Surprise e-mail

Feb 1,2014
Marshall and I decided that it was time for us to serve the mission that we have been planning on for our entire marriage. We submitted our paper work Oct 10,2013. We stated that we would be available Dec 1. It took a whole month for us to receive our call. We had not stipulated the type of mission or where we would like to go. We decided that we would serve wherever and whatever we were called to do.  The month was a very long wait. I had anxiety just not knowing what was coming. I just wanted to know so I could quit worrying about where and what we would be doing. Even tho we did not request a place I was hoping that we would be able to go to Scotland, where Marshall had served as a young man, because I knew that he would love to to back and I would enjoy seeing some the places that he wrote to me about all those many years ago.  On Nov 10 we returned home from Mesa and our call was in our mail box. FINALLY, WE WOULD KNOW.   You can imagine our excitement when we read that we were called to serve in the Scotland Ireland mission. We were, or should i say, Marshall was yelling (well maybe not yelling,but very loudly) saying,  YEAH, THIS IS GREAT!!!  Then we read on and saw that we were not to enter the MTC till April 14,2014.  FIVE months away. Are you kidding? Five months more to wait.  Talk about being disappointed.  When we sent back our acceptance letter, Marshall suggested that we were prepared to go earlier if it was possible. We received an email in reply that we were not needed till the stated date of April 14.  Our only option was to go back to normal living.
THEN:
Marshall checked his email on myldsmail on tuesday of this week on a fluke. We have been receiving all of our information from our Mission office in Scotland via my personal email, so we have not been checking the myldsmail site.  To our surprise our Mission President  had sent us a email in the middle of January asking us if we would be willing to begin our mission much sooner than our April 14th date. The couple we were replacing was going home on March 3 and he needed us then. He stated that he did not know why we were not coming sooner. We wrote back that we would be glad to begin our mission sooner. In just a couple hours we received a email from the Missionary committee advising us that our new date to report to the MTC would be Feb 17th.  Just two and a half weeks away.  Needless to say we have had to shift into high gear.  We are glad that we are getting to go sooner. The wait has been long enough. I am a very patient person but I have to admit that this waiting has seemed to go on forever.  The hardest part is leaving our Grandchildren.  We are very attached to them. Of course we have the greatest grand kids ever.  There will never be a good time to leave them so we decided that we just needed to go and serve while we had good health.
We have been called to work with the young single adults.  We will be in the MTC for one week then the following week we will be in CES training for three days before we board the plane to our mission.
 Stay tuned for the next 18 months and share in our journey.