Called to serve

Toddy, my cute little brother that isn't so little anymore, got called to serve in the Provo MTC Referral Center Mission (no, that is not a joke, and yes, they knew he was from Orem, UT) and he went into the MTC on July 8.
Since the whole swine flu bit was a problem at the MTC, they changed how you drop missionaries off. Now you can only take one car of folk with the missionary, and you drive in, unload the luggage, give a tearful 2 min goodbye, snap a pic, and off the missionary goes. No more going to that meeting thing and then having 5-10 mins to say goodbye.
So we took the biggest car in the fam :) which was my sister's 8 passenger van, and loaded up Mom, Dad, Toddy, and all the siblings that were in town and went to drop him off. And you can see by these pictures that it was kind of hard to say goodbye.


This picture pretty much breaks my heart. Both my parents had a rough time saying bye to their last child for 2 years.


My Dad refused to smile for any of the pictures. Later he said, "I didn't want to smile. I didn't have anything to be smiling about!"


I jokingly said to Toddy "It's not like you're dying or anything, so why are we crying?!" and that made us just cry and laugh even harder.


I LoVe this sweet pic of Toddy and Emmie! She's not even going to know who he is when he gets home.

Toddy has a heart condition and has had to overcome some health issues in order to be able to serve, and we are so proud of him for working through it and making sure that he could serve a mission. So far we've gotten one letter and one email from him and it sounds like he is doing awesome!