Our Ward Family

Today was a hard day at church being our very last Sunday here. We have been very blessed with excellent wards while living in Vegas. We have been in 2 different wards. The first ward we were in was so wonderful and we felt so welcome! However, it was split about 2 1/2 years ago. At first we had a really hard time with this ward, but we have since grown to love it and made some very special friendships. We have been very blessed to have a ward who has made us feel very welcome and been our family away from home and we will really miss everyone. I think wards away from Utah are a little more that way - Not as many people have family to rely on and so we all rely on each other. We will really miss that! We have had some excellent teachers and examples in our ward and I feel that we have learned a lot. Logan has had the BEST Nursery teacher, Sister Heaton, and I know that he will miss her so much! He is one of only about 3 kids in our nursery (on a busy day) and last week he was the only kid in there with 3 leaders. He gets really spoiled and I think it will be so hard for him to adjust to our new nursery, which we heard has 90 kids!!! He has learned a lot in our ward and also made some great friends at play groups and other things. He has also loved the opportunity to have the missionaries over for dinner so frequently. He loves to show off for them when they come over and sing "I Hope They Call Me On A Mission" for them! There are some things that are really neat about living in the mission field and having the opportunity to share the gospel a little more often than you do in Utah.
We will miss a lot of things about our ward - I personally will miss the ladies who I have served in the RS Pres with for the past 2 1/2 years - They have been so great! We have had a lot of fun together! I will also miss our FABULOUS Enrichment nights - They are always so amazing! (However, I will not miss all the work that goes into putting them together, even though I only play a very small part, they always seem to stress me out!) I will miss playing volleyball with the girls in my ward, even though I only got to do it once! I will miss the girls from play group and all of our little chats on parenting and so many other things. I will miss seeing so many people in the halls at church and their smiles and just talking to them. I will miss everyone fussing over Rylee and Logan at church. There are so many kids in Utah that they are not such novelty - Here everyone is always fussing over how cute they are! I will also miss the Conner's. They are an older couple who we love! We have had some great talks over at their house and will miss them a lot! They are always so excited to see us at church and genuinely miss us when we are not there. I will also miss our good friends, the Wennerlinds, who we became friends with through my Visiting Teaching. They have been so much fun to hang out with and Logan has become very attached! Karmann has been my listening ear so many times and helped me through a lot! I will also miss hanging out at the White's house. They have been so kind to our family and include us in everything they do. They are such great friends and let us hang out in their beautiful home until all hours of the night. My kids LOVE their house and all the fun toys they have and their fun backyard. Her older kids are so good to help with my kids and love to babysit them and Natalie and Logan are the best of friends! Jen has been my scrapbooking and blogging partner many nights until very late and Darren has spent many late nights watching BYU or the Jazz with Sandy. Both of my kids also love to be there and I think we will be a little lost without having them close by! They have been great to babysit our kids and include us in so many holiday celebrations and other things and have fed us so often! We will really miss them! We will also miss our Stake President and his sweet wife, Valerie, who have made us feel like family while we have been here and been so good to us. Church activities will just not be the same without being able to see "Grandma Valerie"! Logan used to call President Christiansen "President Hinckley" but has since updated that to "President Monson". So funny! Darren will miss all of his basketball buddies on Tuesday nights. He will also miss all of those who he has served with. I don't think that he will miss his calling all that much (He has been Elders Quorum President for the past 9 months) One thing I think he will NOT miss is all of the moves though! I think he is gone moving someone every weekend! One of my biggest fears with moving is going to a new ward. We are not very good at making friends very quickly and I hate sitting in a ward and feeling so alone! The good thing about the gospel though is that it is always the same wherever you go even if the people aren't. I'm sure that after awhile, we will grow to love our new ward just as we have our ward here.

Tonight we took the kids up to see the Las Vegas Temple. We have been telling Logan that we would take him there for awhile, but just seem to get lazy on Sundays and don't go. He keeps calling our chapel and also the Greek Orthodox church next door 'The Temple" so we wanted him to see the REAL temple before we left! Our kids really enjoyed being on the temple grounds - Logan wanted to jump in the fountains and Rylee loved all the flowers. We have been lucky to have a temple nearby, although we have not taken advantage of that as much as we should have. We are also blessed to have a temple near our new home - It will only be a 10 minute drive - and hope to do better when we move in attending the temple and teaching our children the importance of going there!