Farewell...

Hello to readers of Sammy's blog. This is his sister Danielle. While Sam's serving the Lord and unable to blog, I will be posting updates so friends and family can keep up with how the mission is going. I thought I would backtrack and post some pictures from the day of Sam's farewell and leading up to when he entered the MTC. Sam did a great job on his talk and I'm sure I can speak for Sam when I say he appreciated all of the friends and family that came to support him that day. After church, we went to Lorraine's Day Care for lunch and had a great time. That following Tuesday, Sam was set apart by the stake president as a missionary. As the stake president was giving him the blessing, Katelyn was being antsy so Linds stood up with her and walked over by the president's desk. Kate quickly spotted a bottle of hand sanitizer and, of course, she wanted some. To keep her quiet Linds grabbed the bottle and meant to squirt some in Kate's hand, but the bottle was clogged and instead it squirted straight up and hit Kate right between the eyes! Of course, Kate immediately preceeds to rub the alcohol-based gel into her eyes and starts screaming, so Lindsay has to weave around all of us to take her out of the room. It was hilarious; for the rest of the blessing I could not stop laughing; my family all thought I was sniffling from the sacredness of the occassion. Nope, I was laughing; it was really funny.

Anywho, after Sam was set apart we drove down to Utah and stayed with Parley and Marilynn for the night. The next afternoon, we took Elder Yoshida to the MTC. On the way we asked Sam if he wanted to stop and get anything to eat as his last meal. He said something fruity sounded good so we took him to Jamba Juice. It was his first Jamba ever (such a deprived soul), so we had to get a picture. I think he liked it :) We had to strap his luggage to the top of the explorer to make room in the car, so when we got to the MTC, Sam had to climb up the side to get them down. When he was standing by Kate's door she grabbed onto his belt and had this look on her face that said either "Don't go Uncle Sam" or "Take me with you!" It was cute so I got a picture of that as well. Then, we all went in, Sam got his nametags, and we met in this huge room with a gazillion other missionaries and their families for a little meeting. At the beginning of the meeting, they announced the opening hymn by saying "and now, we'll sing THAT hymn, and sister so-n-so will give an opening prayer." Then we all sang "Called to Serve" with gusto. It was intense. After a couple of speakers it was time to say goodbye. Tears were shed by some, but it was good; Sam looked excited and ready to go. So he went out the missionary doors and we went out the family doors. For any of you who haven't been to the MTC before, it is a neat experience. It's great to see so many young people so willing to give up their lives for the next 18 months to two years and serve the Lord. They are such great examples.

Elder Yoshida has been in the MTC for two weeks now and is doing a great job. He likes both of his companions and the other Elders in his district. The Lord is blessing him and helping him not to feel too homesick. Syd received some pictures in a letter from Sam a few days ago so hopefully we'll get those posted soon. My plan is to post the emails/pictures that Sam sends to the family each week on here. Feel free to leave comments about the posts if you feel you don't have time to write him a complete letter that week and at the end of the week I can print off all of the comments and mail them to Sam along with my letter. We'll see how this works out. Thanks again to all of Sam's family and friends for their support.