Sunday, April 11, 2010

What our future holds...

Camryn went and stayed with her Grandparents in SD (thanks again!) and we took on 5 other girls! 5 other teenage girls I might add. Why you ask? I am not sure, but it was a blast! Ryan and I were host parents for Youth Conference. Meaning from Thursday night to Saturday night these were our daughters.
Whitney, Carolina, Florencia and Emily-the 4 we had the first night. Striking a pose in between a battle with 350+ youth. The Stake made all of these "swords" out of wooden dowels and pool noodles. Talk about fun!
On Saturday we collected can and dry goods from our neighborhood with a cousin group. They did better than any other group. And they got a taste of what it would be like to serve a mission. A lot harder than they thought.
Dropping our donations off at HOPE-Helping Our People in Elsinore. Pretty amazing they have this for our own community. Mckenzie joined our family on the second day-because we are the coolest!
For our second service project the girls went ALL out. This Dad just got back from Kuwait in the ARMY and the wife has been taking care of her parents and her Grandma all in one house. She just had surgery and the Dad is going into surgery next week. They were so inspiring to the girls. The mom is doing so much for her family while her husband is away serving our country. We cleaned a huge pool liner, washed two cars, pulled weeds, washed 4 sets of sheets, cleaned 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms and put together there HD TV with surround sound. The girls were such troopers! And the family was so grateful!
Our first and last Family picture. Pranks with the boys, yelling the words to every song on the radio, long showers and crazy emotions- it is hard work but always worth the experience and spirit felt in the end!

7 comments:

Amy said...

What a cool experience for you! I don't know if I could do that. Where were the girls from? Was this a stake thing? I bet everyone thought you were one of the youth huh? Good job being a good influence on the next generation.


As a side note you need to change your title to "our" not "are".

Jessica said...

Hi Erica. I left you a comment a while back, but I didn't hear from you and you have been on my mind so I thought I would try again. I would love to send you an e-mail. If you have any time and could e-mail me so that I could have your e-mail address that would be fantastic. I'm really glad to see your beauitful family is doing so well.
And adding to this post, what a great opportunity you took up to serve. That's amazing!-Jessica Kauffman (Anderson)

Jessicak33@gmail.com

Brittany Simmons said...

you guys fit right in with those young girls- and what a cute group! I'm sure you had fun though!

nikki said...

You guys know how much I love this stuff - hanging out with YW is totally the best! You guys made awesome hosts and did lots of great service.

Chase and Nichole said...

What a great experience for you guys! Looks like a blast! And I am sure they though Ryan was the funniest person ever huh??!

Karen said...

Sorry I didn't get to talk with you more Ryan and Erica. As you can see from Julie's blog, she is on the mend.

With love,
Karen Rose

Erin said...

what a fun calling!!!! what a cute group of kids too!