Dinner with the Missionaries

Back: Elder Slade (on left) and Elder Anderson (on right)
Front: Me, Sister Brinegar, Katelyn, Sister Ashton, Laura

The front of the card

The inside of the card

In our previous ward, the calendar filled up so fast. By the time it got to me in primary, the nights we could sign up (Fridays and Saturdays) were filled up. Then there were stake changes and our section of the ward got moved to a different ward in a different stake. It was new for some but not for others. For many of the long time ward members, it was going "home". 15 years or so ago, they were once part of the other ward/stake. For others, like us, it was new. It was a smaller ward. Not many kids in primary or YM/YW even with those that got transferred there. So we had plenty of dates to choose from for feeding the missionaries.

What was cool is they were sisters! Katelyn never believed (even with my pictures as proof!) that "girls" could be missionaries. So we made sure to sign up to feed the sisters. At the time there was just two....Sister Hoover and Sister ? (hey I'm bad with names, LOL!). We had them over twice and Katelyn was finally convinced of the whole girls serving missions thing. Then the local mission president put a set of elders in (Elder Tate and Elder Anderson) along with a 3rd sister (Sister Brinegar). But the way the ward mission leader divided it up it was everyone south of 195th got the elders and those north got the sisters. Now it was Laura's turn to be confused. She got mad the first time the elders showed up. But she warmed up to them fast. Esp to Elder Tate. She didn't like Elder Anderson at first for some reason. Then Sister ? finished her mission and there were transfers. Elder Tate and Sister Hoover got transferred and in came Sister Ashton and Elder Slade.

Now funny story......With the first two sisters we had chicken dishes. But with Tate and Anderson, it just seemed like each time they came (3 times) I didn't feel like cooking in the heat so I had Clark grill. Well Clark doesn't just grill simple things. No, he loves to grill up steaks. They are delicious too. And yes, we ended up serving it each of those times. The first time they were like "cool! we haven't had it in a long time!" The second time it was "Score! Sister Raile can give up cooking altogether for all we care!" The third time they were joking that 3 for 3 was just too good to be true until they showed up and I said Clark was taking dinner off the grill. The 4th time we had all 5 missionaries over. We played a joke on the elders. When they all arrived we told them we forgot we had signed up for both sets and since the sisters had never eaten our steak, we'd be serving it to them and the elders could eat the food storage MRE's we had and they could choose which ones they wanted. They actually fell for it til dinner was served. Ha! But the streak ended when we got Elder Slade. I served the elders chicken enchiladas last time.

However, since it was my birthday, I asked Clark to grill steak for us all. When the elders called to confirm and Elder Slade asked if there was anything they could bring I said "Just your appetites. It's my birthday and we're having steak." He's like "Steak?! Yeah! I haven't had that in a long time." In the background I could hear Elder Anderson whose had it 4 times already, "Steak?! Yeah! Woohoo! Hoot hoot hoot!"

When the sisters arrived, they gave me a container of homemade chocolate chip cookies as a gift. After dinner while we were eating birthday cake (yes, I was able to get it finally), the elders said "Now we the sisters already gave you a gift. That was their part of the it. Our job was to make a card. It's not a Hallmark so we hope you'll like it." Like it? Oh my gosh! This card is better than any Hallmark card! I'm going to save it forever.....really. It's that funny! (and yes I have a silly sense of humor) And we even took pics of us all (well minus Clark, he was the picture taker) and the card for the blog.