We love teaching!

 Rod is teaching our branch president, President Quesdada (yes at first we remembered it by quesadilla) to do Trot Pony Trot and This is the way the Ladies Go with his daughter, Emily.  It was his idea to add fluency by adding singing with children.  I think it just may work.  I teach piano to three people in the house while they work together.

 I love the mayonnaise containers here.  They just squeeze and there is never anything left with a knife or a spoon.  We love egg salad sandwiches.  Eggs are $1.75 a dozen and they aren't refrigerated in the stores.  They do seem to be ranch eggs with nice yellow yolks.  We had a bad one one day, and Rod commented that who knows how long they were in the field before they were ours.

 This is Alan, the nephew of one of our students.  I was giving a piano lesson, and Rod was singing with him.  He loved it!

 We decided to fix our washer or get rid of it.  It really does make things easier.  The right side just spins out the water and it does a great job so our clothes can dry in much less time.  I suspect they'll be fresher because of it.  Hurray for machines!

 This is our sock drier.  It folds up neatly (although it is seldom folded).  It might be now with our drier socks.  It is an item I never would have bought, but my guide insisted.  She was right.

 I wanted to get him playing with the I Spy Go Fish cards.  We use them a lot.  I decided I liked the picture of him here much better.  He likes to join in with his brother and sister to learn.

 These angelic children live in one of my favorite places.  It has an open field across the street and the frog chorus is fantastic.  I tried to get a video, but failed.  I will try again.  They are learning English and know a lot.  Their grandpa is the one we followed in the rain to visit the neighbors. He is hard for us to understand but he loves us and we feel really welcome at their house.

We were clapping the rhythm at a first piano class.  Nancy couldn't see the paper, so I tried holding it differently.  Then I couldn't see it, so I put it on my front with my placque magnet.  We had a lot of fun.

We decided not to celebrate Thanksgiving because our students didn't celebrate it, and our taking a day off makes an entire branch miss their lessons.  Our one concession (and I had to twist Rod's arm) was to make a loaf of homemade bread.  He really hates the heat.  It affects him more than it does me.  The bread was quite good, though.  I expected the flour to taste stale, but it tastes better than in the states.   At this moment I am baking a loaf in the crock pot.  We'll see how it turns out.

I invited the elders over to study and have fresh bread.  They made the appointment for 9:00.  I waited until 10:00, then we ate.  They came shortly after.  I lectured them, even though they had the good excuse of no clean clothes.  They have a telephone.  After my lecture, Elder Cobba said "But better late than never."  He had missed the entire point.  In the kitchen later, Elder Pena said how sorry he was.  He had understood.  They are such good kids, but I feel the need to give lectures anyway.

I was really looking forward to District Conference today.  We went all together by bus.  This was interesting as the Elders asked us to pick up Jose, the young man who lives far out, and his family.  We went by the day before to make sure they understood what it was like.  Jose said fine, so we went back at 6:15 this morning to pick them up.  Only Jose came but he wanted to pick up his cousin.  She wasn't up, so we waited 10 minutes.  We got to the church about 6:40 and only one person was there.  Hm. Trejos had insisted we should leave our car at his house in his locked enclosure, so we went over there.  He took us back to the church, then he left to get others.  We finally left the church at 7:30, but then we started a route to pick up more members.

We got to District Meeting about 8:30 for a supposedly 8:00 meeting, but it hadn't started yet.  I ended up in the primary meeting.  The conference itself lasted over two hours.  I was asked to lead the hymn.  One of my students(she was a former student of another missionary couple) played the hymns.  The choir was a capella, and the director didn't know how to direct.  She wants to be a student and has three investigators lined up, she says, but she has missed class for two weeks.  We'll see. Whoever put the hymn numbers up put them in a different order, so when I was supposed to direct I wasn't ready and did my customary leap into the air.  I could hear the mission president laughing.  We take a lot of organization for granted.  I wonder how much of it matters.

I did love seeing all our students and trying to place them all in a different setting.  It felt like home somehow.  Enough for now.  Love to all.