Sister Alex Solomon

Alex's address: 4545 W Beardsley Rd, Apt 2031, Glendale, AZ 85308

Wow, it has been a stressful week! to start off, we had interviews with the president this week. It was actually really great overall but the first thing he said when I got in there was, "Sister Solomon, how well do you know your area?" I was just kind of like, "um....what...?" And then he asked if I would feel comfortable leading my area and if I knew all our Ward leaders and everything. Sooooo we are pretty sure that Sister Williams will be getting transferred on December 2nd. I know we had kind of a rough start together but I really will miss her. We will have had 4 1/2 months together and she will have been in this area (her first one) for 7 1/2 months.

My companion has been talking a lot lately about how she wants to be healthier and lose some weight so I told her about Eat to Live. She is really excited to do it and we are starting it together today! I found a paper in my journal where I wrote down all of the rules for the 6 week plan...sometimes I'm smart. So yeah, it won't be perfect because members still feed us sometimes but we are going to do our best! Mom, I don't know if you can send my eat to live book or not but if you can't, could you send pictures or screenshots of some recipes that aren't too time consuming? When we were at Barnes and Noble a couple of weeks ago, I saw a legit Eat to Live cookbook with tons of recipes but I don't know how much it costs so we are going back to check it out soon.

Now back to why it was a stressful week...I don't know if I told you guys about this when it first started but we have been teaching a lesbian couple and their kids for a couple of months now. They are super great and hilarious and we just love them. Anyway, we were teaching them because one of the moms, Diantha, grew up in the church and knows it's true but was excommunicated in 2001 because of her relationship. It's so weird because they are a lesbian couple but they really want their kids to be baptized and get married in the temple. So we were preparing their daughter, Elainah, for baptism because she is turning 8 next month. I don't know if you guys saw all the hype on Facebook but now Elainah's baptism has been cancelled because of the church's new policy regarding the children of same-sex couples. It was hard for us because the family took it so hard. There were a lot of tears from Diantha but she also understands why the policy is in place and said she is looking forward to starting the 10 year countdown to Elainah's baptism.

It's weird to think that if I was at home right now, that policy would not affect my life at all! But it totally does now!

More stress: our prison dude, Clint, and his wife, Nicole, came to church yesterday! I was glad they were there but it was probably the WORST Sunday ever for them to come. The first time we ever taught them, Nicole was like, "I have really bad social anxiety and I hate being in large groups of people" and Clint said, "we went to that other big church up the road (Christ's Church of the Valley; super anti-Mormon) and we hated it. It wasn't even personal because the pastor wasn't there. He was just on a screen the whole time." Yeah, so what Sunday did they pick for their first time? The one where we had a HUGE regional conference. Everyone in the stake was there AND all of the speakers were on a giant screen in the front. Not only that, but someone turned up the organ really really loud and we had not one but TWO ward members have seizures during the songs. I wanted to scream the entire time. But they did schedule a lesson with us this week so maybe we can get them to come on a normal Sunday.

Fun facts: there's this restaurant nearby called Cafe Rumba. It's a lot like Cafe Rio or Costa Vida but is owned by Mormons. Anyway, the owner gave us free lunch this week and that was super nice! Also, last night we had taco salad at a members house. They put tortillas in these weird bowl shaper things and stuck them in the oven so that the tortillas were just shaped like bowls for the salad to go in. We thought it was really cool so they gave us an extra set of weird taco bowls!

LOVES

So I forgot to tell you guys about one of the best things that happened to me this week! We went to go visit a less active member from one of our ward. We had a good time talking to her and hanging

out with her. She's getting ready to have a baby this week so we're going to go back and help her clean things next week.

Anyway, while we were talking to her, her husband came home. He is not a member. He came in though and was super nice to us and ended up giving us so many chips. He works for Frito-Lay. He did a demo the other day where he had nine boxes of chips to demo but he only opened two of them. So he randomly gave us three huge boxes of Doritos! We're now trying to find ways to pawn them off on our Ward members! Haha, we have been leaving bags of chips on people's doorsteps with notes that say, "thanks for chip-ping in to make this such a great Ward!"

#goodtimes #somanychips #pringlesarebetter