It's Been Awhile - Homecoming. The prep.

Dear Blog and Readers.

Please let me apologize for my extreme delay. I didn't realize that with my husband coming home, life would take so long to catch up. We have been out of the state and in Jamaica. Yesterday was the first time since Mat came home, that I felt like the state of my house was stressing me out. Mat has been home for just over a month and went back to work yesterday. We will slowly get back to our "normal" and regular blogging will resume. I have a ton of pictures to post and blogs to write and I am just itching to get started. SO. I will start with my favorite, HOMECOMING!

Mat was on the 2nd flight of 3 for his unit. The first flight had a lot of problems and kept getting delayed. We weren't sure if Mat was actually going to make it when he was scheduled. I had a house full of people here to welcome him home and we just had to wait it out. He did get in on time and it was a very emotional day.

My husband had been deployed 4 other times. The first one, Zaria was able to attend but she was a baby and doesn't remember. His second one, his ex wife couldn't even be bothered to show up and made him wait around until she came to get him. His third one was 3 hours away and there was no way his ex was going to let me take their kids because she didn't even want me to meet them. His 4th one was in Germany.

So. For his 5th one, he had all 4 of his kids there for the first time.

Que: Big. Deal.

Also, his parents were here as well as his grandma, they had never been to one of his homecomings either.

The day before, we made sure the handsome little guy got a haircut, didn't want him looking homeless when his dad came home. We also stocked up on necessities... Like lots of Kleenex.

4 kids, 5 adults and 6 dogs all piled up in my living room watching Frozen. Can you find us all? I will give you a hint... One of the adults is behind the camera, snapping the photo!

I decided to be kind of obnoxious this deployment and had Mat's dad make this huge sign for the yard. I loved it! And the kids loved helping put it in the ground.

Homecoming was super early in the morning and I was a ball of nerves. Nothing like a bottle of wine to help one relax and sleep.


I will have more homecoming posts over the next few days. This is definitely something that I want to document.

Next up: The morning of homecoming!