Birthday Party!

Today's post has a few pictures some of you may find a little redundant. However, some of the missionaries said they wanted to share today's blog with their families and most missionary moms are hungry for pictures of their sons, so please bear with it.

Elder Liljenquist (one of our elders) had a birthday yesterday. We decided to celebrate and throw a surprise party for him on P-day, the Wednesday before his birthday since that gave us time to play, rather than try to figure out how to do a quick cake and ice cream moment on Saturday. All of the elders except Elder Liljenquist were in on the surprise, and Tuesday night at English Club two women, Lena and Lillya, found out about it and wanted to come, so we had a nice group--as many as we could semi-comfortably fit around the kitchen table. Unfortunately Elder Hansen was in Novosibirsk for Zone Leader Conference so he missed the fun and games and food.

When Elder Liljenquist arrived at our apartment we told him there was something we wanted to show him in the other room. He walked in and saw this:

Roughly translated that says "Happy birthday Elder Liljenquist"

Liliya had made him a birthday poster. He was a little confused. We all shouted "surprise!" and he was even more confused. It's one thing to have a surprise party ON your birthday, but we were 3 days early, so it took him a moment to figure out what was happening. From there on out it was all fun.

Lena, Elder Liljenquist & Liliya

We fixed what we'd been told were some of his favorite foods. We started with hamburgers. Since the "buns" they have here are more like small dry rolls, Dave has been experimenting for a few weeks with different recipes to come up with a nice, soft hamburger bun. He succeeded and they were great! The burgers were cooked on the stove since we don't have a BBQ grill. We were very happy to find sliced bacon--until last week we'd only seen slabs of bacon in the meat case that we'd have to slice ourselves. We weren't able to have lettuce or pickles, but had the other traditional burger toppings, including mustard (from Helsinki--mustard isn't available here). Dave also found a recipe for baked beans and a yellow cake, and cut up a watermelon and a torpedo melon (kind of a little bit similar to sort of like a type of a white cantaloupe). We also had grapes, lots of chips and, as always for the missionaries, сок, some of the great Russian fruit juice. They all seemed to enjoy the food. It was the first time Liliya had ever eaten a hamburger.

After we stuffed ourselves we had a paper airplane contest.

L-R: Elder Bowler, Elder Peterson, Elder Liljenquist, Elder Fitzgerld, Liliya, Lena, Elder Ortner

L-R: Elder Bowler, Elder Peterson, the guest of honor, Elder Fitzgerld, Liliya, Lena, Elder Ortner

Elder Bowler was the winner with Elder Fitzgerald coming in a close second. You can see the winning design, surrounded by the also-rans.

We broke out a new set of Uno cards and Elder Fitzgerald taught us how to play spoons.

Clockwise from the top: Elder Liljenquist, Elder Bowler, Liliya, Elder Ortner, Lena, Elder Fitzgerald, Sister Holbrook

Clockwise: Elder Fitzgerald, Sister Holbrook, Elder Liljenquist, Elder Bowler, Liliya, Elder Ortner, Lena.

By then the food had settled and we had room for cake and ice cream and Lena's cookies.

Elder Liljenquist is now 21.

L-R Elder Fitzgerald, Elder Ortner, the back of Elder Peterson's head, Lena, Liliya, the (almost) birthday boy

By the way, ice cream comes in a plastic sleeve here. They usually serve slices of ice cream--the picture on the package is of slices, not scoops.
Then it was back to the living room for more games. They had fun playing a Pictionary card game until it was time for them to leave for their appointments. During the approximately 5 hours they were here they also each got in their hour on the computer for checking emails, and writing home and to the mission president. That's why the elders aren't all in every picture.

Elder Liljenquist thought he was going to go bowling on his P-day. He didn't seem too disappointed that we changed his plans.

It was a lot of fun. It's the first birthday we've had to celebrate since we got here and probably the only time we'll be able to pull off a surprise party. We'll celebrate others as they come along, but we won't have the element of surprise again.

FYI: We were told last week that our P-day is changing to Mondays.

This week's Russianism:
Before we left on our mission, our son Brad set up two things for us that have been very helpful to us here--this blog site and something called TextFree on the iPad. We've been surprised how nice it's been to be able to send and receive texts in Russia. Here are a couple of examples of how it's been useful: When Brad and Heather left for the hospital to deliver Hadley, Brad texted us. That let us know to plug in Magic Jack and stay close to the phone. We were able to get his call minutes after she was born. Without the text, it is likely we would have been out running errands. Another time we wanted to transfer some money, but were asked for an access code. Dave typed the information into the computer in Siberia, and got a notice that the bank would call our home with code number. Dave quickly texted Jeff, who got the phone call from the bank in Salt Lake, texted back to Siberia where Dave typed the code in, and the money was sent to Albuquerque. All this had to be done within five minutes before the session expired and without tying up the phone. It wouldn't have worked without the texts.