I became a mother!... Well, in missionary life.

Hello!

So as some of you may know, this past week we have transfers, and it was special because we had 17 new missionaries come!  7 of those missionaries were sisters, so our numbers increased dramatically here.  There were three native Japanese sisters, two sisters who are half Japanese so they are already like fluent, and one sister from Ohio.  The sister from Ohio`s name is Lundstrom Shimai, and she is my newest companion!

It`s the first time I have had a companion who hasn`t been a native, so it is a ton of fun to be able to speak English all of the time. I need to step it up for our lessons and stuff though! Northrop Shimai is training too, and she got a 19 year-old Japanese sister. Cool stuff. Lundstrom Shimai is 20, and has no Japanese experience (although she does know Spanish because her mother is from Venezuela, so we`ll need to find somewhere we can use that) other than her 9 weeks at the MTC but she is fearless and even bore her testimony at church yesterday. She studied at BYU-Idaho before coming on the mission, and also taught English for 6 months in China, which is really cool. And will come in handy for our kids English classes!

We`re going to try and get her all set up for missionary life today with buying her a bike and all of that. We had all day training on  Wednesday in Sapporo (including everyone going to a baptism at night, which was really cool), and then we had our sisters training on Thursday. It was especially fun because this time all of the sisters,  even the ones who live far away were able to come! Another fun fact: since so many sisters came and there weren`t very many of us to begin  with all of the sisters except for six are in training right now. And the rest will probably be doing it soon... because I don`t think we`ll have enough for how many are coming this next time! Maybe some will have to double up? It is kind of crazy. They opened up a new area to sisters this time, in Eniwa, and it will probably be the first of many. I`ll probably be heading home right around when things really start to expand, but it is really cool.

This week was also really great because one of our investigators was able to come to church for the first time! She has been wanting to come forever, but hadn`t been able to because of work. But because she switched jobs this month she was able to come for all three hours, and since the first sunday of the month is fast sunday she even fasted!  She is so awesome. Next week she will come to General Conference (which was this past weekend in the states, but we watch it later because of the time difference. You can watch it online at lds.org  whenever you want! I recommend a peek), which will be a lot of fun.

Love you all and hope you are having a fabulous time!!!