Happy 2nd Birthday Abigail Jane!!

Dearest sweetest little girl,

I can't believe it's already been 2 whole years since my first glimpse of you all purple and covered in slime as they delivered you...

Since that first (of many) impossibly loud, impossibly upset SCREAMS of yours that attacked my ears...

Since my first glimpse of your squishy little face...

and of course,

Since  that WONDERFUL moment when I was finally recovered enough from your c-section that they brought you to me, freed you from your blankets and placed your tiny little body in my arms...

I'd loved you already at that point for the nine long (sickness filled) months that you'd grown inside me, but on that wonderful day of your birth, my heart exploded with joy at the sight of you and all at once I was an entirely different person all over again.  

Forever changed for the better by having known you.

I know it hasn't been perfect my darling.   You had a tough time of being a baby and your Daddy missed a lot.  I certainly didn't handle things as well as I wished I had but things have  been looking "upper and upper" (as your brother would say) these last 6 months and it is my forever prayer that things for us will just continue on this upward trend.  I just hope that through it all, I loved you enough.

You amaze me.  Every. Single. Day.

I am so proud of you my beautiful brilliant daughter and I feel like probably, this is only just the beginning of you amazing me.  

Please, don't ever change who you are in your heart.  I love you for all that you are and all that you will be.

Though you're generally so completely easy going and mellow, I could do without your seemingly random temper flares.  Because really, why do you always have to throw shoes?  I mean, someday, we'll probably all sit around and laugh about those tantrums and all those shoes strewn everywhere.  

Take after your Dad much?

Not that he throws shoes, but he tends to be pretty chill too, until he's just not, and then he always does something really ridiculous to deal with frustrations too.

Anyway, thank you for being you.

(It sometimes amazes me just how thoroughly YOU that you are.  I really did expect you to be more like your brother.  Silly, silly me.)

Thank you for being ours.  

Happy Birthday big girl!

We love you.

Celebrating our Anniversary

On Monday, to celebrate 10 (mostly) wonderful years of marriage, Matt and I had our sitter come stay with the kids while he took me for a dinner cruise around San Diego bay.

How cool is that by the way?

I was thoroughly impressed with the thought he put into it, that's for sure.

Interestingly enough, the Hornblower pier is literally RIGHT across the street from the courthouse where were originally wed.

The courthouse is behind us.

One of my friends pointed out how neat it is that what with all the places we've been since, that we managed to be back here 10 years later.

I agree.

I've always thought it was a beautiful building.  Looks lovely all lit up for the holidays.

Since it was a Monday evening, right after the holiday weekend, our cruise wasn't very crowded and
we were on one of the smallest of the Hornblower yachts.  It was called the High Spirits and the Captain said it
was very historical.  It is the sister ship to a Presidential Yacht owned by one of the Presidents Roosevelt.  The crew also had stories of several celebrities spending time on board, including, among others, The Rolling Stones.  

So that was cool.

Matt and I as we climbed aboard.

Matt was able to get our tickets at a nice discount on base so he went ahead and sprang for a celebration package that included a guaranteed window table, a bottle of champagne and souvenir champagne flutes to take home afterward.

Those little boxes had chocolate inside...

Our view of downtown, from the courthouse to the Star of India sailing ship from our table.
(They had the vinyl window panels down since it was so cold out so the photo is a bit blurry.)

After our salad we took some time to explore the boat and see the various views.

And play with the panoramic feature on my new camera.  :)

Here we are at the table when our champagne came.  Still trying to determine when I started liking
champagne.  I know I used to hate it... to much so that we toasted at our big church wedding with a Pinot Grigio.
But this stuff was amazing.  :)

The view of the North Island Naval Air Station as we cruised past.

The boat was 3 levels.  On the top was the dining room.  In the middle there were 2 little lounge areas, a dance floor area, a dish washing room and some deck space.  Down below on the bottom level were a couple of state rooms.

The main lounge reminded me of the scene in Titanic where all the men go off after dinner to smoke cigars.
So here we are lounging, (without the cigars) congratulating ourselves on being Masters of the Universe.

The southern end of downtown and the Coronado bridge out in front of our boat's bow.

Yet another view.  The old USS Midway (now a museum) is the the middle, lit up with the red and blue lights over top.  

Eventually, we returned to our seats for dinner.

Yummy!

Another panoramic view.  These are much cooler when you can see them larger.

I was pretty excited when we went under the bridge.

Right towards the end, before we made our final turn to head back to the pier, we
swung in behind Coronado to enjoy the beautiful views of the Hotel Del
all lit up for the Holidays.  

Matt and I with the bridge behind us.

It was an amazing night.  

Nine years ago on our first anniversary Matt took me to dinner at the Hotel Del Coronado and we ate out on the boardwalk overlooking the beach and the ocean.  That was quite possibly one of the most romantic nights of my life... until now.  On our second, we were still very new to Japan so we dined at a little place called Pepper Lunch.  While delicious, it's the type of place you buy tickets from a little machine to order your food, so it's hardly fine dining.  At 3 years we were in Hong Kong so we went to the amazing Mitchell's Steak House and I kid you not the lobster they showed us as part of their specials talk actually jumped off the tray and tried to scurry away.  By 4 years we were newly back in San Diego and I have no Earthly clue what we did.  At 5 years we had just moved into our house and again, I don't remember doing anything special.  Maybe Matt had duty or something.  At 6 years I was pregnant with Peter and probably fell asleep quite early if I know anything about myself while pregnant.  At 7 years we were in Monterey and our Anniversary fell on Peter's first Thanksgiving.  The following year, at 8, our Anniversary fell on Black Friday.  Try as I might, I couldn't convince my OB to do my C-Section that day so I was enormously pregnant and I put our Christmas tree up while Peter napped and Matt took Marcus (who was visiting for the holiday) out to run some errands and a bit of shopping.  (A.J was born 4 days later, so I'm not kidding when I say I really WAS enormously pregnant and really, I very well could have had her that day.)  Last year, of course was 9 years.  Matt was still in Iraq and I had just moved back to this house here in San Diego.  (Why we move to often in November I may never know!)  He sent me beautiful flowers, and I'm sure I cried about spending the day without him.  

So as you can probably tell, we've largely gotten out of the habit of doing anything fancy to celebrate our Anniversary.

But at 10 years?

At 10 years you find something really amazing to do and you do it together and you remind yourself to thank God for your spouse and all the blessing your lives have held so far.  Then you hope and pray for many many more years with that man, full of just as much love and as many more blessings.

At least that's what I did.

Ten Years Ago...

Ten years ago, back at the end of 2002, Matt and I were in a very odd time of our lives.  He was a Lieutenant Junior Grade, stationed in San Diego onboard a Destroyer as the Navigator. Meanwhile, I was living back in Texas, in a horrid little border town working as an Assistant Band Director for some of the rudest people I've ever met in my life. The job on paper was everything I'd ever wanted, teaching color guard, helping out with the high school and middle school bands and teaching a smattering of beginner instrumentalists as well. I'd taken it as part of a requirement to complete my Master's Degree in Education and my teaching certification. Once a week I left work early and drove 2 and half hours across the bottom of south Texas back to Corpus Christi to attend the last of my instrumental methods classes, to meet with my teaching mentor and get my final pedagogy lessons. After 3 or 4 hours of classes back at Texas A&M Corpus Christi I'd grab dinner with one of my wonderful friends before climbing back into my truck and hauling myself back across the state to my crappy little apartment and my students the next morning. It was a terrible arrangement, but it was working well enough in that I was gaining loads of valuable teaching experience I was was going to finish my schooling as desired.

Except of course, Matt was in California and I missed him terribly.

At that point we'd been engaged for nearly a year. We had been together, in as much of a way that any Navy couple is actually ever "together" for nearly 4 years before he proposed and I was tired of being away from him. We'd already made it through 9 months of the long distance thing 2 years earlier when he'd gotten his commission and gone into the Navy while I'd stayed behind in Ohio to finish my degree. And so even though I knew finishing graduate school was the right thing to do I was just miserable. We talked on the phone for hours every night and tried to plan our wedding for the following summer but nothing was going as planned. Matt couldn't get his leave approved. The  money wasn't adding up. My job was making me crazy and tired and irritable and all that being crazy and tired and irritable was making me doubt everything. I worried that Matt was going to move on in California without me and that we'd never manage to make it to the altar.  

Finally the Thanksgiving holidays rolled around and I had an entire week off from work to fly to San Diego and see him. In the weeks leading up to the visit we'd talked a lot about eloping. (Does it really even count as eloping if you plan it a couple of weeks in advance?) We had, actually, been discussing the idea of going to courthouse since the day Matt proposed in early December 2001, but I knew I wanted a "big" wedding and I didn't want my impatience to ruin that for us. So as Thanksgiving neared we talked about driving off to Vegas and doing it. But I researched online and quickly found out how much EVERYTHING in Vegas costs and we soon abandoned that idea.  Regardless of whether or not we eloped I already had my dress so eventually we were going to have that big church wedding one way or another.  There was no sense in wasting a lot of money now that could be better spent later. We decided that if we were going to do it, the courthouse in San Diego would be fine. (They wave the waiting period for military couples.)

So I flew out on Saturday and we did our thing enjoying San Diego for the weekend.  On Monday and Tuesday Matt had to go into work so I slept in and lounged around his apartment until he came home each afternoon. On Tuesday, November 26th around 4 o'clock it occurred to me that if we were going to get married I probably needed to find out when the courthouse was open the next day and if we needed an appointment or something.  I called to get the information and was told they were going to be closed Wednesday through Friday for the holiday but they would be open until 6 that evening.

But it was already 4:00 in the afternoon!  Matt as still at work.

I'm pretty sure I started to cry.  I called Matt at work and told him we couldn't elope after all and explained why.  He laughed at me for getting all upset, promised to be home in under 10 minutes and assured me we would go down there just as soon as he got home.  (Luckily, at the time, Matt lived in a little apartment right downtown.  It really was 10 minutes from the base and was seriously only about 5 blocks up the hill from the courthouse.  I'm sure we made it there well before 5 pm.

And so that's what we did.  He got home, changed into some civilian clothes and we went down there.  We filled out the paperwork, paid the fee and then we went to another room next door and waited our turn.  There was one other couple there ahead of us.  When our turn came we explained that we didn't have a witness so one of ladies working there volunteered.  She sent me back to my car for my camera so she could take pictures for us.  The other lady working that afternoon said she was qualified but had never yet married anyone because she was pretty new.  We offered to be her first and she was all excited.  And actually, come to think of it, the other lady, who officially went down on record as our witness, was the "regular" officiant and she promised to step in and help out if the other lady got herself into trouble.  Not sure how much trouble she could have gotten into marrying us, there in our jeans, all relaxed and just happy to be making it official FINALLY, but I guess she was nervous too.

Anyway, here are the pictures.

Before...

During the officiant's remarks

Putting on Matt's ring

Putting on my ring

The kiss (although if I remember correctly this one was the second
kiss.  The lady who was acting as our witness and photographer
missed our first smooch and made us redo it.)

Happily married.

Aren't they beautiful?

I'm sure that various people, over the years have seen those pictures and been appalled by our clothes.  But it wasn't about that.  I was about us.  It didn't matter what we were wearing.  And well, if you can't understand that then I guess you just never will.

Because it really was beautiful. 

And we would save the formal wear for another time.

People have often asked me what we did afterward, but HONESTLY, I can't exactly remember.  That week, while I visited Matt in San Diego, we went to dinner and movies and things with several different people practically every single night.  I feel like we went to Bennigan's for dinner and then went to see the newest Harry Potter movie (that would have been the Chamber of Secrets if you're keeping track) but I might actually be mixing my nights up.  We might have gone somewhere else to eat or met up with some friends for some other movie but I can't be sure.  

What I can tell you, is that it wasn't any big, like, celebration.  I mean, we were happy sure, but I was sort of like a foregone conclusion.  We'd already been together and committed to each other for so long that the rings and the vows were basically just some extra icing on the cake.  

It actually wasn't until I went back to Texas and my students noticed the extra ring on my finger, that it even seemed to matter that much.

Then of course, at Christmas, when we went home to Ohio and we had to tell his family.  Somehow a few of his brothers had already heard, but that didn't make his mother cry any less when Matt told her.

My best friend (and eventual Matron of Honor) was pretty upset too.

And I do understand why they were upset.  They love us and wanted to be included.

But for us, were always planned on having that big family church wedding.  (And we did too... in August of 2004.)  

THIS wedding was about us.  

JUST US.

Without the pressure and the drama and the chaos and the big bill.

Stress free.  

In love.

Vowing to be utterly devoted and committed to each other for the rest of our lives.

It was perfect.

And so here we are now, 10 years later.

I had the babysitter snap this one of us together before we went out for the evening.
I wasn't too sure about how pictures would turn out, so I wanted
to make sure we had at least ONE good one to commemorate the occasion.

From Texas, to San Diego, to Japan, back to San Diego, up to Monterey, further up to Seattle and then back to San Diego.

How many addresses is that then?

3 ships.  5 duty stations.

Countless duty nights and lengthy underways.

1 seven month long West Pac cruise.

1 year for him in the Middle East

2 masters degrees (one for each of us.)

3 cats.  2 dogs.  

3 pregnancies.  2 children.

Probably 7 different cars.

1 mortgage.  (well, actually 2, but that's only because we refinanced.)

10 years.

AND STILL GOING STRONG!

Here's to many, many more babe.  I love you!  XOXOXO

Chuck E. Cheese for A.J.'s (early) Birthday

On "Black Friday" we decided that rather than attempt to make ourselves crazy by trying to shop (I whole heartidly avoid THAT madness these days) we would take the kids out to celebrate A.J.'s birthday a bit early.  Not that A.J. probably knew it had anything to do with her birthday but I think they 3 cousins had fun none the less.

Marcus and his dauhter that morning having breakfast.

Of course, Marcus lives aproximately an hour away from ANYTHING.  So it was a bit of a drive.  But happily, we arrived right around lunch at our desitanation, "where a kid can be a kid."  

Waiting for our lunch and watching the animatronic Chuck E.

Of course the food took awhile so we decided to have some fun while we waited.

Let me just be honest, the last time I took the kids to Chuck E. Cheese A.J. was still so small that she mostly sat in the high chair while I entertained (and chased) her brother.  This time around she did try many of the little rides and games but MOSTLY she just wanted to put the tokens in and collect tickets.

"TICKEDTH MOMMY!!  TICKEDTH!"

Eventually our food arrived and it was just in time for our kids to watch the fun of a birthday party somebody was having near by.

Isabella was fascinated.

So was A.J., but she HUNGRY too!

After Chuck E. finished with the birthday party group he led all the other willing children to the front area where he led them all in a rousing chorus of "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" and then threw 100 free tickets into the air for the children to collect.

My kids seemed to be confused by the difference between animatronic Chuck E. and the
guy in the suit....

Anyway, then it was time for more fun.

Which of course, included lots of skee ball.

A.J. was after Marcus's tickets....

Peter also tried his hand at several of the shooting and driving video games.

Check out the screen, Peter's car is crashing into the fence...

A.J. really wanted to play the Guitar but it was way too heavy for her.

She probably wouldn't have been too bad at the jumping game if she
would have stayed on the jumping pad rather than trying to climb inside.

Marcus showing his collection of tickets to Isabella while Matt, and A.J. watch Peter play
some weird shooting game.

Sort of like Battleship.

Finally we ran out of tokens and went to cash in all our tickets and trade them for prizes before we went home.

A.J. traded her tickets for a small rubber frog and a Dora notebook.

Aw the joy from the silly treasures of childhood.

Peter got a purple car.  

Isabella got a slinky and a ring.