i am super pumped to get work done and to help rafael get baptized!

i hope you have a great week!

Happy Halloween

It is that time of year again.  It has officially been over a year that our boy has been on his mission.  We went to see "Meet the Mormons" and I cried the whole last segment.  It was hard to relive those feelings through someone elses eyes.  But the other vignettes were really good.  This year for Halloween, it was rather anticlimatic.  Sydney was the only one going trick-or-treating and she specifically asked Jeff to take her since she was worried about the candy haul and knew he would push her.  So they took her friend Ashlyn and off they went.  They were gone for about 2 1/2 hours, but they made a very respectable haul, if I do say so myself.  Mason did have me curl his hair and spray it pink.  It was really funny, everyone thought he was wearing a wig.  It is so not fair.  He has Morgan's hair that just holds a curl to make any girl jealous.  His hair would hold the curl until he showered again.  Sydney wore the unicorn costume again, we have gotten a lot of mileage out of that one!  And we died her hair blue and pink so it matched the mane and tale of the costume.  Morgan had a bunch of friends over to watch movies and eat pizza, so we used them to help buck 2 tons of pellets into the storage area.  But since it is in the 40's today, we are grateful we are prepared.  Have a wonderful day!

A Miraculous Occasion

Well, here it goes kids.  Through the course of my day, a neighbor called and informed me about a sale at a men's clothing store.  Well, Jeff was in desperate need of some new dress shoes, so I told him about it and told him to go and check it out.  For those of you who don't know, Jeff hates shopping for clothes and when we got married he swore he would never, EVER wear another suit since he paid his dues on his mission.  Well, this retailer was going out of business and had GREAT deals on men's clothing.  So he went in and low and behold he came home with a receipt for a... get this... 2 pant suit and dress shoes for a great deal.  Yes it is still a lot of money, but for a tailored linen blend 2 pant suit, we got a screaming deal.  So let us know what you think!

It's Homecoming!

Morgan went to homecoming tonight.  In fact, she just left.  Jeff and the kids went down to do a slot canyon with some friends, so I stayed here to make sure she looked good, and I just couldn't let her be by herself before she went to a dance.  Fortunately she recycled her dress from her first prom, which worked out just great.  Her date is her best friend Chance.  He asked her by carving a pumpking and having it barf all over the front porch with pennies in the goo that she had to find to work out who asked her.  The very next day someone else asked her.  It must be nice to be in demand.  Enjoy the pictures.  We will add more from Jeff's adventure later!

Of course they had to do the "pose"!

She better be home before midnight, we wouldn't want her turning into a pumpkin!

Morgan Cut her Hair!!!

Well, Morgan had let her hair grow out quite long.  She was hoping to be able to let it grow until graduation.  But alas, with her work requirements and always having it up, it had to go!

So we made an appointment with the cute Kenzie at the end of the street.  She does a great job and makes sure that you love it!

 In the end, the hair is gone and she absolutely loves it.  Everyone says she looks like her mom now.  You will just have to let us know what you think!