John, John, Baptism, John

(Another excerpt from a letter to Hannah)

This week has been a busy one for us. John got his Eagle stuff submitted to the scout office on his birthday (after running around earlier in the week trying to get signatures and laboring over writing a statement of his life purpose), so that's all good. Now he just needs a board of review and he will be done!

Also, we have been working hard trying to get John's visa application stuff ready. Emails were sent to seminary and institute people, notaries were visited, and birth certificates were procured - I managed to order and receive a new one, but by then the one they used to get John's passport was returned so now we have two, so if the one we submit with his visa isn't returned, we still have one. Also fingerprints were taken, twice. On Monday, John went to the city place to get them taken, but they informed him that they don't do that anymore, and they sent him to a website where he found out they do that once a week at the College Hill Library. So he made an appointment and went to the library on Wednesday to have them taken. They took them digitally, and then sent them... somewhere. John told them he needed the fingerprints to get his visa and so they sent them wherever travel visa fingerprints are sent, and I'm not sure where that is, or what they'll do with them when they get them. So on Friday, John took the bus(!) downtown to get his fingerprints taken again, and this time they actually rubbed his fingers in ink and then stuck them to the card that we could mail to the one place for the FBI clearance, as our instructions told us to do. While he was downtown, he also got the apostilles that he needed. We have everything we need now except the FBI clearance, but as soon as that comes back we can mail the whole thing to the travel office. And pray that his visa arrives in time.

Yesterday there was a baptism. Sharon R.'s granddaughter was baptized. (Do you remember Sharon? She was my cute, short elderly ministering companion.) Also, three children were baptized by their father. The dad is a returning less active member, and he was ordained a priest last Sunday so that he would be able to baptize his family. The wife also wants to be baptized, but she was having a really bad day yesterday and wasn't feeling up to coming. I'm sure she will be baptized too in the next few weeks though.

John is supposed to be ordained an elder today. And he will probably receive his temple recommend and be endowed this weekend. It seems so strange to think that two of my children are now official adults. We celebrated his birthday yesterday and he got things for his mission - umbrella, camera, watch, socks, etc.

I'm attaching a couple photos. The first one is of the hail storm last week, taken from our front porch. The second one is John blowing out the candles on his cake. He baked it and decorated it himself. It was supposed to be a castle, but he had a lot of difficulty getting the turrets to stand up, and they fell over. It tasted good though!