Still alive, I am!

It has been quite a while since I wrote one of these things, but I assure you, I have not fallen off of the face of the Earth and I am still alive! You can call off the search posse now!

I am trying to figure out how the last 3 months have flown by so fast. At least on my end they have. I am sure that out there in “monotonous land” (aka the Arabian Sea), things are not flying by as fast for Mike.

Speaking of Mike . . . we have passed the halfway point of the deployment. Things are all downhill from this point. He knows this but yet insists on saying it uber sarcastically and being a general butt about it. This is mostly why I am fairly sure that the time is just not passing by very fast for him out there.

It is nice to know that there aren’t many days to go though . . . only a couple more days and we will be into double digits in the countdown! They continue to do a good job of . . . whatever it is they are doing . . . out there. They “continue to support Operation Enduring Freedom”, according to the CO. That’s the official story . . . and I’m sticking to it. haha

The squadron/ship created an Excel spreadsheet/workbook thingy and made it a deployment tracker with deployment days passed, percentage of the deployment completed and left to go . . . as well as months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds left in the deployment. I think it is pretty safe to say that we check it every day . . . even if we do have it memorized by now.

As far as we are concerned, here on the homefront, we’re hanging in there and counting down the days till daddy’s return home. Emilie tries to remember to take a look at the deployment tracker every day so that she can keep updated on how long we have to go . . . if she doesn’t remember to look at it, I remind her and open it up for her. Once we get home, we will probably make a paper chain as well . . . it should be interesting to see how the cats react to dangling paper in the house. They may be helpful in ripping off the links . . .

We have been in Oregon for 4 months now . . . and only have 3 ½ weeks left until we head back to Virginia. Before we came out, we shipped out 2 boxes filled with baby supplies and miscellaneous items we would need while we were here. To date, I have sent back 5 huge boxes of . . . stuff . . . and there are a few more waiting in the wings to be filled up. Once Terri is able to send my boxes souvenirs from Disney World and I consolidate them and distribute what needs distributing, I will have yet another box about ready to be sealed up and gone. It is truly amazing how much STUFF you accumulate in the course of such a short time, I tell you! In my defense, though . . . we HAVE gotten baby gifts as well as Christmas gifts . . . and I went to Disney World for a week and did my usual “too-much-stuff” buying. Anyone who knows me knows that it isn’t too hard a thing for me to do . . . and how could this Star Wars nerd pass up the Jedi Mickey Mouse?! Answer me that, would you? LOL

Evan will be THREE MONTHS OLD on Friday (Jan. 9th). How crazy is that?!?!?! He is definitely Mr. Personality . . . very smiley, starting to kind of laugh/giggle and is always making this sort of flirty/shy face when people talk to him . . . still a VERY easy baby. He rolled over (front to back) for the first time on his own last night!!!!

He is really still sort of a quiet boy . . . only really lets loose when he thinks he is starving or when he is way over tired and just can’t give up and fall asleep. Otherwise, he is pretty laid-back. He is still figuring out how his limbs work and how those things on the ends of his arms operate. He made the trip to Disney World with me and slept the entire flight. There were only a couple of “instances” of unhappy Evan-ness on the trip but otherwise he was pretty easy going! We rode a lot of rides, met a lot of characters (of the human and Disney variety) took a couple of naps and got a lot of good use of the new stroller!

Emilie is glad to be back to school after Christmas break . . . I think she just got bored being off of school so long. She said she had butterflies in her stomach on the way to school yesterday morning but by the time she got home, she was back to “normal” (whatever THAT is. haha)

She has already told me that she is nervous about going back to VA and starting back at school there again. Kind of odd since she knows the kids there (most of them have been there with her since Kindergarten) and there is a chance that she may be able to be in her former 1st grade teacher’s class now that she moved up to 2nd grade this year. I think she is just anxious about the changes again . . . and rightly so as she has been through a TON of them in the last few months.

So there’s what we have been up to lately in a rather large nutshell . . . I will probably post later about our trip to Disney World, pictures and all that good stuff.;)