Churches

We're changing our phone number. We just set up our new phone account last week, and we're already ready to change our number. The first wrong call happened when we were out, so I came home to a message for Sister Jessica from a nice lady saying she decided that she would like to go to church that Sunday. I called her back to let her know she had called the wrong number so she didn't think that Sister Jessica ditched her, and if it hadn't been General Conference that weekend, I would have gone ahead and invited her to church with us.

The next calls came from a 1-800-number, which at first I ignored, because I figured it was telemarketers. They called a lot. The same number called us around four or five times a day, and I would just ignore it. Brian finally answered when he was home, and when he told the man he had reached the wrong number, the man said, in an angry voice, "Oh, I've got the right number," and hung up on him. Brian then looked up the number online and found that it was a creditor from Wells Fargo who had been trying to track some people down for a while. No wonder he called so often.

We've gotten a couple of calls to the parents of a girl who has skipped classes at Pasco High. It's just a recording, so I hope they're not getting in trouble for not getting the calls.

The majority of the calls, though, have come from people looking for Sister Jessica or Pastor James, and they all expect us to be a church, so they don't give me any preliminary background when they call, and it completely catches me off guard. Last week a man called and said he had come up to Washington from Sacramento for a job interview. Well, he didn't get the job, and now he needed money to purchase a plane ticket back to Sacramento to be with his wife and family. (I seriously didn't figure out that he was calling a church until this morning. I thought he was just dialing random numbers, hoping to get some money.)

Today, right when Alyssa and I were finishing up her Phoncis test, the phone rang, and I thought it might be Brian, so I said, "Good job, Alyssa! Five minute break!" and ran to our bedroom to answer the phone. It wasn't Brian.

"Yeah," the man said, "I'm wondering if anyone in your church does mechanical work?" I thought for a moment, and said the second thing that popped into my head. The first, which, of course, I didn't say, was: Why are these crazy people calling us? and the second, which I did, was: "You know, we just moved into this house a couple of weeks ago, and we haven't really gotten to know anyone at church that well. We really don't know anybody. I don't know any mechanics."

And then it hit me. DUH! He thinks we're a church. He must think I'm Sister Jessica. I hope he didn't think I was Pastor James. So then I had to explain that we were indeed not a church, and I think I confused him more than he confused me, because he kept saying "We're just looking for a mechanic...We're having problems..." while I apologized and said good-bye.

So we're changing our number.

And speaking of churches, we went to our new ward on Sunday. You would think that having church at 12:30 would make us be on time, but I happened to shut the car door on Marcus' fingers as we were getting ready to leave, and then we had to put ice on it, but he didn't like the ice pack, so Brian pulled a water bottle out of the fridge and had him hold it on the way to church. He drank some of the water, too.

While we were driving to church, I told the kids how important it was to make a good first impression, and that they needed to be good for their teachers. "Alyssa," Brian said, when I was finished, "she's talking to you." (She's been talking back and being quite rude to me the past few weeks, but actually the last three days have been wonderful!) Then Brian started to lecture Alyssa on not talking back and respecting her teachers, and Ethan said, "Look, Alyssa!" as we were passing the soccer fields with fifty gazillion soccer games going on.

"Hold on, Ethan," Brian said, "Wait until I'm done talking to Alyssa. Now you got in trouble this morning for talking rude..." and three minutes later, as we were nearing church, Brian finally said to Ethan, "Now what did you have to say?"

Ethan hesitated for about two seconds, then said, with full enthusiasm, "Alyssa yook out yours window!" It's too bad the soccer fields were long gone by then. We did have a good talk about them, though.

Church was wonderful. Sister Hall (Emily's mom) is a nursery leader, and it would be hard to think of a better person to teach and love Marcus and all the other little kids in there. (There was a boy who fell asleep under the table during singing time, and one of the ladies told me that it was "his table" and he fell asleep there every week. No wonder - church is right during nap time!)

Sister Beck sat beside me in Relief Society, and she was my very first tent mom at Girls Camp. It was fun catching up with her.

As I was taking Alyssa to Primary, a little blonde girl whisked by, grabbing Alyssa on the way. I found out from her mom that Kinzie is the girl Alyssa has been playing with in a yard across the street, and we actually had her over to play today, and then we all walked to the park together. That was a lot of fun! Kinzie is Alyssa's age, and she has a brother a little older than Ethan, and another brother a little older than Marcus. It's perfect! And I really enjoyed visiting with their mom while the kids played.

On Monday a sister who lives in the cul-de-sac over stopped by and invited me to a girls-lunch-out on Tuesday, which was great, and I got to know a few of the sisters in the ward, including the Bishop's wife. She gave us permission to not answer his calls, so I guess we won't have to worry about getting callings for a while. We'll just tell him we thought his number was a creditor from Wells Fargo.