Monday, August 30, 2010

Nate is finally building his boat!


Follow this link to check out his progress on the message boards at microskiff.com ....


I will add the link to our favorite blogs listed to the right or add it to your bookmarks :)

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Back to work

Nathan arrived back to his first day of work and found this little guy sitting on his desk waiting for him. The note read "I've been keeping an eye on things since you've been gone."


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The backstory involves me asking one of our friends who was deployed with Nate to get the necessary pictures for me to order this bobble head. I lied and told Nate I needed his head shots to learn how to cut his hair. As you can see below, he was not impressed with having to take the posed photos.


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Poor Rob, our friend who took the photos, it looks like he got a mouthful after those shots were taken, he got a care package of girl scout cookies for all of his trouble :)





A week or so later Nate was in the drop zone getting ready to go on his first Blackhawk jump. I'm stuck at EVERY jump for the FRG so I got photos of the whole day!

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Walking out to the chopper...

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Waiting for liftoff (Nate is seated on the right)...

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and away they go!






Nate floating through the air...

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and walking back after a safe landing.

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Shaking the chute out, I'm sure my Dad remembers this :)


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Sunday, August 22, 2010

Home Safe



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Last year I noticed that Green Ramp was seriously lacking in support for families waiting on incoming soldiers, so I started the green ramp project with our FRG. As the leader, no one had a choice but to go along with me :) I spent the entire month of July babysitting my project. Every time a new chalk came in from our unit I was at green ramp running our FRG support table which I had stocked with coffee, water, food, coloring pages and activities for kids and soduko and crosswords for adults. Lots of other odds and ends were there, all with the goal to help pass the time while families waited for their soldiers flights to come in. It was an awesome opportunity for me to mingle with spouses and get them involved with the FRG.


Of course, this means I had to create a sign to advertise our presence...

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and the maiden voyage of project green ramp was made in the wee hours of the morning the first week in July.

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Rain or shine, daytime or 0200 (my favorite was a flight coming in at 12:05am that read 0005 on the schedule), I was present for every single chalk and witnessed every reunion. Everyone seemed to appreciate the table, especially the starbucks coffee at 5am :)





In the end, here is the quick video I managed to snag in the chaos that was Nate's arrival. I was simultaneously trying to operate my FRG table and document his homecoming.






I got ONE picture with my fellow FRG representative while we were waiting for the plane to de-board. Wish I could say I dressed up like the other wives do for the husbands arrival but the truth is, Nate wouldn't appreciate it and I wouldn't enjoy it either. We are a jeans and t-shirt kinda crew in this house. At green ramp, it was my uniform, a unit t-shirt along with my FRG badge got me access beyond the control point so I could snap photos in front without having to fight for a spot in front.

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Back on American soil, walking up to green ramp. Can you spot Nate?



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