Open House Photos!

Photo by: Rebecca Jaggi

Hey Everyone, fill in blogger here! I'm Hermana Weller's awesome little sister Jessica, (hope she thinks I'm awesome) I'll be taking over her blog while she's in Ecuador. Here's my first attempt to cover for her while she's gone. I hope my posts are as spiritually filled as hers are.

For the last night with my sister I decided to take my little munchkins (age 5 and 1) to spend the night with their special aunt. As I was writing this yesterday around 1am, we were huddled up on a small couch (kids asleep) getting ready for the morning when we would be saying, "See you later" to our amazing missionary.

AnnaAlicia is such an inspiration to me, she's my best friend, my best older sister (jokes on her, she's the only one!), and my go to lady for everything in life. I will miss her tremendously, but I am so proud of her and am so excited to see her again in 18 short months.

The last few days with her have been amazing, crazy, and family filled. We celebrated Halloween early  for Anna of course (you can read a blog post on this Here on our other blog), celebrated an early birthday  for her with dinner and cupcakes and held an open house for her farewell! Here are a few photos from her farewell. Take a look!

Above is one of the last photos I took my lovely sister! For her farewell we made a very cute and simple Banner. The one directly above says Hasta La Vista and the one on the top right says See ya. 

Want to make your own Banner? 

Tools:

• Scissors
• Construction paper
• Ribbon
• Hole Punch
• Marker & pencil
• Ruler (optional)

Instructions:

1. Use the ruler and a pencil trace out whatever shape you'd like for your flags. I chose to do triangles. 
2. Cut the same number of shapes as the saying you'll be using OR you could cut more for some blank ones on the sides of the word and in between. For example, for See Ya, I cut out 5 triangles, but I could have used 8 or more with some blanks.
3. Make two hole punches at the base of the triangle shape
4. Write out your saying
5. String ribbon through the holes connecting all of the letters
6. To hang it I used two thumb tacks, but you could also use something nicer

The photo in the middle is a Personalized Called to Serve Missionary Map that AnnaAlicia ordered from a fellow Sister Missionary who sold these as a way to save money for her mission. You can order your own Here. Below is a larger view of the maps available. They are so adorable and very inexpensive.

AnnaAlicia's farewell was held at my house so we decorated my house with quite a few photos of her! She even let me keep the ones in the middle. Now I have my own custom called to serve map and her photo by it. I love having them in my entry way because each morning I get to show my little 5 yr old Luis where his aunty is. She's currently in Mexico City MTC so I get to show him where that is on the little map. 

My sister is such a wonderful party planner! She made her own cupcakes to bring to HER party and did a lot of prepping before the party. My sister-in-law brought the yummy cookies on the left. She made a ton! 

Below is all of the delicious food we had. AnnaAlicia had great ideas for food and we had so much left over. We had a Make Your Own Taco Station, Nacho Station, Desserts,  and my favorite the Ceviche in cups. Ceviche is a latino favorite! It's a salad that is filled with cucumber, tomato, imitation crab, shrimp and tons of freshly squeezed lemon juice. (I'll have the recipe up on our other blog soon, so look out for it Here.)