Whoa It's November????

29 Oct 2010 Wow.  I just looked at the calendar.  I left home on 5 July.  It’s already about to be November.  I have two more months of deployment time to serve before I get to go home.  Time has flown! When I first arrived, I was so brand new and spongelike.  In shock at the poverty of the country I’m in, getting used to all the different ranks of all the different branches of military, learning all the joint ops terms...

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Morphine

No, not the drug!  The band!  My wonderful friend, John, introduced me to this band and I have to say:  O. My. Gosh.  What a sexy sexy band.  The music is just fansexintastic!! http://www.lukin.com/tos/ Some of my favorite songs from this band are:  Supersex, So Many Ways, and All Your W...

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Prayer Request

While you're deployed, you're far from friends and family.  The challenges are harder to face and your loved ones have to deal with things without you.  When your family is struggling and you aren't there to help, you feel completely powerless.  And understandably so. And sometimes all you can do is pray.  Someone dropped a prayer request in a prayer box and I wanted to post it so that the prayer is heard and maybe others might include them in their prayers.  Here's the request, minus the names: "I pray that God...

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The Quiet Sniffle

It doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re from or where you’ve been.  It doesn’t matter if it’s your first or your twenty-first deployment.  At some point in your tour, you will spend at least one night crying in your room hoping your roommate doesn’t hear you.  It’s just a fact, something that’s bound to happen.  And when you’re laying in bed with your laptop smoking under your fingertips and you pause your typing because you think you hear sniffling from the other side of the room, anyone who isn’t an asshole will understand...

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Gizmo

You'll be amazed at how many people keep a special something with them on deployments.  Lots of people have pictures of their families and friends, some have some kind of souveneir (gosh, did I spell that right?  Ah hell, whatever) that they keep close to them.  These things come in all sorts of varieties-- t-shirts that smell of a special cologne (girls do this, duh), patches they've gotten from someone they made friends with (JT...

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Orphanage Visit

I know I haven't talked about where I'm deployed to and what is going on here.  And I won't -- not the where and what anyway.  But I will talk about my experience here because I think it's important to capture that.  So here I go... The camp is small.  Really small.  If you get lost, it better be your first day because otherwise you're not that bright.  LOL I kid, I kid.  But seriously, it's tiny.  The days...

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Update on Deployed Mom Project

I've started my kids' kids book!  It's called Our Family.  I used the MS Publisher program to put it together.  For the cover page, I put in some colorful shapes and of course the classic stick figure family.  I've always loved stick figures.  :P  Anyway, I had so much fun putting this thing together! The second page says "There are three people in my family."  I made sure to put the colorful numbers 1-3 so that...

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Lack of Child Support

In one of my earlier blogs I mentioned the word “child support” with a disclaimer that I’ll talk about that in another blog.  Well here it is.  This is my take on my situation with the lack of child support.Link to Kickball VideoI went to a bible study a few weeks ago and we watched a short video clip called Kickball.  You’ve gotta watch it.  I even put the link up for ya.  Check it out.  Anyway, it’s about a little boy who really wants this ball and his parents don’t get it for him.  He really, really wants it...

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Making Deployment Comfortable

When you get deployed, you usually bring the basics:  gear, PT clothes, shower shoes, hygiene products, feminine products, DVDs, laptop, iPod (or whatever you use for music).  Then you get there, get assigned your tent/room/bay.  Whatever it is, it's not home and it's not pretty.  And you're going to have to stay there for the next 6 months or so.  But just because you're deployed it doesn't mean you have to suffer entirely! I'm halfway through my deployment and I've got to say that I absolutely love my room.  It...

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Deployed Mom Project

I've come up with this BRILLIANT idea.  Okay, it's brilliant to me.  Anyway, I'll get on with it.  So, everytime I Skype with my kids I spend lots of time holding the pictures on my phone up to the camera so that my Caden can see.  I'll show him pictures of me, him, Sean, and our dog Charlie.  I'll also show pictures of planes, motorcycles, and other things.  He gets a kick out of seeing pictures.  He just loves this.  So I've decided to make him a book. I'm not sure what to call this book.  But it's...

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The Jonah in Me

Went to worship service today and we learned about Jonah.  The book of Jonah is in the Old Testament.  It talks about Jonah’s inner struggle with doing what God requests of him.  It was a pretty amazing story, actually.  God told Jonah to go to Nineveh and Jonah went the complete opposite direction because he did not want to go. Well, God threw a storm at him, then created a huge fish (probably a whale or something) to swallow Jonah.  And it did.  Jonah spent three days and nights in the belly of the whale before his...

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M Saves Me From My Fear of the Dress

Last night, a bunch of people and I were scheduled to attend a fundraiser dinner for a local orphanage.  It was a pretty big deal so I decided to wear a dress. I love dresses.  I love putting on something that makes me look and feel like a woman.  But I always feel so embarrassed when I'm all dressed up.  I feel like I would fall or that my dress would get snagged on something and fall off or something.  LOL I get really nervous!  So anyway, my wonderful friend who I'll call M met me outside and he was such a huge...

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JT the Sweetheart

On the camp, I'm surrounded by tons of ... men.  Women here are just not that many.  Personally, I think it's a good thing.  Haha!  Not that I don't like being around other women, it's just that most women are catty by nature.  We're emotionally charged.  You put a bunch of us together and you get:  the drama queen, the slut, the loner, the innocent, the bitch, the weird chick, and the one we all hate- the two-face.  You put us all together and this is what happens: The first week, everyone clings to...

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Saviors in Metal

I have a huge thing for taking photos.  I usually just use my phone -- I love my iPhone.  I know it isn't one of those really expensive cameras that take award-winning photos.  But I don't care.  If I see something worth capturing, I'm going to capture it! I took this one while we were at an outreach.  The boat transported food for the people of the community, who were in need of many things like healthcare, food and clothing. ...

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Chopper Ride!

Today, we flew on a helicopter to head to an island for tomorrow's memorial service.  We will be honoring two young men who gave the ultimate sacrifice last year.  It will be a remembrance memorial service. I've never flown in a chopper before so I was pretty excited.  It makes number two on my list of cool transportation in the military, the first being a B-1 Bomber.  Yeah baby!  Anyway, so the chaps and I got to ride in...

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Unconditional Love

Although this story didn't happen today and it didn't even happen yesterday, it happened on a day I least expected it so I thought it would be appropriate to label it under the "Daily Goodness" topic.  I'll have to give you a little bit of a history by starting in the past and ending in the "daily goodness." When I was married to my kids' dad (I'll call him X), I always had little suspicions that he was cheating on me.  His phone...

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Cinderella!

My kids are the sweetest people in my world.  Of course, like all kids, they have the capability of driving me a little nuts at times.  But they make me smile, laugh, grin, and remember what it was like to walk in innocence.  They amaze me every day. One day, I was folding laundry in my bedroom while my boys "helped".  While hanging some blouses up, I came across a summer dress that I got at a thrift store.  Just for fun, I slipped into it and let my hair down.  Immediately, my older son's eyes grew wide and a grin...

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Strong Little Boy

When I left X, my older son (I'll call him Caden) was about two and my younger son (Sean) was three months old.  Little guys.  Throughout the months following our departure, I would wonder if I was putting them through too much.  I felt truly ashamed for dragging them through such rough changes.  But I would remind myself that I was doing it to save them. The night we left, I packed a gym bag of our clothes, a plastic bag of baby bottles, and a bag of diapers.  I had no where to go, so I took the kids to my office to think. ...

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