The Home Stretch: Monday

Today is day one of what I'm calling the Home Stretch. I was going to go to a coffee with my friends, but there is a horrible case of Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease going around base, and the last thing I want is for Baby Caroline to be sick when she meets her daddy! As hard as it was to give up a fun time-consumer (in a good way-that's the whole point of this week), I bowed out at the last minute. So today I've mostly been sitting around, trying to create a game plan of how to pass the time before Greg gets home. One of the things I decided to do was to hang up Greg's homecoming sign. For those of you that don't know, hanging up homecoming signs on the fences outside the front gate of a base is USMC tradition (and probably in other branches too, although not all branches have units coming home in busses in droves - some come straight off the plane, others meet family at the ship). Anyway, the concept is that when the boys arrive on the busses, the first thing they see before they even enter the base are signs that their wives and kids  have made for them. It's also a signal to everyone else who lives on or visits the base that a unit is coming home, which is a great feeling too, to imagine a family that has been waiting for months to see their husband/Daddy and finally he is home.

Well, finally that family is us - Caroline, Rocky, and myself! I felt like I've come full circle today, because I remember tearing up when we first moved here every time I'd see the "Can't Wait To Meet You" sign from a baby who had been born while his/her Daddy was gone. I remember thinking, I don't think that's possible to survive that. And yet, with just a few more tiny steps, I will add that as one of my biggest life accomplishments so far! But enough about that....anyway, we hung up our sign today, right outside of the front gate, and here's the finished product:

Hopefully Greg will be on the right side of the bus so he can see it when he comes in. Rocky also made a sign, but we'll save that one for the backyard. Once I put that one up (later in the week), I'll upload a pic of that as well.




P.S. For those of you who think that perhaps I actually flew to Afghanistan to fly this banner up, no, you're wrong - this is actually what 29 Palms looks like. And yes, apparently it does look exactly like Afghanistan. One less transition Greg has to make, right?!