Pumpkin Craziness

The holiday craziness has officially begun. For the last few weeks, I have been wearing all my hats at once: Wife, Mom, Teacher, Dance Coach, etc. with probably more than a little "Crazy Woman who needs more caffeine" thrown in there. Consequently, I haven't posted pics in forever on here so I will try to catch up.......These pics are from two Fridays ago.... a day which dawned dark and rainy with the kind of rain that only Florida can bring. I always thought I knew rain, having grown up in the Northwest. Moving here showed me that what I knew about was drizzle. When it rains in Florida, it pours buckets and throws in some rather frightning displays of thunder and lightning for good measure. It is as if Mother Nature feels the need to compensate for all the sunny days by dumping a good 6 months worth of rain in one day. It is truly a spectacular display if you are sitting inside with a good cup of something warm, a good book and some candles. However, if you have to actually venture out in the storm, it pretty much bites the big one.

A Florida storm is enough to put a damper on anyone's day but when you have a day full of outdoor events planned, it quickly catapults an inconvenient day into utter chaos. Friday was a day full of planned outdoor events - a PreK Pumpkin Patch Field Trip for Sam, Jump Rope for Heart Day for the whole school, and Fall Festival for the whole school from 3:00 - 6:00 pm. By late Thursday evening, Jump Rope for Heart had been cancelled, leavign about 800 kids very disappointed and every teacher in the building scrambling for last minute lesson plans on a day that we had planned to not be teaching but chaperoning events. On Friday morning we arrived to hear the news that Fall Festival would not be cancelled but moved indoors, creating massive chaos since we had no "indoor" plan because after all, this is FLORIDA, land of perpetual sunshine where October temps are usually in the high 70's. Dunk tanks and bouncy slides were cancelled in between classes, last minute plans and maps were run to classrooms and announced periodically over the PA system, adding to the general chaos as we tried to teach kids unhappy about being in classrooms instead of on the PE field. I assumed that Sam's field trip was cancelled as well but then got last minute notification that the church was moving the Pumpkin Patch games indoors and the kids were in fact boarding the buses. Duane had also assumed the trip was cancelled and had decided to sleep in on his day off so I had to make a frantic call to him to get dressed and head out to the Pumpkin Patch before Sam became hysterical because her Daddy was supposed to be her "Chipper own" (Chaperone). Utter craziness.

By the end of the day, we seemed to have a plan in place for Fall Festival, which was good since it was set to start at 3:30pm. My dance team girls had 3 booths running and luckily a few of the parents showed up to erect our booths and bouncy castle while I taught. Once the kids were released, I made a mad dash down the hall with my dance team girls carrying Sam and Kaitie. We located our booth and immediately had a line of customers wanting their hair colored (colored hair spray). I spent the next 3 hours manning a bouncy castle, hair color and tattoo (temporary of course) booth, Pom Pom and spirit item booth and 16 hyper middle school girls. The hair color was by far the most popular booth and Duane and the girls got a big kick out of paying my dance team girls to color my hair neon orange, much to my great embarassment. All in all, it was a crazy day but we made a ton of money which we will need to fund our Nationals trip to Orlando this spring.

Next up: Fall Festival for 6th RTB, holiday picture appointment for the girls, prep for the Pep Rally, Jump Rope for Heart makeup day, 6th RTB Annual Haunted Hay Ride, Trick or Treating...........................................

I may need something stronger than coffee soon......

War Weary?

This article was published on CNN.com by a wife whose husband is stationed with the 82nd Airborne at Ft. Bragg, NC. She blogs for the Fayetteville Observer and I think her commentary speaks for many military families. Here's to my Army Wife friends - couldn't make it thru this Army life without amazing women like you! :)

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War Weary
by Rebekah Sanderlin

If the American military went to war and America went shopping, then seven years later the war wages on but America is home from the shopping spree with her credit cards maxed out and her head aching from buyer’s remorse.
The war didn’t change and the fighting force didn’t change, but the people back home are over it. War, it seems, went out of style in 2003.
In the military community we roll our eyes when we hear that Americans are war weary. Just what, we wonder, are you all weary of? Hearing about the war? Seeing stories in the news? Most Americans don’t even know anyone in the military and won’t have any direct contact with the war besides seeing uniformed soldiers in the airport. You all haven’t been asked to do anything more to support this war than sit back and watch as your tax dollars are spent.
To us, civilian complaints about being war weary sound like the gripes of deadbeat dads: It’s a bummer to hear that things are going badly and you’re sick of being asked to pay for it, but you’re not doing any of the real work yourselves. Many of you believe that fighting this war is optional. You seem to think our nation could make everything okay by just sitting this one out.
And, in a way, that reasoning makes sense. Most of you haven’t been on the front lines or on the homefront. You haven’t looked into the eyes of the enemy and the innocents and you haven’t heard gunshots and mortar rounds in the background during a precious-but-short phone call. You haven’t had villagers beg you to stay or to adopt their children. And you haven’t heard your soulmate grapple with dueling guilt: Guilt that he’s leaving his family for so long and guilt that he isn’t deployed more frequently and for longer so that he could do more. You haven’t seen or heard any of this, so how could you possibly understand?
It’s not your fault. Nobody has asked you to do anything. Our leaders didn’t think you would be willing to make real sacrifices, so they never bothered to ask. They let you all think that shopping yourselves into debt was patriotic, that spending yourselves into bankruptcy and foreclosure was enough to keep our nation safe.
You are war weary because futility breeds weariness. When you feel like something is for no good reason and getting nowhere, it’s understandable that you’d be over it. But maybe you wouldn’t be so war weary if you, personally, had a stake in what was happening “over there.”
In the military community, the price tag for this war is much higher but the commitment level is much greater. Our country has not only asked for our tax dollars (and believe me, we’re paying monetarily for this war, too) but for our blood, our family time, our futures, our children’s happiness and our very lives. We have enlisted and reenlisted – and offered our support to our spouses who sign back up - because, soldier and spouse, we know the commitment level of the people who want to kill us and we know the desperate dependence of the people our nation has vowed to protect. We know that we have to be at least as committed as our enemy or our own children will be fighting this same war.
My husband has spent the bulk of our five-and-a-half-year marriage deployed. He’s missed most of our son’s life and our daughter has never even heard his voice – not even in utero. We won’t know for years what the long-term effects of these deployments will be on him, on us and on our kids. Last year he suffered a serious head injury and he’s lost most of the hearing in his right ear, the ear closest to his gun. We don’t know what the long-term effects of his injuries will be, either. This year, on his third deployment to Afghanistan, he missed my father’s death and funeral, our daughter’s birth, our son learning to ride a bike and catching his first fish, and countless other precious moments that cannot be reclaimed. There is no predicting what events he’ll miss in the future.
And we are the lucky ones.
My husband has lost more than 20 friends in this global war on terror and I have an ever-growing group of Army widow friends. They are young and beautiful and many have young children. They are also stunted. They hang around Army towns years after losing their soldiers because they say they don’t fit in anywhere else. They say they can no longer relate to what they see and hear in the civilian world.
They can’t reintegrate into the your world because there the people they meet don’t know what it’s like to sacrifice everything for something intangible. The widows say they don’t feel like they fit in where people don’t know how hard it is to break away from that last hug before a deployment. In the civilian world the widows, like all soldiers and military spouses these days, are treated as oddities, something to marvel or gawk at from a distance. People either fawn over us or try to ignore us. Our presence inspires either adulation or discomfort.
So we hunker down in our military towns, where regular pilgrimages to D.C. to visit loved ones at Arlington and Walter Reed are common. In military towns, we can laugh about all the dust and sand that comes into our homes after a deployment, carted thousands of miles from where it was picked up. We can complain about long lines at the post office during our weekly visits to send care packages. We can vent about news of another deployment, less than a year after the last one. If anyone in America should be war weary, it’s us.
And make no mistake: We are tired. We are stretched thin. Our marriages and our families are collapsing. Our children are emotionally damaged. They act out at school and cry at home. Everyday we wonder if we have the strength for even another day of this. We’re tired from the work, but we’re not weary of the mission.
This war is far from over, that’s something both candidates for the presidency have acknowledged. Whichever man finds himself in the Oval Office come January will be in a position to decide our fates in the military community in a way more personal and immediate than most Americans will experience. The next president will determine how much my husband and I will see each other for the next four years and whether or not he will have the tools and policies he needs when he is in harm’s way. The next president will determine our odds of continuing to be the lucky ones.
This war is far from over – that is an obvious truth in military communities. But our reality seems so very different from yours. For the last seven years our elected officials haven’t thought enough of you to ask you to pitch in. They haven’t, so I will.
My husband and I know that this is not his last deployment and we know that his odds of returning home get worse with each trip. The only way our family and other military families will get a break is if more Americans sign up to join the fight. News reports these days are full of stories of lay-offs and the high cost of health care. Well, guess what? There are no pink slips in the military and our excellent health care system is free.
So sign up. We want you. Your nation wants you. And we in the military community need you. My family deserves a break.

The Great Conversation

Many of you know that we lost a very dear friend of ours about a year and a half ago in Iraq. Darrell and his wife Diana are more like family than friends to us - those rare people who come into your life and effortlessly feel as if they have always been there, as if you have known each other for forever. Darrell was a thinker, a writer, a voracious reader of ideas and a man who sought to understand the world around him and always do right by those whose lives he touched. During his two deployments, he faithfully recorded his thoughts, his feelings, his struggles. He hoped one day to publish a book, to help others understand what it was to be a soldier and a man and how you reconcile your faith with the desparation and violence that becomes par for the course in a land overcome with war. In the midst of it all he somehow found hope and he wanted others to know.

When he died, his father, Darrell Sr., obtained permission to travel to Iraq and visit with Darrell's unit there, to walk where his son had last walked. He compiled all of Darrell's writings - those on his computer, in notes and letters and e-mails home, and the stories that the soldiers who served next to him tell. Darrell Sr. has worked for the last year and a half to complete the book his son dreamed of one day publishing. The book is set to come out in February of 09. It will be called The Great Conversation and can be reserved online at Amazon.com - just search for "Griffin, Darrell." The book details Darrell's experience but also the experiences of all those who served with him. It is the story of the American Soldier - of men and boys from small towns and big cities who leave families and dreams behind to answer a call they may not always understand but feel compelled to commit themselves to. It is their struggles, their triumphs, their love for their families and each other and the hope that allows them to continue and keep their faith despite often desperate conditions. I hope that some of you will reserve the book and read it - not because I think it details the heroic life of a perfect man but because it tells the story of an ordinary man who did extraordinary things for the love of those he left behind and those that stood beside him as well as those he was sent to protect - and because it is the story of a friend. Once I know more about the book tour dates and locations, I will post the info. If you wish to know more about Darrell, just google "SSG. Darrell Griffin" or look for the US News and World Report" special article that appeared in the spring of 07.