Regan is officially in Italy!

Regan with the Italy Rome Mission President and his wife

The group of new missionaries that arrived in Italy with Regan

Regan officially arrived to Italy last Wednesday! I meant to post this last week, but I was out of town and am just getting back home. We are so happy he made it there safe and sound, along with the rest of the missionaries. We received the long awaited phone call from Regan when he was at the airport before his flight (the ONE phone call missionaries are allowed to make home, besides on Christmas Day and Mothers Day!) We sent him various calling cards and tons of quarters just to make sure he had everything he needed to use the payphone at the airport! We were overboard excited about this call :) When we saw an unknown number come up on my mom's phone, we knew it was Regan. When we answered, we put him on speaker phone and connected Allie in. We all spoke to him for about 25-30 minutes. We were so grateful for that amount of time because we thought he would only have around 5 minutes.

It was so good to hear his voice, and get a majorly condensed version of his MTC experience. He sounded so happy, and even more excited to finally go to Italy. He gave us advice about things we could do to further strengthen our personal testimonies, based on various lessons he learned during his time at the MTC. He closed the phone call by sharing his testimony with us. It was extremely powerful and left us all in tears. We are so proud of Regan and could not possibly miss him any more than we do already! 

A day later we received an email from the mission president's wife, attached with the 2 pictures above. They took pictures with all the missionaries and let them email home saying that they arrived safe and sound. Words can't describe how grateful we were that the mission president and his wife did this for all the missionaries and their families! They seem like extremely nice people :) After arriving at the mission home in Rome, all the missionaries received letters telling them where in Italy their first assignments were (I only know this from reading the blog of the mission presidents wife!). We are anxiously awaiting his Pday email this Wednesday letting us know where he was assigned to go!