Poor Junior

What you get when you cross one Abs with a compliant little brother.

Video of Junior and Abs.

Ignore the mess, we were out and about all day and don't have time for stuff like that!  I did get laundry folded, but haven't hit all the socks.  Please tell me someone else out there has a sock bucket??????

VACATION!!

The kids are out of school.

Gunner is on leave.

We have plenty to do to keep us busy. I voted for the fiber optic tree, and Gunner wants the whole nine yards. Considering he missed last Christmas, I should be going all out this year. But now we have waited so long, the thought of packing it all up again in less than a week.....and we know who will get stuck packing it up! Maybe we can do the fiber optic tree next year when he is gone again.

Someone who stumbled on my blog saw the pictures of Gunner and thought he looked exactly like his buddy that he served in Desert Storm with way back when. He was talking about my BIL. Small world!

We have a few last minute gifts to get, and then we are done. I am all done buying for my niece and nephew whose names I drew this year. I keep adding to their piles. My brother mentioned that his son likes hand-me-downs (he's 1--my nephew, not my brother). I can help them out there, because Andrew is going to mysteriously outgrow all his noisy toys before we see them!

Our list of things to take on vacation is growing faster than I want it too.

Gunner got a flip phone for our anniversary. I'm such a good wife. :)

Abs got behind the chair where our wireless modem is and "might have accidentally pushed it out of the way, really carefully, with her big toe, which is always gentle." It's broken now.

Abs has tied up the fan in her room with yarn, and it stretches from her bed to the fan to the door. I don't even want to know what she was trying to create. The other day Sammy came out of her room with all her socks tucked into his collar so that he looked like a lion. She was shocked that I made her "un-decorate" him.

Em finally got her door back, and we haven't had any slamming yet. Let's hope it continues.

At school, Junior made a snowman out of a sock. It's really cute, but he wanted to put buttons on the back. I let him, and the teacher noticed and told him that he did a great job with the buttons on the back. He told her "My snowman has buttons on his back like I do after my accidents". They make him dress himself, and he always puts his clothes on backwards, so he thinks the buttons should go in the back.

Never a dull moment!

Happy Anniversary Gunner!

15 years of marriage
14 hundred pounds of TA50
13 pressed uniforms
12 years living stateside
11 years of actually being in the same country
10 pairs of boots
9 months since you got home
8 military houses
7 months till your Afghanistan deployment (sorry, it fit!)
6 cross country trips
5 P-C-S-es
4 year long deployments
3 cute kids
2 strange inlaws
and 1 puppy named Sammy.

Thanks for the first 15 years Gunner, here's to the next 15....

D-O-N-E!!!!

I *think* I have finished school for the semester.  I finished my gigantic project and submitted it.  Unless I find some glaring errors that I didn't catch the first 500 times I reviewed it, when I review it again tonight, I won't resubmit it.  Hopefully she won't send it back and ask for clarification on anything.  I don't want to see it again.

I did a quick paper for my other class to tie up the loose ends, and submitted that too.

I have such a weight off my shoulders.

Nine days till Christmas, and now I can get busy and get everything done that I need to! 

Is it bad that I want to buy a 3 foot fiber optic tree and call it good?  I was so wrapped up in school, I couldn't even think about the holidays.  Maybe my motivation will come out tomorrow morning when I wake up and don't have this black cloud of school doom hanging over my head. 

I'm too happy to even nap right now.  Wish I had had this energy when I was working on my stuff!

Wordless Wednesday

I was looking through old drafts on my blog, and I found this one that I was going to do for a wordless Wednesday over 2 1/2 years ago.  

Gunner in Iraq during 2nd tour.

500 pictures

What does Abs do at 3 am?  She takes pictures.  Hundreds of them.  No kidding.  Over 500 pictures of the lights. 

Then Junior was up, so he became her focus for a bit, and we have about 100 pictures.  Looks like she was trying every setting.

I kind of like this one.

I guess she won him over in the end, because he was participating a little bit more and we have about 50 of these, but only a handful where you can see Junior's face, usually it's just a mouth.

At least it looks like she got better in time.

North Pole--Home of Santa's Workshop

Since it was supposed to be a nice day, we decided to head to the North Pole Home of Santa's Workshop.  (They give a military discount, and you know how I like discounts!)  I went when I was 6, but all I remembered was a bumpy slide on a burlap bag.  On the bright side, I remembered that we went!

I wanted to get there early, but as usual, life gets in the way.  (We won't even get started on how my project that is due in a few days is in the way too, since I obviously through that to the side to venture out)  Anyway, the whole park is kind of old and cheesy, but the kids loved it.  Junior could go on every ride which was nice.  We could always tell when he was enjoying a ride as he yells out at the top of his lungs "WEEEEE-HAAAAWWWW". 

About 2 it started to snow, and it really came down for the rest of the time we were there.  The nice part was that most people left during the first few minutes of the snow, so we never had to wait, and could stay on the rides. 

Even Em and Abs got along well enough to ride on almost every ride together.















I took a ton of pictures, of course, and I think Gunner even took one of me once.  Junior was asleep before we pulled out of the parking lot and slept the whole way home.  A quick dinner, and we had all the kids in bed by 7:30.  Let's hope they sleep!