Somehow it never occurred to me that I might one day have TWO sisters serving church missions at once.

We dropped Eli off at the airport last week to head to the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah, where she’ll stay for a week and a half or so before she ships out to Guam. It boggles my mind to think about how different her experience will be from both mine and Lose’s. Though I will miss her terribly — I’ve LOVED having my fellow family extrovert around over the past few months — I felt nothing but excitement for her when we said goodbye at the airport, knowing how ready she was to go.

We got to talk to her after she arrived at the MTC, and she’s doing great so far! She (and I, and everyone else) think that the magnitude of this life change will really start to hit her once she’s on the plane or on the ground in Guam. If she’s anything like me (and she really, really is), she’ll start feeling a really wild sense of disorientation that can only come from being transplanted somewhere that is so far removed from your daily life right around day 2 or 3 – and I can’t wait to see what she does on day 4.

I know it doesn’t work this way, but seeing my siblings undertake huge responsibilities and life-changing experiences that I stumbled through once upon a time makes me wish that I could transplant all the lessons I learned to them, so they can achieve and be more than I ever could. Life works out the way it should, though. It’s made me so happy to watch Lose live her experience on her mission in her own way, totally breezing through and loving things that gave me such a tough time while learning lessons completely unique to her. And Eli will do the same. Cannot WAIT to meet the new version of herself that is born from this new chapter.

To Sister Maile 3.0 from Sister Maile 1.0 (aka Sœur Maile) — we love you, and good luck!