End of Seminary

We learned today that October had not been this cold in 65 years. Lucky us. We do appreciate the good days we do have.

On our Monday our grandson Zach gave us a call on his own. We always know it is him because before the video comes up we can hear him giggling. His personality has not changed much since we have left. It looks like we will have his sweet, innocent spirit with us for many years. It is interesting how the human mind works. He is learning to read, but his understanding is very limited. He can add numbers, but has very limited understanding of application.

The "Do Duck In Bakery" is next to a convenience store/service station. It is one of the few places you can get pizza in Greymouth. Domino's Pizza is in country, but not in Greymouth. This establishment also sells other bakery goods including cakes and meat pies. No donuts. We have purchased pizza here three times for our students and this is our final time. It is $17.00 for a large pizza and we buy three. They do not use the same kind of tomato base and spices as we do, and the toppings are some what different as well. The kids favorite is chicken and cream cheese. We think their Hawaiian pizza is better in that they use ground ham instead of the thin sliced ham they use in America.
We celebrated the end of seminary with our students Saturday late afternoon. It will be hard to leave these great kids. This weekend we have a seminary activity in Nelson that will bring all the district students together. We are looking forward to that.
We had one student missing from our Pizza feed. Sione had his left eye swollen shut. We don't know what caused it, but our Tongan families have frequent problems with boils. He has been out of school for several days.
The three large pizza's did not take long to consume. It must have satisfied them because they did not eat very much ice cream later. We also had a quiz on this years New Testament course. Those that got the right answers got pieces of Cadbury chocolate. We were pleased that they could answer most of the questions.
Last week Mafi and Ofa had work conflicts with institute so we brought them home after church to make up the class. We fed them grilled cheese sandwiches and had some left over chocolate candy from the seminary activity and these girls used it as their vegetable.
After our Book of Mormon class, we served them the left over ice cream from the seminary activity. Ofa loves bread with her ice cream. Here she is putting the last of our chocolate sauce on her bread. Have to love these Tongan women.


Tim's Sister took our camera and caught her brother with his ipod enjoying his own singing. To bad he found out so soon. It was quite fun to see him in his own little world trying to sing along with the song he was listening to.

Our youth loved Elder Bednar's talk in conference. He spoke of the importance of Expressing and showing love, Bearing Testimony and then living it, and of being consistent.

He said that we must not assume our family members know we love them. "We can begin to become more diligent and concerned at home by telling the people we love that we love them. Such expressions do not need to be flowery or lengthy. We simply should sincerely and frequently express love." He also said if we only tell our families of our love during testimony meetings we are being hypocritical.

After counsel on the value of our testimonies to our families, he taught that we need to live them in our homes. "Being consistent in our homes is important. Many of the Savior's harshest rebukes were directed to hypocrites. Jesus warned His disciples concerning the scribes and Pharisees: 'Do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.'