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The Amazing Couple

I love, LOVE, LOVE that a fellow military couple won this year's Amazing Race!!
To be honest, I don't really watch that much TV, but every now and then when we're flipping through the channels, we stop and watch the reality show.  I thought it was pretty cool that a military couple was on it, not to mention the few episodes I caught I could easily relate to them - How the husband sometimes spoke to her like one of his soldiers, or how each task at hand was a mission to complete (which in the tv show's case it was, so that comparison didn't work to well.....but if you're a military spouse you know what I mean).
Anyways, what I didn't realize was they entered into the show shortly after a deployment, and if you've been through a deployment, you know the last thing you'd want to do is have your every 'reintergrating' move recorded and televised. I know when the Mr. came back to me after a deployment, commuincation was a bit difficult and stressed, which is normal, but there is no way I could have done it all with a million viewers watching!!!  OR maybe I could have........hhmmm, a million dollars is quite a motivator.

I think the author of this article is on point when describing what a challenge it would have been.

Congrats to them!

Mother's Day Crafting

So Mother's Day has snuck up on me yet again!  One day, I swear, I will have completed Mother's Day gifts AND have them sent off in time...one day....
But until that day arrives, I'll show you what I've created for this year.
I saw this on Pinterest...

And thought it was such a cute idea, especially with me being due to give birth any minute now, it just seemed like a great gift idea for Mother's Day.  BUT, seeing how we're in Germany and we no longer have a garage for me to do wood projects in, I wanted to simplify it a bit, and also make it a bit smaller so it could be mailed to my Mom and MIL.
So instead of wood, I went to Bauhaus (which is the German Home Depot) and bought 2 plain white tiles, which were a total of 0.32 Euro, which I'm guessing is about 20 cents. So cheap, right!?

Next I copied the quote/ saying into Word, printed it onto cardstock in the size I wanted (I printed it on white cardstock and a yellow cardstock)...

I painted the back and sides of the tile black. I salvaged the back of an old picture frame to use. Pulled out the good 'ol Mod Podge and got to work.
After one failed attemp (the mod podge cause the paper to bubble up), I found the best thing to do is paint a light layer, as evenly as possible on the back of the cardstock and press it firmly down all over to keep it from bubbling. I did this until I could tell it was drying some, and staying flat.
Next I applied Mod Podge over the cardstock and the tile for a clean finish.
Once that was dry, I glued the back of the picture frame to the back of the tile so it could stand on it's own (or be hung up since there were little circle thingys on it that allow that).

And tada!  My finished product:

Not too shabby, eh?

Some news...

It seems like all my posts are catch-up posts. I've become quite the procrastinator and just plain busy with everyday life. BUT, I'd reeeeally like to try to get back into blogging after this long hiatus.  So, instead of filling in the gaps, I'll just proceed to what's going on these days.
Well for starters, I'm pregnant! And VERY pregnant at that. I'm due in 2 weeks.  lol.
So basically since my last post, the Mr. and I have been either prepping or having a panic attack over this surprise.

This past weekend a good friend of mine here in Germany held a baby shower for me. It was small, yet intimate and held at a British Tea House in Mannheim. It was a lot of fun. The tea was delicious along with the lunch, and so great to see the other coaches I had been coaching with earlier in the year, befroe the end of the swim season.

Here is a shot of us all:

I'm holding up a baby picture of myself that was a prize for one of the games. I didn't win it, but just thought it was funny that it was a prize.

Along with this real live baby shower, my cousin N has prepared a "mail-in" shower that gives everyone that isn't in Germany, a chance be part of a baby shower for me.  The idea is everyone sends out a gift by a certain date, and I won't open them until a set date. She has also sent me decorations and such, so it's a bit festive when I open the gifts. I'd be opening them via Skype or possibly just recording the whole thing and uploading the video, that way everyone is a aprt of it all at once. That being said, Mr. White and I cannot even begin to express how blessed we are with such wonderful family and friends. We have received more than we ever thought imginable!!  Little M, that's still cooking in my belly, is aleady spoiled beyond belief!  =)

Things to look forward to this week: Installing Baby M's car seat, meeting with my Doula, and quite a bit of crafting!!  I may even put up a craft tutorial if I'm feeling up to it :)

Ciao. 

Farewell to the Families

Weeeell, since these lastest posts are catching everyone up, I'll start by saying we are now in GERMANY!!!  Yaayy!!!!  We are living on post in a 3 bedroom apartment.
Buuut, before we get to that, we made some trips to say our farewells to the fams before we left.
First we went to Houston to visit the hubs' family. It was the first time in years that all the kids were all together, so took the oppurtunity to take family pic :)

The brothers, I love this pic :)

Then after Houston, later on in Aug before the big move, I flew home to Canada to see my family (Curtis had limited leave days by then)

And since we were all home there as well, we took family pics too!  Except we got really fancy for them.....

Here is my Mom & Dad on the left, and my Aunt & Uncle on the right.

Here are the cousins:

and my favorite, the Grandmothers (one is a pimp!!!)

We had a ton of fun! 

While home we I also go to join in the fun of celebrating my Mom's big 5-0. We rented a hotel dining area and had a fabulous party!

I miss them all so much and can't wait for their visit to Germany!

Update #1 - Just a little homecoming

Well it's been quite a while since my last post, and A LOT has happened. I'm going to try and update everyone in a couple of posts. Starting with...... drum roll pleeeease......
HE'S BACK!!!!
My husband is back from a year long deployment to Afghanistan, thank God! He actually came back at the end of April, but it still feels new. I'm not sure if I'll ever get used to picking up after him and cooking real meals. Wait, scratch that, I may get used to it, but I highly doubt I'll ever enjoy it.  But don't get me wrong, I would much rather be picking up after him than have him gone again for a year.
Anyways, the homecoming day was extremely exciting and probably the longest day ever! We decided to take his leave days and go on vacation to Hawaii!!  We stayed at the Hale Koa, the military resort. At first when someone mentioned the military resort to me I smiled and nodded politely, but in my head was saying "Why in the world would I go to HI on vacation and stay at a military hotel!?" But later when I looked it up online I was shocked.  It was like an actual resort! AND they have a redeployment/ R&R deal, 30% off your stay, food and festivities going on at the hotel. I priced it out and it ended up being a really great deal. We flew to HI in early June and stayed for 10 days. We stayed on Waikkiki Beach at the  Hale Hoa for 5 dyas and night, then stayed on post with friends for the last 5 days.  We had the most amazing time!  I reccomend the redployment deal to everyone!
We did lots of hiking, lots of beach'ing, swam with the sharks, saw huge sea turtles, went snorkelling, hore back riding, went on sunset dinner cruise topped with fireworks, toured the Dole Pineapple Plantation, and eneded our trip with a Hawaiin L'uau.

After HI, we also took a few small trips to Big Bear, CA, Houston, TX and to see my family in Cobourg, Ontario.  More about these trip in the next posting.

Chillin' with my dawgs!

Doing a little dog-sitting and chilling with the doggies :)

Tigger is joining us for the night.

My friend K

Todays post in honor of my friend K. She has been such a help while the guys are gone and become a close friend. She's always around when I need something, and hopefully I'm just as helpful to her. sometimes I refer to her as my wife. Let me explain that I do not swing that way, I'm completely joking when I call her my wife and I am happily married to an amazing man.
Anyways, she has cooked me dinner far more times than I have cooked myself any kind of meal throughout this deployment. She has brought me homemade soup when I was sick. She visits me at work. She refills my wine glasses as needed. She makes me desserts. Sometimes she even BRINGS me dinner to my work!  She's great company, and her 6 month old daughter E is fabulous company as well!
This past Valentine's she invited me over for dinner (her hubs is away as well) and she had the house decorated and a delicious meal ready for me when I got off work!

Thanks K for being such a good friend!!!

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A little R&R...

Sooooo.... the hubs was home for R&R a few weeks ago :)

And for the most part we just enjoyed hanging out at home with each other and the dogs. I wasn't sure if Vegas (our 2yr old Boston Terrorist) was going to remember him or not, so when we walked up to the door, and Vegas saw him and started barking like crazy, I was kinda bummed realizing he didn't remember him. But then hubs said "Vegas, it's me, come here..." and Vegas started running full speed and jumping all over him, he also peed more than I've ever seen him pee before. He remember him.  lol.

Cali, our pup loved him! Which I was VERY happy about b/c I've heard female dogs are a bit more aggressive than male dogs, and this was going to the first male in the house since he left.

Anyways, we did make a trip off post to L.A. for a weekend, which was much needed as he was coming from one desert to another.  We started the trip off with a little whale watching. So cool, right!? But wait, it gets even cooler! So we get there a little early and walk around the harbor, where they had beautiful green grass everywhere!!  Which might not be as exciting to you as it was to us. He's overseas in a desert all day, and I'm here in the Mojave desert......we haven't seen grass in a long time!!  

Moving along....after a little walking around it was time to board the boat. So we get on and we set off looking for whales. We probably were out about 30mins away when we spotted our first whale. *Side note: along with the passengers, there is the captain and someone from the aquarium telling us about whales and ocean life*  As we are approaching the whale all of a sudden you hear from the aquarium dude "ohmygosh, she's giving birth!!!"  So of course EVERYONE stands up and runs over to see.  Well by the time we were up close she had given birth to a baby whale!!  Then, the aquarium guy explained to us that when a calf is born it doesn't fully know how to swim and what to do, so the mother whale spends the first hour or so pushing the baby tot he surface and forcing him into the motion of what he's suppose to do. And we got to witness all of this!!  So we watched as the baby would surface, and then the mother, over and over.  It was amazing!!!  Also, because we were so close to them, you can imagine how much the ship would rock.  It was sooooo hard to try and get a pic all while trying to hold on to keep your balance.  They are hard to see, but here are some shots:

Us :)

 Here's a shot of the baby and it's mother =)  I know it's kinda far.....

 Some sea-lions we saw on the way back.

After the whale watching we went to a Japanese steakhouse.  It was my first time going to one and we just happened to get a table/ show to our selves :)

The next day, we went to the Laker's game!!!  The hubs is a huge Kobe fan, so we went ahead and splurged and got wicked seats to see them play the Celtics. We went early and got to watch them warm-up. 

check out Shaq!

The game was a close one, but the Laker's lost :(

For the rest of R&R we pretty much just chilled, had a few dinner and a movie nights, but just enjoyed each others company for the rest of the time.

Here's a shot of a couple of models I cam across:

And until we meet again :(

Whaaat!!?? February is almost over!!??

Heeeeello all!!
Well it's been a million years since I've blogged.  I have no idea what happened, or where the time went! I guess I just got busy with good 'ol, daily life.  With that being said I'll update you a little as to what's been going on in my life :)
As of today we have a teeny, tiny bit more than 2 months left in this deployment!!!!  I seriously cannot believe that.  I honestly thought the year was going to drag on, while I slept in and whined to everyone that crossed my path about the depressions of deployment. But to my surprise the year has gone by amazingly fast. I know this sounds horrible, but I almost feel as though I'm running out of time to do everything I had planned to do while he was gone!  Money that I had planned to put away each month somehow vanished, all the projects that I had planned never even got a second thought, and all the cooking I was suppose to be perfecting dwindled down to eating cereal, popcorn and ice cream every day. I can honestly say I am amazed at how fast this went by. And I'm so thankful for that.

The hubs was recently home on R&R. I was amazing!!!  He arrived 2 days before my birthday. Best birthday present ever!! We did lots of relaxing, and he got to meet Cali, our American Bulldog puppy, for the first time.  I was a bit nervous about their meeting as she's been with just me since July now, and has never had any males in the house, other than my family.  But I apparently had nothing to worry about as she was in love with him after the 3rd or 4th sniff.  I'm pretty sure she forgot who I was by the 3rd day.  We had an amazing time together. I'll post a separate R&R post later.

I've mostly been working like crazy. The 40 hour work seems to be more like a 60 hour week by the end. I treasure my weekends so much!  Especially a holiday weekend like this past one. I'm getting very tired of my work and I'm looking forward to leaving it when we PCS. Speaking of PCS'ing....

We're PCS'ing to GERMANY!!!
I'm so ecstatic I can't even tell you!! We will be leaving at the end of the summer. So when the hubs gets home, after a month or so of re-integration, we are going on vacation to Hiwaii, then a month later we will be making the rounds to Canada, NC and TX to say our goodbye's to family and friends, then after that we're off!  It's going to be an extremely hectic time when he gets back, but I'm looking forward to getting out of this desert and being in a new place, and of course traveling!!! I'm dreading looking for another job, but hopefully NAF, my current employer, will help with the transition.  If not....Paris here I come!!!  lol, JK.

Anyways, I'll end it there.
Hope everyone has a great rest of the week!!

Road to Reunion tv series

I only JUST saw a comment on one of my posts from a guy named Chris. He is the casting director for a USO sponsored tv series about military families with loved ones overseas. It sounds like a good show, I would love to watch it, but don't think I'd ever want to be on it, just not my kind of thing.
Have any of you received a comment or message from him?
To be honest the site doesn't look very legit.  I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I just don't like sharing any info about his deployment with anyone, especially not over the internet.
Any thoughts?

Here's the website:
http://www.roadtoreunion.com/

Wordless Wednesday

What are you eating mommy?

Can we have some too??

Catch-Up

I've been MIA in the blogging world for a while.  Things have been very busy with work and house-training the new puppy, Cali. But I'm reeeeally going to try and be better at documenting what's going on in our lives...... even though there's really not that much going on, he he.

Anyways, here's a quick DIY project I just finished a few days ago. Got the idea from Stephanie Lynn's Under The Table and Dreaming.  Definitely check out her projects, they are awesome!

Here's my project:

The picture is over our TV in the living room and it looks so cute!

I spent a total of $0 on this project. I had quite a few old frames stashed away, this one in particular came with a matting, so I just printed off the letters & numbers in the sizes I wanted to fit in an 8x10 frame. We have a photo printer, so the entire project was super fast to complete.  I think in Stephanie's project she used a program to stitch the pieces together, but I'm not that computer savvy. 

My next project is putting up a little decor in the master bathroom, and also start putting together the guest room.

Moving on...

About a week ago Cali, the new pup went into heat. Aaahhh.... She is only 5 months now, so I definitely did not think it was going to happen so early. I was hoping to get her fixed later this month before I even had to go through a heat cycle, but I guess she was ready.

It's the first time I've ever been around a female dog in heat, let alone take care of one. It was 

G-R-O-S-S! 

It wasn't all that messy, but the smell....!!!!

She'll be getting fixed pretty soon!!!!

The Tarantula Wasp

These crazy, large critters are everywhere out here in the desert.  They fly around looking like evil fairies, but they are in fact, The Tarantula Wasp.

The Tarantula wasp's body measures around 2 inches, but it's legs and antennae are long, as well as its wings. It has a blue-black body with orange wings.  They are most active in the summers (like now), and during the day time.  The females give them their name, as they need a spider to host their larvae, and in their case, a tarantula is preferred.

The female wasp finds a tarantula by smell. She scampers across the land until she finds a burrow. She enters and expels the spider, then attacks it. She will probe the spider with her antennas, and when the spider lifts its front legs and shows its fangs, she will sting. She might grab one of the spiders legs and flip it over on its back and sting its belly, or approach form the side. Once stung, the tarantula will be paralyzed within seconds for the remainder of its life. The wasp will drink the fluid coming form the wound to replenish her strength from the encounter. She will then drag it back to her own burrow and lay a single egg on the spiders belly, then seal the chamber.

Once the egg hatches, the tiny grub begins to suck and feed on the spiders remains. It continues sucking until it finally rips itself from the spiders body.

**Click here to read straight from the source**