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Everett's Home!

On August 18th, our missionary son came home from his mission in Armenia.  He was originally supposed to come home on September 15 but the mission president recognized how hard it is to come home and not be able to start school for several months because you have just barely missed the beginning of the semester.  So he sent home about 7 missionaries a few weeks early so they could all start school.

Here they are at the airport in Armenia together:



Everett's travel day was unbelievably long.  Armenia is 10 hours ahead.  He got up at 7am on Friday, August 17th (9pm on Thursday for us).  Then he didn't sleep at all on Friday night because they had to go to the airport at 2am on Saturday morning and he was busy talking to all his missionary buddies.  They flew to Vienna at 4am, then had a long layover.  Their next flight was to Chicago arriving 1pm or so.  They had a long 6-hour layover there which became even longer when the flight was delayed by 90 minutes or so.  He called me in Chicago to tell me and I encouraged him to sleep on the airport floor if possible.

We all went to the airport and he arrived in the airport about 12:30am.  We got home about 2:30am--he went about 53 hours without lying in a bed, getting a little sleep along the way.  The next morning we had 9am church.  I think he was functioning on adrenaline at that point.  Regardless, we were super happy to see him!


With his good friend Gehrig who wrote him faithfully every week






The next day after church, he was interviewed by the stake president and officially released as a missionary.  We were able to spend a lot of time that day hearing about his mission.

Taking his name off the missionary board in the stake offices.
We were able to go to the temple a few days later with Lincoln and MiCayla
A week after he came home, we celebrated his July birthday with Too Much Chocolate Cake and hamburgers.  One great thing about Everett is how much he appreciates (most) of the food I cook.  His cousin and good friend Anna was there that weekend for his official homecoming talk at church and joined us for dinner.



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