The moment we've been waiting for has arrived! It actually arrived on Thursday, October 28 at 10:30am when I was home by myself and had no one to tell! I was so excited to see the envelope from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that I took a picture of it so Devin could see how good it looked! (Really, it looks like it's time to repaint our mailbox!)
I was jumping around yelling, "It's here!" but the kids were at school, Del and Devin were in Island Park building a cabin, and Olive (dog) and Millie (cat) didn't care. I called Devin on the phone, but he and Del were up on the roof, so we couldn't talk much. When Emma came home from school I told her, and at first she was really excited. Then it hit her, and she said, "That means he'll be leaving soon. I'll really miss him, Mom." I thought it was sweet, especially considering that he's usually a total pest and loves to pick on her!
We waited until this morning to have him open it, so we could have grandparents and siblings there, too. We realized that he is the first of the Nielson great-grandchildren and Thompson great-grandchildren to serve a mission, which is very exciting! We have speculated about so many places that he could be called to, but none of us guessed it right (unless you count my Dad, who said he bet he was NOT going to Denmark, Korea, Iran or Afghanistan. Yep, Dad, you were right!).
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| You are hereby called to serve in the Mexico Tijuana Mission... |
When Devin read "Mexico Tijuana Mission" my first thought was, "They teach the gospel there? I thought they just partied in Tijuana," but then we remembered that President Monson just announced the Tijuana temple a couple of weeks ago in conference! It will be so exciting for him to serve where a temple is being built, since temples always offer a tremendous opportunity for missionary work. He's really excited and will have plenty of time to get ready. He'll report at the MTC on March 9th, so we'll probably have his farewell on March 6th. He'll keep working with Del until then to earn money for his mission.
