February Fun

The snow is beautiful this time of year

This was the coldest day this year

The longest February of the past four years is now behind us.  We have one young lady in our branch that was able to celebrate her 5th birthday this year.  She was born on leap day so even though she in 24 in calendar years. It is such a blessing to work with these youth we had some fun activities this past month. One of the fun times was a Home Evening Group activity were we went skating on the Rideau Canal. It is 7.4 KM of skiable ice. The longest skating rink in the world.

Skating with the youth

We didn't skate just walked with our ice spikes and trekking poles

The only problem is that this winter has been quite temperate so the ice is not as good as it has been in past years. But what a wonderful time it is. Another activity that the youth participated in was going to the Montreal Temple to participate in baptisms.  We had a good group and were blessed with good travel weather and great pizza at Georges a great eatery just down the road from the temple.

We love temple trips

Another of the great blessings we enjoy is working with wonderful missionaries. The down side to this is that you just begin to really love and appreciate them and they get transferred. This month was no exception. On this transfer day we had the largest snow storm of the year.  But all still went well accept for the missionaries that were flying in. Their flights all got canceled and they arrived a few days later.

District councils are wonderful

Sister Long left us to train a new missionary. She's the best

Transfer day at the bus station

We had a wonderful zone conference where we where trained by a wonderful mission president. President and Sister Low are such a blessing to this mission they are so loving and kind. This transfer they welcomed one of the largest groups of new missionaries into our mission that they have had so far. It is such a blessing to watch these young missionaries grow and progress. The opportunity to get trained by them each week at our District Council is wonderful.

Zone conference there is a lady in the stake that has been
serving zone conference luncheons for over 20 years thanks Sister Booth

The last district council before transfers

We continue to see our EnglishConnects group grow and progress as we continue to help people learn English. We had a fun activity this month. We discussed making pancakes and then went into the kitchen with 12 students and had three cooking stations and made banana waffles. They had a wonderful time and hopefully they will continue to learn and progress.

Working with our EnglishConnects class

The other wonderful blessings is working with our Pathway Group. They are over 1/2 through their one year program. Each of them is progressing in their teaching skills and also learning to be better disciple leaders in their wards. Right now they are working on group projects developing a business plan fro a lemonade stand. The things they are learning are incredible.
The stake had a wonderful Valentine activity. They had a stake dance.  Over 100 people attended. Several of our YSA kids came and were the life of the party.  The music was fun and there was a Carom like games set up for those who didn't want to dance.  The food was wonderful and the company was great.

We gave several of our neighbors on the 10th
floor a heart attack on Valentines Day

Happy Valentines day

Last but not least we were able to travel to Salt Lake the last few days of the month to be with our family as our son blessed Grayson Jep Mikkelsen. What  a wonderful opportunity to spend a few days being with some of our family and celebrate a wonderful day with them.

We finally got to meet Grayson in person

Grandkids are the best

Grayson Loves Grandma

We blessed Grayson in a special family event what a wonderful day

Proud Daddy (Jacob) and Grandparents

The proud parents

Being a Senior missionary has its challenges but also the blessing are wonderful.  We would not trade this opportunity, What a blessing it is to work with the wonderful people from Ottawa but also to see the blessings that come to our family. We hope that each of you are well and that the blessings of living the gospel of Jesus Christ are blessing your lives.  We love all of you

Erik and Jacob both have birthdays in March so this was
our birthday breakfast celebration at Sweet Lake Biscuits.

We are heading back in the morning so lookout
Ottawa here we come

Happy Hippo in the Ottawa snow

Welcome to the Winter Wonderful Land

We have been remiss in sending out a blog for December and January.  It seems like time just speeds forward and we are busily involved in the daily work of the Kingdom.  We love serving here and have found it very satisfying as we continue to develop relationships with the wonderful people of Canada.  What a blessing to be here and to be able to work with all these wonderful people.
Just a glimpse into our week.  But I'll throw pictures in that are totally unrelated just to break it up.

Light the World Treat plates ready to deliver

This is how Senior missionaries use their TV as a Christmas Card Display

Christmas Eve activity for youth that had no family in town
We could only find Daniel and Dante they are both from Mexico

Christmas Morning District Breakfast With a wonderful group
of missionaries. Great ways to spend Christmas morning

On Sunday we are blessed to be able to attend the YSA Ward and work with the wonderful youth of the church.  We start at about 10:30 with mission correlation and then attend Ward council on the first and third Sundays. Church at 1 and after the block we have either and meal with the youth or another YSA meeting. We arrive home about 4:30.  The rest of the sabbath is spent visiting with our family.

Christmas Eve Picture of Riley and Jonathan

Day after Christmas in Columbus helping Jonathan move

Riley our master builder

Quilt for our newest Grandson Grayson Born December 6th
The ears on the bears are floppy it was fun to make this quilt.
One down side fabric in Canada is very expensive!

Celebrating Jonathan's 33rd birthday while we were in Columbus

Monday we have a Senior Couples District Council where 21 couples meet together on a computer program called Zoom and we share our miracles and receive training from the mission president. In the evening we attend Home Evening group with the youth and there is always a wonderful activity.

Christmas gift from one of our Pathway students

The district transfer picture.  It's hard as these wonderful
missionaries get transferred out of our life. 

Creative missionaries making handouts for district
council. This is me after the resurrection
 minus the glasses and gray hair

Tuesday is our P day with laundry and cleaning and then we have a Zoom Faculty meeting with our area Coordinator and the other Institute couple in Montreal. In the evening we teach EnglishConnect 1 which is an English Language training program.  We work with the missionaries and we have anywhere from 3 to 8 people mostly non members attending.

This is our son Erik in an office just outside of the the Presidents Oval Office
Door on the right goes into the Oval office.
He is on the back row by the door.
His company is working on a project with several major business to improve education

Wednesday is our big day. We have District Council with the young Missionaries that is always a highlight, they are so intune with the spirit. We prepare all week to teach a lesson at Institute.  Sister Mikkelsen is teaching an LDS Hymns class.  They are exploring the church hymns and the composers and the stories behind the songs.  I teach the Eternal Families class.  It is one of the four required classes for Institute graduation.  It is an in-depth exploration of The Family Proclamation. The semester is 14 weeks long and we have 28 lessons so we teach two lessons a every Wednesday night. This is the most tiring day of our week but also the most rewarding.  To instruct these youth is a blessing I learn much more from them than they learn from me.

Grayson

Aria

Mads

Thursday we facilitate a Pathway class.  We have a stellar group of individuals from our stake that bless our life as they teach a gospel lesson and a university preparation lesson each week.  This truly an inspired program

We love the sisters!

Friday we have a Family History class at the church we teach a short lesson then work with the students in the Family History Library.

Little Chilly this morning frost on the eyelashes

Hogs Back Falls in the winter sunrise

Saturday on the first and third weeks we volunteer at the Satellite Bishops Storehouse.  We have a food delivery made to the church early in the morning and then we set up tables and stock all the food on the tables and the patrons take little wagons around and pick up the items that they preorder earlier in the week.  It is a great blessing to the stake.  The other Saturdays we help clean the church if it is our wards month.
So it may seem that we are very busy but we have lots of time to study and prepare during the day it is a wonderful time of our lives. Wonderful happenings this last two months we had a wonderful Christmas season with lots of service and Lighting the World activities.  Our youth handed out over 700 pass along cards with service ideas printed on them.
We made a quick trip to Columbus the day after Christmas to help our son Jonathan move to a new place. It was fun to be able to visit with them for a few days.  We have enjoyed several snow storms but nothing like last year yet.  The weather has been very mild so far but as they say wait a few minutes and it will change.

Mer Blue this is a Bog that we visited in the fall now it's
enjoying it's winter coat

Last Christmas we got this from two youth
it survived the summer and now it is blessing
our lives with its beautiful colors.
You have to keep it in the dark 12 hours everyday
for 3 months to get it to bloom.  There is a parable in that
sometime we have to struggle in the dark so that
we can grow and bloom also.

Snow flakes the size of 1/2 dollars. It was an amazing snow storm

Well I'll close it up now but just want all of you to know that being here is the best, and yes, we miss you and wish we could be with you but this is where the Lord would have us be at this time in our life. May you and your families be blessed as you continue to serve in His Kingdom.  We love you and wish you the best.
Elder and Sister Mikkelsen

November gone December here

First snow of the year

November has fled, we are well into December and the Holiday rush is upon us.  This last month has been wonderful as we were able to complete another semester of Institute.  Sister Mikkelsen taught The Gospel and the Productive Life. I taught The Doctrine and Teachings of the Book of Mormon. Together we taught Introduction to Family History. We had a wonderful semester. We had over 60 students registered and about 70% attendance.  That is the best that this area has seen for over 5 years.

Our youth on a temple trip

Relief Society activity! These are great sisters

Family Home Evening is always lots of fun

Reverse Charades 

Ginger Bread (gram cracker) house building

Here are two of our sisters with one of their friends they are teaching

We are so blessed to be able to serve where the youth are so strong in the gospel and seek for more wisdom and knowledge.  I wish that I could invite each of you into my class to observe these youth. I spend lots of hours preparing and seeking for guidance in what to teach.  When I get to the class I'll ask a few questions and before I know it the 1 1/2 is over and we have hardly gone through half of the lesson.  These youth are so in tune and inspired. They, along with the assistance of the Holy Ghost, teach each other.  I'm basically there to pick on the next person who raises their hand. Oh what a blessing it is to work with these wonderful youth. The future of the church is in good hands.
Pathway is a program where we work with members of our stake to develop their skills to be successful in university studies.  We have a great group. They are a blessing to us each week.  We facilitate an EnglishConnect1 group on Tuesday night. The missionaries are the teachers and we have added a lot of friends to their teaching pool as they bring them to class to teach them English.

Our Pathway class. Some of the best in our stake

Our district just before transfers.  These young people are blessing
lots of lives.

Those are little blobs of ice that froze to the moss strings hanging
in the water it was an interesting photo

This was our final tomato harvest before the frost hit
Since this picture all of those tomatoes ripened and we have feasted on them

Sunrise from our window.

The first part of November came in with a wintery blast and we thought we were going to be socked in for the winter.  But since that first big snow storm things warmed back up and most of the snow is gone again.  I'm sure we have lots to look forward to the rest of the winter but we are content to let it come later.

Love this site

This bench has appeared many times in different
seasons look forward to more pictures of this bench

In Canada, as we talked about last month, they have their Thanksgiving in the middle of October, but that didn't stop us from celebrating our American traditions at our USA appointed time.  We were blessed to have Daniel, Sonina, and our little Granddaughter Aria come and spend a few days with us.  They are so wonderful to make that 14 hour road warrior drive. I don't know how they do it.  We had a wonderful time. We sent mom and dad off on a day long date and we had little Aria all to ourselves the entire day.  Grandkids are the best!

Notice dads mouth as Aria Eats- automatic reflex

Let's go Grandpa

I love my Grandma

Parting is hard this was taken as they left

Happy Thanksgiving 

We have had lots of Pre-Christmas activities and parties.  We started off the month of December with the Light the World Campaign.  Our youth in the ward decided that we needed to hand out service ornaments. So we purchased 500 silicone bracelets and produced cards that had a service printed on the back. They then placed them on a Christmas tree and went to different locations to hand them out.  We have placed over 300 cards so far this month and have 4 more dates for sharing.  They have found several really wonderful Friends to teach the gospel to.  We hope each of you are also participating in this wonderful activity.

Here is the brackets and the cards we made 10 per sheet and then
just cut them apart  We will do over 600 by end of the month

Other service opportunities to do- gift wrapping 

Sister Mikkelsen demonstrating her wrapping skills

We enjoyed a stake Christmas concert two weeks ago and last Sunday the First Presidency Devotional and our Stake reception.  The stake president has a reception before the Devotional and we had about two hundred people in attendance.  It doesn't hurt that they have some amazing refreshments prior to the devotional, including Shrimp Cocktail.
This last week we had our Ward Christmas party. It was a big success with over 60 in attendance.  We had a talent show as part of the activities.  We have a very talented ward.  We had native cultural Mexican dancing, solos, Guitars and singing and even a duet that played the drums and an electric guitar.  He played the Guitar with a cello bow.  It was a mesmerizing sound.  These youth never stop amazing me.

The ward Christmas party

Handing out brackets and cards downtown Ottawa

Well that takes us to the really big news for this posting.  That's right!  Sister Mikkelsen and I are Grandparents again. Natalie and Jacob had a little baby boy, Grayson Jep Mikkelsen, on Friday December 6th at 10:30 MST.  He was 8 LBS 5 oz.  He and mom are doing great. Dad has been amazing! This blessing forces me to testify of the blessings of a mission.  3 of our 4 grandchildren were born while we were serving missions and the 4th one came after we had already received our call.

Welcome home Grayson Jep Mikkelsen

Happy Birhday mom and son

Jacob makes a good-looking Daddy

 Yes we miss being with them now but they are safe and healthy and that is a wonderful mission blessing.  Here in this mission we have like 20 couples serving and we meet with them over Zoom each week.  It is unbelievable the miracles they are seeing and being a part of.  This is a wonderful opportunity plan now to allow yourselves to be blessed as full-time missionaries.  We love each of you and wish you a Merry Christmas and Blessed New Year.
Elder and Sister Mikkelsen

Other blessings of serving a mission- the family photos!