Happy 3rd Birthday, Kenneth!!!

Our sweet lil guy turned 3!!! Kenneth was born in Landstuhl, Germany March 31, 2006 at 4:26 pm CET (Central European Time). He has brought so much fun and laughter into our lives, and has made our family complete.

His grandma and papa came over with pizza and presents. I made him a Thomas cake that was really yummy. We hung out and played with his new stuff and had a blast!

He got an additional birthday present of an ear infection. He looked really glassy eyed before bed, took his temp and it was 103. He woke up screaming 20 minutes after I put him to bed and told me his ear was hurting. I sat with him in the recliner most of the night and he was able to sleep some.

I'm glad it held off long enough for him to enjoy his birthday, so I am grateful for that.

11 months!

We've come a LOOOOONG way in all this! 11 months ago I stood on my front porch at 5 am and watched him drive away from us. I distinctly remember coming back into my dark, quiet house, leaning up against my front door and thinking "Now what?" It really hit me at the point what was happening - and how long a year really was! I think I was in serious denial from the moment we found out about the deployment to the day that he left.

So what has it been like? Well...the only way I can explain how we have been getting through it is that life goes on no matter what - and we made a CHOICE everyday to be happy. Some days that decision was harder than others for sure, I'm not saying that it was all cupcakes and roses, no, it wasn't like that at all. There were definately some sad times, some scary times, some lonely times, some teary times. If you know us really well you know that there is a lot of fun and laughter in our lives, and that definately prevailed over those other times.

So, like Homer Simpsons declared, "What I'll mostly remember is the laughter."

Medial Gastrocnemius and Achilles Tendon Part Ways

So, it turns out, I have 20 year old instincts while playing volleyball, but a 36 year old worn out body. Back on 11 Mar, while playing volleyball and pushing off my left foot, I felt a snap when someone hit my calf with a tire iron, well at least that is what it felt like. I stumbled off the court, put some ice on it. I was still able to hobble around with pain, so I wasn't sure what happened. I subbed myself out, put some ice on it, and just coached the rest of the game instead of playing. After the game, stopped by the med clinic, got some pain killers and headed home. The next day, my calf had swollen up about twice normal size, but that was nothing compared to the bruising and bleeding that were about to appear a couple days later. At any rate, a week later I went back to the clinic and saw the orthopedic surgeon who confirmed it was a Medial Gastrocnemius Muscle Tear (it seperated from the Achilles Tendon). He said I wouldn't need surgery, but would need 3-6 months for it to recover. I've been doing physical therapy most every day, they have me do exercises, then do a soft tissue massage (this does not feel good at all, they basically stick their fingers in the torn area and move stuff around) and finish up with some Inter Ferential Current (this means they electrocute my leg for about 15 minutes).

A couple of days ago the therapist decided to tape up my ankle, and sort of make me a second achilles tendon using eleastic tape, and this relieves a lot of stress on helps me walk so much better, almost without a limp.

Despite the improvement in getting around, its still not strong enough to play volleyball, which means I missed the final two games of the intramural season and will miss the play-offs something I've been looking forward to for 4 months now. I've played the previous two seasons, when we have come in second place to the Services Squadron, but we finally had the team to beat them. BUT, our back-row specialist went TDY up-range, our best setter went on R&R, and I'm the other setter, so we are going to be hard pressed to beat them now.

Oh well.

Just 40 more days here, and I'm headed home, so I'll have to focus on that instead of volleyball.

To my sistas out there...(miss u guys!)

This is how my group of friends in Germany and I dealt with the stress of being Air Force Wives! We would hang out and act CRAZY!

Oh, I am hugely pregnant with Kenneth in this photo, so I pretty much look like a marshmallow, but whatever...

This was at Ramstein AB, Germany in early 2006. Lisa, Brandi, and I were pretty much the Three Amigos. Lisa and I were neighbors, (she lived upstairs from me) and Brandi lived in town. All of our kids were buddies too and attended the same Montessori preschool.

Good times! Love you guys! Hey Lisa, want to come to Cali and play BUNKO?

Air Force Wife's Prayer
(Alexandra Benakis)

An Air Force wife has so much to bear,
She's everything at once, no one could compare,
When God made her, he had perfection in mind,
For nowhere on Earth is another of her kind,
She leads a life not many would choose,
For her job is the hardest in the military to do,
She is courageous and strong, one would say made of steel,
But way deep down is a heart that can feel,

She stands by her husband, so proud and so tall,
And waits many nights by the phone for a call,
She's Mommy and Daddy all rolled into one,
She'll never rest easy until her job's done,
She sits all alone and in silence she cries,
Did I do a good job, is my family all right?
But deep in her heart she knows that it's true,
God is right beside her helping her through.

In about 6 weeks...

Kelly will be on his way home. Amazing to me that he has been in the Sandbox 10.5 months now.

Very much looking forward to his homecoming, and spending many, many more happy years together.

This year will be our 17th year together, it all began for us in August 1992. We actually met for the 1st time December 1991 (my friend Kathy drug him to one of my band concerts, I think he was kind of "meh" about going but didn't have any other plans so he went along with it) but I didn't see him again until I started college the next year.

What is really interesting is that our paths had crossed many years before we met. We discoved a few years back that we both had group pictures from the Clovis Band Festival from 1987. I was a 7th grader at Computech and he was an 8th grader at Kastner. It's so weird to think that my future husband and father of my kids was present that day and I had no idea.

My best friend from high school/college, Kathy, (the same one who introduced us at the band concert in 1991) discovered that she and Kelly used to be neighbors and they played together when they were 3 yrs old.

My other BFF from high school, Brooke, was dating my good friend Andy who went to Clovis West with Kelly and knew him. Kelly recalls that he saw Andy and Brooke at a movie theater one night, I'm pretty sure another friend of mine and I were supposed to be going as well but we didn't for some reason. So I probably would have met Kelly at that point if I would have gone!

It was meant to be, what can I say?

Happy 6th Birthday Julia!

Our sweet, brilliant, beautiful, and amazing girl was born March 2, 2003 at 4:48 am in Las Vegas. We are so blessed to have her as our daughter. Words can't even begin to describe how much we love her and the pure joy she has brought into our lives.

10 months of deployment behind us - just come home already!

Well 10 months later here we are. Every one is alive and well. Ready for Kelly's extended vacation to the desert to be over, over, over.

We are actually starting to make travel arrangements for our trip out to TX, bought a plane ticket for him to outprocess Tyndall AFB, planning on taking the kids to the Grand Canyon and Sea World San Antonio en route to San Angelo. So it is really cool to be able to start making plans again, ya know, together and stuff.

It's weird, this end stretch of all this is harder emotionally than it was in the beginning for me. I am getting anxious and antsy about his homecoming. I just want him to be a part of our daily lives again so much. I have been passing the time by watching lots of Reno 911 after the kids are in bed and partaking in my current addiction, McDonald's Sugar Free Vanilla Iced Coffee. Well, it beats eating bags of cookies and fast food, which is the way I used to deal with this stuff.

Also, seriously the kids are totally keeping me going here. Military wives without kids will often comment that they don't know how they would handle a deployment with kids. I say I don't know how wives would handle one WITHOUT kids. Kelly deployed to Italy for 3.5 months before we had kids, I was working full time and working on my Master's in the evening and weekends, and when I came home I was so miserable. I would just go sit by our pool when I got home and cry. I don't know what I would do if I didn't have these 2 amazing kids in my life. I don't know how Kelly manages over there by himself. Oh geez here comes the tears, so I'm gonna wrap this up.