Sunday was a busy day! I had ward Council at 7:00am. At 9:00 we had sacrament meeting. The number of Covid cases has sky rocketed in Cache Valley so we are watching sacrament meeting broadcast in our home. At 10:30 we had Relief Society and Elder’s Quorum on Zoom. At 12:00 we taught the last mission preparation lesson to our niece. She’ll begin home MTC in just a few weeks! Finally, at 2:00 we had our virtual primary program! My presidency and the senior primary teachers put in a lot of effort to gather responses from the primary children. Due to the nature of the Zoom meeting only senior primary children were invited to participate. About 9 children came and each had a short speaking part. You could tell they spent a lot of time writing and practicing their parts. I gave a short talk and the Bishop gave a short talk. We had an opening and closing song, but everyone had to keep their microphones on mute to avoid echo. The whole program only took 15 minutes. It was short but very, very sweet. I loved the testimonies of the children. I hope next year primary programs can be held as they have in the past, but given current circumstances this program was perfect.
Monday evening we carved a Jack-o-lantern.
Tuesday evening I attended a virtual training for primary presidencies and primary music leaders. We heard from a sister on the general primary board. She talked about the purpose of primary and three things we should do to fulfill that purpose. We need to value children, protect children, and engage children in the Lord’s work.
Tuesday night Mark also had a meeting with a member of the bishopric. He was asked to be the second counselor in the Sunday school presidency. The new Sunday school president is Brother Loveland, who was the bishopric counselor over primary until a couple weeks ago. I enjoyed working with him and am excited for Mark to get to serve with him too. Mark is looking forward to his new calling and having the chance to attend Sunday school and Elder’s Quorum regularly again. I decided to order our Christmas cards early this year and got them printed just last week. I’ve been teasing Mark that he ruined our Christmas card because it doesn’t mention his new calling, but it’s ok!
Mark collected grebes and got to go hunting once more with his professor this week. He is staying plenty busy with school work too!
We had apartment cleaning inspections this week. We always use it as a good motivator to deep clean the things we don’t always get to in weekly cleaning. They did cleaning inspections over Zoom this year. Mark walked around and showed our RA the apartment on his phone.
The annual Murray family Halloween party was canceled because of COVID so we decided to have a small dinner with my parents. I tried to plan spooky food- mummy hot dogs, roasted carrots cut to look like pumpkins with Brussels sprouts (like a pumpkin patch), green veggie dip in a carved orange bell pepper, and “blood” red juice. We ended with spider web peanut butter bars. We had a nice, simple evening. I do miss seeing family, but it is nice to practice simplifying holidays.
On Halloween Mark spent a few hours helping his family cut out egress windows at his grandpa’s house in Richmond. He enjoyed getting to say hello, especially to his little brother who just came home from his mission.
We watched a few Halloween episodes of Sabrina the teenage witch when he got home. Then we decided we were done with Halloween and pulled out Christmas movies! With so many activities cancelled we thought it would be fun to make a Christmas movie bracket. We’re going to watch every movie on the bracket and choose our favorites to move forward until we each have our favorite. It should be a fun activity for the next couple months!
Mark accidentally locked himself outside on our balcony, haha!
Our Story: The Bell Family 