MTC Photo-A-Day

The day I left from the Indianapolis airport! My last picture with my parents! I love and miss you all so much!

This is me and my companion Hermana Redford :) She is super cute! These are from today by the way so this is what I look like right now ;)

 Me and my companion :)

This is my district and I love them! There is a statue just outside our wall that is doing this pose so of course we did it!!!

The girls in my district: from left to right Hermana Brown, Hermana Larson, Hermana Brown, Hermana Duncan, My companion Hermana Redford and ME :)

On one of our first nights, this is all of us as roommates (two of the girls in our district are in a different room)! MOM EVERYONE LOVED YOUR PUMPKIN BREAD!
Left to right Hermana Brown, Hermana Duncan, Hermana Redford and me and our bears and pumpkin bread of course!

We love these pictures from Elder Peter´s really nice camera.

Just thought these were super cool! We all got these taken :) So pretty and fun!

This morning, pure paradise!

Our first pday last week, we all took pictures in front of the sign! I literally am in paradise!

 The many personalities of the girls in my district! I love them so much:)

We all took cute pictures in pajamas at our sleepover last night. These make me chuckle :) Missionaries can have fun too! Don´t worry :)

So we have this guy in our district named Elder Peters and he is a pro photographer and so he took pictures of all of us so that we could send them to our families :) So nice!   Smiles!

I eat pizza as big as my face and eat the whole thing.

Traveling to the Mexico City Temple.

Today my district had the wonderful opportunity to visit the Mexico City Temple. It is currently closed due to renovations, but we did get to visit the Visitors Center.

My District in front of the Mexico City Temple.

My District in front of the Christus at the Visitor's Center.

Me and my companion in front of the Christus.

Poem from a District Meeting.  It didn't translate over very well from Spanish so there are some mistakes, but it's a sweet quote about missionaries and I love it and I hope you do too :)

One day at lunch, they had the tiniest bananas that I have ever seen so we thought it would be funny to take silly pictures with them! We did a "see no bananas, hear no bananas, eat no bananas" picture :)

And then we had unicorns, unibrows, cellphones, guns, fangs and devil horns as a district with these little bananas. We definitely still find time to have fun here :)

A drawing of my district and teachers.

A tumbling challenge

during gym time.

Mexico City

​HELLO FRIENDS AND FAMILY

From the warm and beautiful mexico

Another cute one from the temple.
I didn't get this from Elder Peter's camera until today but we are all so happy together. I love these girls!

Another beautiful view from the outdoor breakfast area of our beautiful campus

This is the outdoor covered eating section with a great view, but there are also eating sections inside too :)

This is the indoor food area! It's pretty nice and spacious!

These are all the sweet sisters and me at breakfast this morning. On the left it's Hermana Brown, me and my companion Hermana Redford, on the right its Hermana Larson, Hermana Brown and Hermana Duncan! I love these girls :)

This was the tender mercy of American food for lunch. Sometimes the food here gets a little sketchy, but this was a great meal! 

I got a very special and fabulous package from my sweet mother. This is the best gift any missionary could ever ask for and that is KRISPY KREME DONUTS. I ate so many of them and especially after getting over being sick and getting bored with the food here, delicious American Pastries were such a treat! Just look how happy I am :)

This is a far away view of my bed and sleeping area. It's a pretty good space. The beds still feel like smooth stones, but I am always so tired I fall right asleep :)

This is a close up of my top bunk where I sleep at night and all my little trinkets and gadgets! My pictures of my family and friends and the wonderful picture of Elsa that my five year old niece colored! I am very proud :)

This one is mainly for Josie.  One night we were not utilizing our time too well and we were coming up with which Disney Character we would be. I got Snow White and my companion is Belle. But the guy in this picture is Elder Christensen  has to be Christoff from Frozen, we all just looked at him and said you have to be you look just like him. So all of us have cute little nieces that love frozen and we asked if he would dress up like christoff for a picture so our nieces could think we met the real Christoff and he did! He is such a sweet guy and doesn't he look just like him?!
So funny!

​Sometimes the spirit is willing but the flesh simply is not. We probably will have a whole album of people accidentally falling asleep and goofy pictures with them! This is Elder Kummerman and all of us sister missionaries.  What a champ!

Elder peters is a dedicated missionary who fell asleep cuddling the Ensign (a church magazine) with the article entitled ´´Sharing Your Light´´ open. It was so funny we all had to take pictures.

Elder Peters being crazy Elder Peters.  One day, I made a really cute snowman out of sticky tack and then Elder Peters pretended to eat it....

They made Thanksgiving really special for us.  They set up really nice tables, made the traditional meal (the turkey was amazing) and they even played Christmas music in the background for us.

The sisters from Thanksgiving Dinner 

We also were very blessed with kids who got pies for the holiday season but couldn´t finish them so they gave them to our district. We had pie in class almost every day. It was great! 

 Every Monday night when the Latinos are leaving the next morning for the mission field they ask every ´´pretty white girl´´ that they can find to take a picture with them. They aren´t embarrassed and they don´t think it´s weird, but we think it´s both funny and weird because they don´t even know our names and have never talked to us before.  We just eat it up when it happens -hahaha soo funny.

I workout!

This is my special machine that I ride on every morning. Sometimes its´s really cold so i dress warm and then I take off scarves and sweatshirts as time goes on, but I love it. My calves are starting to look pretty good. 6 miles a day with a resistance of 5 works pretty well.

This is what my skinny little closet looks like. My college closet was even a little bit bigger than this, but I don´t have too much stuff so it works out great :)

This is my lovely bathroom where four girls somehow get ready each day

And because my sister thinks that doing your laundry in a different country would be so different, here is a picture to show you that I may be a missionary, but I still have to wash and dry my clothes just like the rest of you ;)

This is a picture from a lesson we had a while back about how the CCM (this place that I am at right now) is a ship that will take us somewhere to be better missionaries but we have to learn somethings here before we get to the field. It was a cool activity!

This is a practice we did last night in an attempt to make sense of all the different tenses a verb can have and it´s different uses.

This is what my notes look like from devotionals and meetings that we go to throughout the day! This is a page from Sunday, Nov. 30th which just so happened to be the 12 year anniversary of my baptism with my best friend Grace Fischvogt and another one of our great friends Thomas Shoaf who is serving his mission in Hawaii right now! Pretty cool!

This is how stressed I am about email time, I have to make an outline for you all so that I use my time wisely. I love you :)

This was this campus in the 1960s, there wasn´t much around it, but a lot has changed now!

This is the Missionary Training Center now. We are the greenest area. All around us are crazy amounts of houses. It´s a very busy place just on the outside of our walls! But it´s great to be here!

I also had quite a bit of luck outdoors this week because I got a lot of really cool pictures of the birds here and also some beautiful sunsets.

I guess I still really love birds. My mom has rubbed off onto me :) and here there are so many beautiful birds and I have gotten lucky once or twice to get some really pretty and cool shots !

The beautiful sunset I captured after one of our Sunday meetings. I am living in a paradise currently!

Studying under the palm trees on a beautiful sunny day in Mexico. It was nice :)

The girl in the middle is Casy! She is the one that we get to teach once a week! She´s super cute and we love her to pieces! She is 21 and she helps us practice our Spanish by teaching lessons to her! She is great!!! We will miss her! This is our last week that we get to teach her!

Umbrella: Here is a picture of me in my coral dress with my matching umbrella!  Naturally I acted like a ham. I can very rarely take a serious picture. 

My companion and I doing service by cleaning the men´s urinals. Gross.

Each evening we go to an activity called TALL which is an online language program. Sometimes we are silly. The headphones make us look like we run NASA or something ;)

Occasionally we play “Hot Pear” instead of “Hot Potato”

This is my desk and my view that I sit at every day :)

Isn’t this beautiful? One of the girl’s moms that we teach on Thursdays makes these and I want to buy one for after my mission! They have so many different styles and they are so beautiful!

One day Elder Peters told me I had a big mouth and I told him he did too so we used a book to measure the sizes of our mouths and they ended up being about the same size.

When Elders Peters was measuring the size of his mouth, we all gave him lipstick and he actually did kind of a good job putting it on.  SOOOO FUNNY!

We compared and his mouth is definitely a little bit bigger.

Elder Peters' camera does wonders for my face ;).     From Ashley:  I call this sweet retribution – that is all! 

Elder Peters did this so obviously I had to take a picture.

Sometimes, we don´t know what Elder Peters is thinking, here he is being a duck. All of us girls always called him pato because his shirt always came untucked and he looked like a duck!

This one is mainly for mom because this tree reminded me of the Charlie Brown Christmas Tree and oh how I wish that I could watch this movie with mom this year! I love it and this tree is really a sad excuse for a Christmas tree but it made me smile and think of her :) Love you mommy!

This was from this past Sunday with our Branch President. Presidente Martineau. He is such a great guy. He is the lawyer for all of Mexico and recently got to attend the Catholic Colloquial about families. 

This is our friend “chino” (that is his nickname meaning curly) he is one of the workers in the kitchen and we became really good friends with him! We will miss him so much!

This is all of my district posing with Hermano Aguiñaga. We love him and will miss him!

This is Hermana Soto who is one of our classroom cleaning ladies and she is so cute. Also the guy looking like a boss in the back is Hermano Cayetano and he´s another one of the teachers here. He said we were his favorite district and he didn´t even teach us, he just visited us a lot!

This is our district with our afternoon teacher Hermano Polo! We love him so much!

He is such a funny guy! But so is our district!

Me and my companion being awkward missionaries with polo! We love him! 

He is sad to see us go :-(

Our whole district with our morning teacher Hermano Vargas. We will miss him so much!

This is Hermano Vargas, our morning teacher. He is a great guy and we love him so much!

Hno. Polo being a russian/eskimo as he taught his last lesson to us.

We were so sad to say goodbye to Hermano Polo because he truly has become one of our best friends in this life. He changed my life so we were all crying tears with our puffy faces. He told us we were all very special to him and that our paths would cross again. He is a very smart man and knows a lot of English too and is working to be a doctor and he has a visa to the USA and wants to go to school in Utah so I very well may see him again. I sincerely hope! This was also the same night that we were saying goodbye to Hermana Brown and Hermana Duncan so everyone was just sad to be going.

This was at two am when my companion and I ran to go wake up the boys to say goodbye to our sisters one last time. Pretty cool shot if you ask me, but also very sad. We will miss them.

Me and my sweet companion, Hermana Redford.

There were cross walks so we couldn't resist taking an awkward sister missionary “Beatles” picture.  

We are sister missionaries. We are prepared and we are going to teach the gospel and bare our testimonies like no one ever before.