best two years

You see that tall gangly looking guy in the middle there? Yeah, that guy left to serve a mission last night and I couldn’t be more proud of him. He’s my youngest brother-we’ve already lived through one brother going on a mission. So here I’ll wait, patiently for two years, for that happy moment in the airport where I’ll be holding my sign and anxiously looking to see if I can see him walking up the terminal.

Our family is pretty close knit. There are three kids, me, and my two brothers. We do pretty much everything together, and we really haven’t ever been apart for very long-one reason why I think we were blessed to get accepted to Midwestern. I wouldn’t change the tight-knitt-ed-ness for anything in the world. But it’s obvious that for moments such as these that we would have a hard time saying goodbye-see ya in two years. And it hurts like ton of bricks. But really saying goodbye is the hardest part, the points leading up to it were definitely difficult, but the goodbye.

Brand and I tried to spend as much time as we could with Ty{ler} before he left-which is why I haven’t been blogging lately. But that’s what we did, we spent lots of time with him, watching The Office, hanging out-sitting around talking, like it was going out of style. I loved it, and sometimes I want to rewind to those times. Brand and I took Ty to breakfast one time-family tradition, we went to our childhood favorite-Wildflower Bread Company, and got our childhood favorite-traditional pancakes (they melt in your mouth and it was just like I remember). We went to the mall and the boys goofed around, I thought about how quiet the house would be without my goofy-fun-loving brother there, so quite that house. I thought about all the good stories we would read from him, the experiences he would have. And holy cow he is going to grow up even more! It’s hard for me to believe that he’s old enough for all of this, that little baby T. -Boy am I getting touchy and nostalgic.

For his last meal we went to Grimaldi’s, his favorite restaurant. He loves pizza and-frankly-I’m pretty sure there isn’t going to be much pizza in Honduras.

The rest of the day we spent getting him ready. I went around the house finding random knick-knacs to put in his suit case-that’s what he did to Mike so I figured he’d appreciate the little things. We were just about to load up the suit cases with an hour to spare when my dad was taking them down the stairs and one of them breaks-good one Satan, or was is fate? Dad went to the store and bought another one with a more sturdy handle and we were able to make it out on time. We got to the airport and saw a few other missionaries-which made my sister heart happy that he would have other people looking out for him and I could rest easy. The airport was my least favorite part, goodbye’s are not my forte. But one of my most favorite pictures of Ty is when he’s standing facing back at us in the terminal waving goodbye with thee biggest smile I’ve ever seen. Okay, best two years.

We got home to find his shoes right under his seat where he always left them. I started to wonder if he did it on purpose or if it was just habit. Either way it got my water works going again. I cannot believe how fast the time has gone, he got his mission call and now he’s off to serve the Lord. Boy am I gonna miss that brother of mine and all his silly antics.

Look out Honduras, here he comes!