Such a blessing living close to the temple

familia mía!

Thanks for the letter Robby, I love hearing how you're doing. Sounds like your tearing it up at Marana! Keep it up at school, always enroll in the honors classes. That was my mistake freshman and sophomore year. I later realized that the bigger difference is not the harder homework or the harder tests, but rather the different class mates. In the honors classes you can avoid getting stuck around the macaneros and cabasuros (knuckle heads and troublemakers) and instead sit around people that are tranquilo and smarter than the average Joe.

Well Bianca and Pascual (brother and sister of recent convert Esteban) were baptized yesterday! Esteban baptized them, he is too funny. He brought them down by the neck and dunked super fast, then he turned to us and flexed for a quick second, that's Esteban for ya. We held the baptism on Sunday so their mom could go, but she ended up not going, very lame. The mom was upset last time because apparently Esteban didn't tell her when his baptism was. But now she is a bit of a hippocrit. But the three kids are doing great, living the commandments and loving life. They are good examples for their parents. The mom and step dad need to go to church, stop drinking and smoking, but they haven't put forth the effort so far. They love having us over, so we are just going to keep being patient and they will come around. The 3 kids, my comp and I helped Esteban's mom do the laundry on Saturday so that there would be nothing in the way to attend church. It was kind of exciting, my first time washing clothes by hand.

Oh exciting news for Esteban! he went to the temple to do baptisms for the dead! Fernando would have gone to, but he needs the priesthood first, next week they will go again. Such a blessing living close to the temple.

We did a home makeover in Esteban's room. I took a bunch of pictures from the liahona and taped them to his wall. I will show you a pic later, the theme for this year for the youth is stand in holy places, so I want his house to be a holy place. I also gave him my liahona from 2008 that talked all about temples, the pictures in there are incredible. I think the Washington DC is one of my favorites.

I'm glad you enjoyed the video, the bench bar is filled with cement. no idea how much it weighs but I don't think I could do any more than one the clean and jerk. We also put 2 chairs together and I benched 25 reps. I will have at least 3 more months here, we will see how high we can take that number.

bueno, got to go
love to all,
elder lafaye
ps familia estrada came to church for the 3rd time! still preparing for their marriage and baptism on the 23

What do I do with a whole chicken?