Marie's Baaaaaaaacckk!

Thursday, October 6th was highly anticipated by all of us! We were so excited to see Sister Bates and welcome her home! Jeff and I flew into Seattle that morning. Here we are at the airport with the traditional "welcome home!" sign, handmade by her siblings. :) At the airport to greet her were: Dad, Mom, Laura, Jeff T., Jeff B., Michael & Claire.

We were there early and just so excited! Dad, Jeff & Mike were on escalator duty to give us warning when they saw her and which direction she would be coming from. She came up right as a large group came...we almost missed her for all the people! But not for long....she was quickly being hugged by all of us. :)

Our first glimpse of her!

I'm not sure if I was the first one Marie hugged...but I'd like to think I was. Sisters reunited!

Hugging brother Jeff. My other Jeff is in the background filming our hug-fest. :)

Michael thought it would be funny to wear a wig when she first saw him...it seems that is a tradition in our family to freak out the returning missionary... :) You can see by Marie's face, she isn't impressed.

After taking off the wig, she's shocked to see that Michael has facial hair:

After getting her luggage, we took a quick pic. Smiles all around!

We went out to lunch at Spaghetti Factory - yum! and then headed home when Marie got released by the Stake President. We were all pooped and piled on mom & dad's bed just like we always did growing up on Saturday mornings. Too bad we're all too big now to really fit. :)


Marie then sat down and showed us what she brought home her mission and taught us a discussion with her object lesson:

Friday and Saturday we spent a lot of time talking and catching up, acquainting Marie with Facebook again, and buying her new clothes. :)

We also enjoyed getting Mike ready for his homecoming dance! Here he is...in a tux. Ow ow!

He asked Jeff if he would drive him to pick up his date. (Mike can drive, but can't drive anyone other than family for a while - Washington law) Jeff was happy to drive the mini cooper and escort the young love birds. :) I thought it was cute he asked Jeff to drive him...I guess he knew anyone else would embarrass him. Ha!
They met up with a group for pictures and went out to dinner before the dance. We pulled up just as the group was leaving in the limo....so we missed the pictures! Luckily Jeff took pictures and movies on his IPhone. The kids were like, "who is that dude taking pictures of us?" ha ha. Hilarious.
Doesn't this bring back high school memories? What fun.

Marie & I at the capital lake! I've never been there...beautiful place!
We got good laughs over the weekend with this dog named Lucky. She was reluctantly given to our family almost a year ago. My mother insists she doesn't like the dog, but still makes her look cute with bows. That dog won't leave my mom's side. It was hilarious how loyal she is to mom.
Saturday night we went to "Tugboat Annie's" for dinner. YUM! Wow, it was a treat eating on the dock.

Sunday morning at 7am we went and listened to Marie report her mission to the High Council. What a great experience that was! What an amazing missionary she was! We then went to church and listened to her great homecoming talk on Charity....she didn't even use notes! You could tell she was teaching every day...it was great!

After church we had a family dinner and enjoyed company. The whole family was together, and the Wismers joined us! How fun! Here we all are on the front porch... minus Dad who is taking the picture.

Here's Marie with cousin Sally & baby Claire. It was so fun to see our cousins...what a fun surprise!

Here's Claire x 2!

We sat around and looked at all of Marie's mission pictures and heard her stories. It was a joyful, heavenly weekend and we are so happy that we have a wonderful sister missionary that returned with honor back to her family.

The last day we went on a hike in the back yard with Dad and it was beautiful. My parents have quite the yard...we kept joking with my mom that she should put up signs and charge admission to her "botanical garden." Ha! She has gorgeous flowers and plants blooming all over the place. I want to have my house look like that! Too bad the weather is too hot in texas for flowers to grow much. We had beautiful weather this weekend in WA, and we enjoyed the great outdoors.

What a fun weekend! We're so glad to have Marie back!!