The Best way to spread Christmas Cheer is singing loud for all to hear!

We had a wonderful Christmas being able to SKYPE on Christmas morning with Sister Leavitt, in Russia.  She looks great and still has her same crazy sense of humor.  She leaves Tuesday on her last VISA trip, so she will be home in less than 90-days.  Wow, time is flying by!

Here is Sister Leavitt with her companion having their candlelight Christmas Eve dinner.

С РОЖДЕСТВОМ!!!!!!!  MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!  I hope that you all had a very merry Chirstmas. I know that we did here. This week was a little crazy because Sister LeBaron had her visa trip and that just meant that I had to stay in center with the senior couple for two days, and it also meant that we had to pack all of our meetings into the first two days of our week.... So that's how Tuesday went. Just crazy and busy and wonderful. Also on Wednesday we helped one of our members wallpaper from 11 in the morning until 8 at night with only a half hour for lunch. It was a long day, but it was worth all of the hard work because he was so happy. I forgot to take a before and after picture to show you all, but it turned out so good! So Then the rest of the week nothing that exciting happend. On Friday I went with the Neilsons to try and find a Christmas ham... that was an interesting adventure, but good news is that we found one and it was so delicious! On Saturday we had a missionary Christmas party and we ate ham and potatoes and chips and salsa and cake ( the coolest christmas cake I have ever seen that a member made for us!). We did a christmas program and read the Christmas Story together, then each companionship shared a talent or a game. For our talent I told a tongue twister.. the only one I know "A tooter that tooted the flute tried to tutor two tutors to tute. Said the two to the tutor is it harder to tute or to tutor to tuters to tute?" Then Sister LeBaron touched her nose with her tongue. It was a complete success. Also one of the Ukraniane elders sang a traditional Ukraniane song and then threw rice all over the floor... it was a complete shock and we were all laughing so hard that some of the elders were even crying. Then on Sunday we just went to church and that was fun. Then Sister LeBaron and I had a candle lit dinner. It was so fun. We made BBQ chicken and garlic potatoes and homemade rolls and broccoli. Then after dinner we got to watch ELF and then we got to call home, which was the best Christmas present of my entire life! It was so much fun to see my family and talk to them and it made me so HAPPY!!! 

Anyways, that's the news I have to share about this week. I hope that you all had a great week!

Love,

Sister Leavitt

Teacher say's every time a bell rings another angel gets it's wings!

Merry Christmas in deed.  And might I add that we are also "pretty darn tootin" excited to SKYPE with her on Christmas.  This is the picture she sent this week of the tree she made with lights for their apartment.  Isn't it beautiful? Enjoy her email and have a great week.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!I love Christmas! It is my favorite time of the whole year... A little different in Russia though because they don't celebrate Christmas when we do in America. They Celebrate Christmas on the 7th of January. And they don't even give each other that many presents for Christmas. Instead they give each other presents for New Years... So it's all sorts of confusing, but it means that we get to celebrate even more because we will celebrate American Christmas on Sunday and CALL HOME! and open our Chirstmas presents and stuff, then the next Sunday we will celebrate New Years, and then the next Saturday we get to celebrate Christmas again. I think this is what you would call a win win win situation. Because then I just get to have 2 Christmases and I love that day! So I'm really excited. It's also fun because we have been doing a few Christmas lessons with people and it's just so much fun to talk about Christ, because really without him, we wouldn't even have anything to be joyful about. So... JOY TO THE WORLD THE LORD HAS COME!!!!

So, this week was so much fun and it went by so fast! I want to tell you about a cool thing that happened. So once a week we have district meeting, and it takes us about an hour and a half to get to our meeting and then two hours to have our meeting, so it really cuts down on the amount of time that we have to work on those days, so in the morning I prayed that we would have the opprotunity to teach some one while we were traveling to our meeting, and we did! Sister LeBaron sometimes gets car sick when we ride for so long on those bumpy marshrutkas, so we sat in the very front and as we were going this man that was standing next to us started talking to us and we ended up talking to him about alot of things. He was kind of strange and a little rude and maybe just wanted to pick on us in the beginning, but it ended nicely and he even invited us to come to this meeting with him for this company he just started working for.. probably some king of pyramid thing, but still... it was nice of him. Also that company is called like sunshine products and it is based in provo utah and it was started by mormons and when he found out that that's what religion we are he got even more interested. So we'll see if that goes anywhere.

We put up a Christmas tree this week! We just taped it onto our wall. It's just made out of Christmas lights, but it makes it feel like Christmas time. We also decorated our living room with paper snowflakes and we cut out a nativity scene from an ensign to hang up. So we're ready. This week Sister LeBaron has to get a new visa, so we are just working Tuesday and Wednesday and then leaving on Thursday. And then when she gets back on Saturday we have a Christmas eve party with all the missionaries, and then on Christmas day we will have church, just like normal since it's not even a holliday here, and then at night we will get to call home, so those are our plans. I'm pretty darn tootin' excited if I do say so myself. So that's all. I hope that you all have a very merry Christmas time.

Love,

Sister Leavitt

Is that you Santa Claus?

We are always glad to hear when she is feeling better, she really hates to be sick and stuck at home.

Well Hello! It was sunny today in Volgograd Russia! And it made me so happy becaue it hasn't been sunny here in more than a week, and sometimes I just really miss the sun in the winter. So now that that's been said, let me tell you about my week. It was pretty boring, but a few really exciting things happened. Like, on Tuesday we had a meeting with one of our members and he has two birds and he just bought one of them and hadn't named her yet and so he decided to name her after me, so now her official name is Leavitt. :) Also we got to see Katya and Alexander this weeek and we sang Christmas songs with them and took some pictures and taught them a lesson and it was just fun and so that was also good. The rest of the week however was just kind of boring. Sister LeBaron and I both got some kind of stomach sickness and we were home Wednesday, Thrusday and Friday. I was so bored out of my mind that I took to deep cleaning our kitchen and living room. So our apartment is really clean now, and that's good. Friday we got transfer calls, we found out that we are both staying here in Volgograd, so that will be fun. I was actually really really really really really really disappointed when we first found out and I cried a little bit, because I just have been feeling a little trapped here in this small city so far away from everyone, but then we went to chruch on Sunday, and I felt the love and the spirit there and now I am actually really excited to be staying here and serving here for another 6 weeks over the hollidays. I feel so blessed all of the time and I just can't believe how blessed I am to be serving the members in this branch. They make my heart leap for joy everytime I see them. I wish we had chruch everyday so that i could see them all more often! Anyways, that's what happened this week. Sorry so short, but nothing really cool happens when we have to stay at home. I hope you all have a wonderful week and invite the spirit of Christ into your homes at this christmas time. Remember that He really is the reason for this wonderful season.

Love,

Sister Leavitt

So this is Christmas, And what have you done, Another Year over, a new one just began!

Sister Leavit has a way of making the best of my week.  She will bring a smile without fail every Monday.  Love you Courtney!

I don't even know what to say about this week. There are a few major events that I suppose I should mention. Like the fact that last tuesday we went and visited this member of ours who I love visiting because she always makes us the best food when we go over. So we taught her a lesson about Thanksgiving and gave her the turkey of thanks that we had made for her. Then there was a surpirse because she started telling us about how our branch is moving buildings at the beginning of March and how they are supposed to move into a building that has a night club and strip dancing... She just kept going on and on about how no one would come to church and about how all you would ever hear is "BOOM BOOM" coming from the club. So then the next day we went and visited one of our other members and she also mentioned how the chruch is supposed to be moving, but she was really excited about it because where we will be moving to is a nicer building and visible to more people and she thinks that moving there will allow people to notice our church more and just stop in to see what we're all about. Anyways, so after that Sister LeBaron and I decided we had better go and check out this new building, so we did and we dicided that we are for moving... But we'll see what happens.

Also, an interesting thing happened on Thursday night. So we have been meeting with one of our inactives Ludmila, for a while and reading the book of mormon with her because she wants to try and finish it by the end of the year, but she has a lot of questions. So we met with her at the chruch and the meeting went really good. Then when it was over we were walking out, and we have to go out the back way during the week, and there are these tile steps that we have to go down and there isn't good lighting... and she fell down the steps and landed right on her head. It was horrible. Immediately she had a giant goose egg. When I felt it, it was so big that it filled the whole palm of my hand... So we got her up and walked her to the hospital that is just across the street from our church. They got mad at her for just walking in... They told her she should have called an ambulance, but she said that was a silly idea, since we were just across the street. Anyways, she told us to leave after that because she just had to wait for a long time to be looked at. I don't know if she's mad at us or what, but when I called her later that night she just said, "everything is okay", like 5 times and then hung up... We'll see. 

Everything else was just pretty mellow this week. Alexander is doing well! Katya is the same, she just has so many questions all of the time! They are still the best though. We watched the “Testiments” this week with them and Dasha, their 3 year old, even watched the end with us and when Christ appeared to the Nephites at the end she let out a gasp. It was really cute. 

Life is just pretty good. I love serving a mission and sharing my testimony with others. We are trying so hard to find new investigators and spead the good news! Maybe since it's getting to be the holliday season people will want to hear more about Christ! That is my hope. I also think we will try caroling... because I love singing. Well, that's all. I wish you a very happy Holliday season!

Love,

Sister Leavitt                  pictured with my companion Sister LeBaron

Thanksgiving+Baptism+Zone Conference= BEST Week Ever!

Thankful that she had the BEST week ever!  Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving too. Enjoy the pictures that Sister LeBaron sent. Till next week.

 The Elders catching the Mission President

Alexanders Baptism

Hello! My name is Sister Courtney Catherine Leavitt, and boy do I have a story for you. It all started with last Monday it was a p-day so that was nice, then in the evening we did what you do on Monday nights, Family Night! For family night we did a Thanksgiving lesson. We talked about grattitude and how we should express our grattitude to those around us. We made everyone turkey cards and on the back we wrote all the reasons we are grateful for them. We also talked about Christ and how we should always be grateful for him and his atoning sacrafice. We made rolls and a peach pie for everyone to try. Everyone just about died when they tasted the rolls. Seriously, they went crazy for them. I never even knew that a roll was anything that special, but aparently it is to someone who has never tasted one before. 

Tuesday was a pretty normal day. One of our members came over to our apartment and fixed our bathroom lights because one of them got broken and then I tried to fix it and actually made it all worse. So our Brother Kamo came and made everything all better and now we don't have to shower using a flashlight for our light. 

Wednesday was so GOOD!! We just had meetings all day, we had one with one of our less actives that we have been working with. She is so cool. She has a goal to read the whole book of mormon by the end of the year and so we have been helping her do that. Also we had a meeting with Alexander and Katya on Wednesday night. They were busy the rest of the week, so this was kind of our last booster lesson before Alexanders baptism. We talked all about what would happen and what he needed to do. Also we just played with his kids for a minute. The discovered their new favorite game called sit on Sister LeBarons legs and then she moves them up and down and they just bounce all around. They love it so much! (Note: Sister LeBaron was only a little bit sore the next day.)

Thursday was THANKSGIVING!!!! We got to get together with all of the 10 missionaries in our zone and eat a delicious thanksgiving feast prepared for us by our senior couple missionaries. It was a blast, after we ate we just played uno and talked and sang some songs. Really, it was just like being at home with my family.... If I had 6 brothers... But it was so fun. I loved it. I love thanksgiving so much. All the Russians kept asking us what we even do for thanksgiving and we just told them we eat a lot. They thought that was funny. But it's true. That's what we do. And HOLY MOLY!!! Elders can sure eat a TON of food! 

Friday we had some last minute prep work to do for the baptism, like making programs and calling people and cleaning the font and making cookies and stuff like that. It took our whole day to get all of it done! But it was so worth all the hard work!!

Saturday was Zone conference. It was fun as usual. We got to build puzzles and... my favorite part was when the zone leaders talked about trust and they had our mission president fall straight back into the AP's arms.... I was so nervous that they wouldn't catch him and then we would have to find a new mission president, but luckily they caught him and so that was the best news. We also watched this really cool video clip about this runner in the 1992 olympics who tore a muscle when he was running in one of his races. He was favored to win even, and boom, just stopped because he was in so much pain. Just when the medical team came to help him off of the track he stood up and started walking to the finish line because he was deterimined to finish the race. His dad came running down from the stands and helped him the to the finish line... I was crying a little by the end. I can't remember the name of the runner, but I suggest you all get on youtube and try to find it, because it was so good! So yep, then Saturday night was Alexander's Baptism! He was so happy and smiled the whole time. I am so proud of him and all he has done to be able to get baptized! It was such a miraculous moment and I will never forget it. Katya came and her whole family came too. The spirit was so strong and I hope that everyone that was there could feel it. The water was dirty because that's just how Russian water comes out, the services started 20 minutes late because Katya was running home for something they forgot, but none of that even matters. I am so happy and I know that Alexander is happy too. On Sunday we were able to see him recieve the gift of the Holy Ghost too. AHHHH! How cool is it to be a missionary and see people have might changes of heart? So cool. I am telling you!!!!

Well, that's our week. It was busy and crazy and we are so tired... But it was worth it and we are just so happy. I love my life.

Love,

Sister Leavitt