New Baby, Rylee Rebecca Smith

Rylee Rebecca Smith was born Sunday, August 8th, 2010. She weighed 8 pounds and 5 ounces and she is chubby and healthy. Cam said this was the worst labor she'd had the pleasure of experiencing but all is well and she is feeling fine. Rylee had her hearing test today and she passed it.

Isaac, Jaycee, Ammon, Callie and Sheldon are all excited to have a new sister.

August 8th Letter from Ethan

good morning!

first order of business: got the package on friday! and i loved it. thank you SO much for all that and yeah that was expensive! everyone say that and apparently they were very amazed at how much it was. butthank you and i hope that ill be able to use my trumpet soon for some kind of music thing.

second order of business. recipe for friendship bread! croats would love it! so that would be cool. also could you find out a little about nikola tesla. where he was born and went to school and stuff. whats funny is croatia claims him as his own, but so does serbia, and slovenia. so.... who knows. so if you can find out CITIES. thats the big thing. cause technically he was born in yugoslavia haha. but oh well. its a funny thing. every city here has a nikola tesla street. another thing. camaro pictures. at least on the email. i need just a few to show some people cause its so cool. oh yeah, by the way dad, when i get home we are fixing up the pick up. wou can just sit there and tell me what to do if you want, but i want to fix it up cause it would be really fun to learn about all that stuff and actually do something like that.

a really cool thing that you guys can listen to is a song by a croatian guy. and its really pretty. its by oliver dragojević and the song is called vjerujem u anđele. so if you look that up on youtube it should be there. if not on google you should be able to find something. he's really good.

another thing. every year for zone conference near christmas we have christmas skits. so.... i was thinking. can you send me things like phonetic punctuation, the other victor borge thing i have (with the inflamitory language or something. "threelips". and if anyone has any funny church related skits, they are very welcome. any ideas whatsoever. its nice to have a variety haha.

oh yeah, and for chirstmas i dont really need a whole lot. especially cause i got the package! :] but what i was thinking was a family calendar. the ones that leah always makes. she can just make one more and you guys can send it to me so then ill remember birthdays, ill have a calendar, and ill have great family pictures. that would be really cool.

this week was really weird cause elder brown left for ljubljana and it was just elder anderson and me in osijek. we have some good times though. we had an audit. and it consisted of a lot more than i ever thought. it was a good training experience though and it was a good learning tool. ill definitely respect my bishop and stake more now that im learning more about how it all works. im having a good time. its pretty different here cause we dont have a ward or a stake or anything. its basically the mission president and us the missionaries. thats about it. i mean there are a few members and stuff, but they are very few and not many stay active for a long time. thats a big problem here. the inactive rate. we have about 50 members in osijek. and 2 came to church yesterday. and that was a good sunday... its pretty different...

a lot has happened this week and i dont have a lot of time to email. only about 30 minutes left. okay so heres a story for you.

elder brown went to ljubljana (slovenia) this last week and he got back late friday night. so elder anderson and i had to pick him up fro the train station. especially since he had a huge suitcase and my package which was stinking heavy! so anyway. right before he had to go we started hearing thunder and we looked outside and there was lightning in the clouds going every 2 seconds literally. it was lighting up the entire sky. it was about 9 at night. then wind started blowing like crazy and the rain came soon after. it all came very fast and it was insane. but the best part was that we had to go pick up elder brown from the train station at 9:30. so we were pretty excited cause it was going to be pretty wet outside. ive been stuck in some pretty crazy storms before, but never as bad as this one. i have never seen this much rain or wind in all of my life. let me tell you that right now. so we get in regular p-day clothes cause its not too likely that we're going to stop people on the street and talk to them. and i get my camera so i can get some of the action on film. the sad thing is that i watched the films that i took and they are nothing compared to what it was actually like. they are weak sause (thats what we say here). so we're about a 8 to 10 minutes walk from the train station. not too bad. so me and elder anderson just start running! we ran so stinking fast. we were running full speed all the way to the train station and it took us like 2 or 3 minutes at most. we only stopped once. that was under a little tent thing at a cafe and all the people were inside the tent thing just drinking their little drinks and just laughed and said we were crazy. we just waved and started running again. so we got to the train station and water was just pouring everywhere. we were soaked. literally. everything on my body was wet. my shoes through and through and my garments were soaked in every place. so we waited for him for a while and finally say him getting off the trian> we ran out to grab his stuff for him and he was wearing his entire suit, so he was getting wet. and there was no way to save him from getting wet. at the beginning elder brown was running around to try and avoid getting wet and after about 1 minutes, he was already completely soaked so he just started walking. we had his rolly luggage thing and my package which was crazy heavy too. so we just walked home and got in and we all had to just strip down in the bathroom and throw our clothes in the shower cuase they were so stinking wet. the paper on the package was all wet too but goo thing everything was wrapped in bubble wrap cuase nothing got wet excpet a little bit on the ensigns. but thats okay. they dry. so yeah. it was an exciting night and we all have pictures and films and such so you will all see very soon. ill try to attach some today so you can see how wet we really were.

anyway. i gotta go now. if i think of anything else, ill email again later today. i love you guys and ill email you again more. dont worry.

love

elder jacobsen

The Mission in August, Osijek, Croatia

Mac and Cheese!! Courtesy of Elder Anderson's mom.

It was raining..... a little

After our adventure of picking up Elder Brown

Elder Brown after our 8 or so minute walk.