The Countdown

This is for my dad... so he can CORRECTLY keep track of their time left in the mission. Starting after about Christmas, which was their six month mark, my dad was telling people back home, "Yeah, this whole mission thing isn't too bad...time is flying by...we've got the first year down...now just two more to go." We had to keep reminding him that seven or eight months does not equal a year and that he still had about two and a HALF years left. Well, I'm proud to say that just last month my parents actually passed their real one year mark. One-third of the way through. YAY! 398 days down and only 697 left to go (if my calculations are correct). So in honor of their year mark I went and bought two sister missionary countdown charts and taped them together. 1095 days. So, now we can visually see the time flying by. Before I know it I will no longer have to spend all of my savings every time I want to see my parents, won't have a pile of stuff in my room awaiting the next "shipment" to Brazil, and won't have to wonder where and with whom I'll spend my holidays. And my mom and I can go shopping...and not Brazilian style shopping (which is a topic for a whole other post) and my dad can build me a house so I won't be homeless anymore. It will be great. But for now we wait. And count. Hopefully I won't forget to fill in the chart though. My family isn't too good at keeping these missionary countdown charts. I'm always impressed when people actually do stay up to date on them, like my blog leech Maggie, who is faithfully counting down the days for her special someone to get home. When Russell went on his mission we bought one of the big poster sized charts and hung it up. The first few weeks or even months we (probably actually just me) faithfully added a sticker each day. Then we kind of forgot about it until the day Russell was coming home from his mission and in the rush of getting things at the house ready for his homecoming I remember my parents telling Lee and I to hurry and fill in all the spaces on the poster I guess so Russell wouldn't feel bad that we hadn't been counting down the every second to his return. Then I went on a mission and we again got a big countdown poster. I think I guilted my family into filling it in because I knew that they wouldn't without a little prodding. I remember on holidays when we'd talk saying to them "Are you guys filling in my countdown poster? I bet you're not. Have you guys even noticed that I'm gone? Does anyone even miss me?" blah, blah, blah. So, they filled it in to appease me. Then when Lee went we again bought the poster. This time we didn't even pretend that we had been counting down. Lee's poster just had a sticker on day one, and a sticker on day 730 with nothing in between filled in. When Tyler went we didn't even bother with the poster. Sorry Ty. We are such a loving family, aren't we?