This week has been amazing!!! We have been able to teach so much and I love our investigators! We were lucky enough to get our travel plans last Friday and we will be leaving on October 3rd (this Monday) at 12:30 in the afternoon. We will get in to Melbourne at 11:05 am (their time) on October 5th, and we are nowhere on October 4th-we lose a day. All the people going to Melbourne will fly together to LA and all the Perth people will fly together to LA but we are not taking the same flights to LA, however we are on the same flight to Sydney! I love my district and I am really going to miss them when we all have to leave each other. The other district in our zone just left this morning really, really early, and my companion is the coordinating sister so we checked them out at 4:45 this morning-I’m tired! They are going to Columbus Ohio!!, and we are going to miss them so much. Sister Weedon who left, is from Sydney so she is really excited that we are going to Australia!!! We miss them but we are getting to know our new district better. We also got a new district today, we won't really see them until later because it is p-day, but we are excited, and they have 4 sisters!! We really like having districts with sisters :)

Everyone keeps telling me about the General Relief Society broadcast but believe it or not, we haven't seen it yet :) We get to watch it Saturday or Sunday while the Elders watch Priesthood.

I only have 2 min left so I will make this quick! I get to call home!!! Yay!!! Before I leave the States!! I will call my mom and dad from LA at 7pm, so it will be 8pm my mom's time and 9pm my dad's time!! I'm really happy they let us do that and if you want you can put me on speaker!!! I can't wait, and remember that if I get snail mail from you I will write back-so write me!!!!!

-Sister Edmunds

Hello Family!

I only have 26 min to write to you guys, so I will have to make this quick! we can use email, but only on p-days, and Wednesday is my p-day. i will actually only have one more p-day in the MTC before I leave for Australia!!! After that I will have a little more time to email-they limit us here so that everyone can write home.

The week has gone by really really fast even though days can seem really long. We are already teaching 4 different people, some in the TRC and 2 of them are our teachers pretending to be investigators. Even though most of the people we are teaching are just pretending you can still feel the Spirit really strong. We don't know enough yet to be great teachers but our lessons go so much better when we have the Spirit :)

So a little about our district: we have 12 missionaries, 4 sisters and 8 elders. All of us are going to either Melbourne Australia, Perth Australia or Aukland New Zealand. No, I have not seen Elder Donnovan-he's probably in a different district. Me and my companion Sister Tovar are both going to Melbourne along with 2 Elders: Elder Mcniel and Elder Bellon. Our estimated departure date is set for October 3-which feels really, really, really close-I hope we are ready! In our zone we actually have a sister (Sister Weedon) from Sydney Australia, so she is super excited about where we are all going :) Her and her companions even left us Tim Tams which is a really yummy Australian biscuit (cookie). Their district is going to Columbus Ohio :) We are also super excited to be getting new missionaries in today (new missionaries on Wednesday!!) There aren't any sisters and I think they are going somewhere in California?? We're not sure yet, but we will get to welcome them today!!

We work really hard, litteraly from 6:30am to 9:30 at night, with almost no breaks. The first day I wasn't sure what to study and felt like I had too much time to study. I definitely do NOT feel like that now! 3 weeks doesn't seem like nearly enough time to learn everything I need to!!

On another cool note, Elder Russel m. Nelson came to speak at our devotional last night (devotionals on Sunday and Tuesdays). It was a pretty wonderful lesson on the Book of Mormom-which has been pretty much our main focus :) Me and my companion and the other sisters in out district (Sister Myers and Sister Haney) along with 2 of our elders (Elder Lee and Elder NcNiel) sang in the devotional choir-"Consider the Lillies" and what do you know, my BYU Stake President (Pres. Brenchley) was our conductor :) I almost said 'hi' but we have like 20 min to grab dinner and run back to our seats so, I will have to do that if I see him again.

I always have songs stuck in my head now-I actually woke up the other day, before the alarm (i think) and was singing a hymn subconciously in my head, and as soon as I was done the alarm went off. Kind of a nice way to wake up :)

I'm sure there's more I want to say but I don't have much time. Don't worry, I'm writting letters later today so I'm sure I will think of more to say :)

Also, tell the boys that I'm only going to be snail mailing those who write me by mail or Dear Elder, so if they want a letter they better write (otherwise they will get mass emails until I get to Australia-and maybe beyond :)

Tell everyone I love them and say hi to Rachael for me!!!

-Christine

So this is my first blog for my mission blog. I am hoping to update this every 2 weeks or so but for now I will just give some basic information about my mission so far.

I received my mission call at the end of April, the 2oth I think (for those of you who know me well, the fact that I cannot remember the exact day is not surprising), and was called to report to the MTC on September 14th, 2011. I will be serving in the Melbourne, Australia Mission for the next year and a half and, if all goes well, will be in the MTC for approximately 3 weeks as I am English speaking.

It's been a long and crazy summer and I am excited to be leaving in exactly 1 week :) I only have a few more small things left to do, but I cannot believe how fast the time has gone.

On another note, I am excited to see many of my friends who are currently in the MTC, including my former roommate DaNae, who apparently may be one of my hosts when I enter, which would be super cool :)

Goodbye to all for now, I will write on this blog as often as I can and will try to put pictures on here once in a while. I am told Melbourne is very pretty :)