A catch up on my summer!

Although Facebook ends up being my main means of communication with most people, this seems to be the best way for all of my family members to see what I'm up to while I'm away from home!  I'm still at home hanging out with the family before I head back out to Provo in about three weeks so it's just been the same old, same old.  

This summer has been great!  JD came out to Ohio to visit in May for a week and then I went out to California in June for 10 days.  We had a great time together, but it was pretty hard to say our final goodbye!  We know this is most definitely the right thing for both of us right now though.  After California, I went to Indiana where I had the GREAT opportunity to be an EFY counselor for a group of 14-15 year olds.  It was a great week and I was able to learn so much!  The week after that, I was able to go to Hilton Head Island, SC (our annual vacation) with all of my relatives.  As usual, it was a blast to get to spend time with everyone!  I came home and had a week off, and then I was off to Kentucky for my 2nd week of EFY!  KY was AWESOME!  I had 16-18 girls and they were seriously amazing.  The spirit was so strong that week.  I felt so lucky to have been able to have those girls in my group.   

JD has been gone for almost a month now and things are going great!  He loves the MTC and is learning so much!  9 of the 12 elders in his district are already familiar with Japanese so he was pretty intimidated at first, but he's doing awesome and always writes different things for me in my letters in Japanese!  This week he showed me how to write my name a few different ways!  I think I'm going to start a journal full of all the different words and phrases he shows me so I can kind of get a better feel for the language myself!  Rasmussen Choro (Elder Rasmussen) is currently serving as the district leader over the elders in his district.  Getting and sending letters between the two of us is great!  I really am confident that we're doing this the right way.  So many people get so caught up in the romantic part of their relationship while the guy is on his mission, but we've gone the other direction.  Our letters consist of teaching each other what we're learning and different thoughts or insights we've had throughout the week.  Through this, I think we've both learned so much!  One of my session directors at EFY spoke to us about how your relationship with him/her is only as strong as your relationship with Heavenly Father.  He gave an awesome talk and it was great for me to hear what he had to say.  I think that's part of the reason why JD being gone has been so easy this far.    

I'll post some pictures from my summer, but that's pretty much it so far!