This Better Work

 
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BP finishes pumping cement into blown-out well

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I really need this to work out well so I can have The General home.  It's been 65 days since he left home to work in the Gulf of Mexico.  Lucky for us I have been able to visit a few times.  That's made it bearable, but I really want him to come home.  There's talk of a deployment in his future and I would really like to be able to spend the next few months with him until then.  I am super proud of him for all his hard work during this time.  It's going to be a change for him coming home and going back to work essentially 7-4 every day.

 

Mini Vacation

With The General still working with the oil spill, my mother and I decided that it was time we took ourselves and the dog down there for a few days.  It was the first time the dog has been to the beach.  We had a blast!

At first, he was afraid of the water and kept backing out of it.  But we finally got him to go in the water and pretty soon....well take a look...

We had a super awesome time!!


Even though it was just a couple of days we enjoyed our time spent with The General and can't wait to go back to the beach.

 

Happy 4th of July

The 4th of July is my FAVORITE holiday.  I'm excited to get to spend the holiday with my husband on the Gulf Coast.  Fireworks rank pretty high on my list of favorite things.  Looking back at last year I will have to say that things have greatly improved for The General and I.  We spent last 4th of July in a hotel after moving out of our apartment when we found out they were providing illegal electricity.  So we were practically homeless.  Let me just say that 2 nights in a hotel room with a dog and a cat are not the most exciting way to spend the holiday.  But we did get to see some pretty awesome fireworks from the balcony of the hotel.

No More You Tube

Not forever...just no more for me today!

I've gotten sucked in and have been watching videos of soldiers coming home and crying my eyes out for about 2 hours.  Definitely not a good way to spend the holiday.  I'm spending the morning at the hotel waiting for The General to get done with work for the day.  It's been 33 days since The General left home to work on the Gulf Coast.  I'm thinking of it as a "mini-deployment."  I'm so blessed that I'm able to talk to him most every day and that I can come visit him.  But it still sucks having him away from home.

A New Family Tradition

I've created a monster! It all started with the quilts I made for two of my best friends' weddings. Then The General's cousin and his wife were pregnant and we wanted to make them a baby quilt. Now it's almost expected that I will make one for each of the nieces and nephews (thank goodness we only have 5 between the two of us) and for any new babies.


The one for the baby turned out great. The General's cousin is a hunter so we decided to make the quilt for both the cousin and his wife. One side is all pink and white (so cute) and the other is pink camo!

Here's one of the nieces and her new quilt. I absolutely LOVE the way this one turned out. This girl is all into pink. When we gave the baby quilt to the cousin and his wife, she came up to me later and said she wanted one just like it. So I was able to use some of the leftover fabric. And I found some awesome fabric for the back - you can't really tell in the picture but the back is pink and sparkly.  It was so pretty I wanted to keep it for myself but I knew she would love it more than me.

Well we just found out that two of the other cousins are now pregnant and due a month apart this Fall. I had better get busy on those.

Wedding Day

Here is my brother walking me down the aisle!  I couldn't go down the aisle in a wheelchair.  It was tough but so worth it.  

And when I got down there, I was able to sit on a stool.  It turned out to be a beautiful wedding.  Exactly what we wanted.

It's Been Awhile

I am writing a recap of 2009.  In a nutshell: WOW!  So over the next few days I'm going to post some of the highs and lows of the year.  Is it really possible that the best year of your life is also the worst of your life?  Well that's what happened to me...

Where to begin again?

April 2009

What a great month!  The General returned home from Iraq and we got engaged. 

May 2009

Not a bad month.  We moved into a new and bigger apartment and started planning our wedding.

June & July 2009

This is when things turned bad....we found out at the end of June that our apartment complex was in financial trouble.  What they didn't tell us was that the city had stopped granting new electricity permits until the complex paid it's bills.  So essentially we had moved in at the end of May and had been getting power illegally until the end of June (much to our surprise!!).  So at the end of June they cut the power and we were forced to move.  At the time we weren't sure we wanted to stay in Jackson.  The General hadn't found a job yet.  We thought about moving back up to North MS and even went up there for a couple of weeks and stayed with The General's parents.  In the end we ended up staying and found a nice apartment.  Things were looking up.  At the end of July we were given three wedding/bridal showers.  My mom drove over from Huntsville and we all went up to Memphis and North MS for the festivities. My mother-in-law is the secretary at the church and belongs to a sewing group.  This group of women gave us the most wonderful wedding shower.  I was completely overwhelmed.

August 2009

Work was insane but things were going well with the wedding planning.  In fact, it's a blessing now as we look back that things were in order a couple of weeks before the wedding.  That's when disaster struck!

Just 4 days before the big day I fell in the middle of the night.  The General and I had been packing our bags getting ready to leave on Thursday for the wedding weekend.  We had bags everywhere - bags for the wedding and bags for the honeymoon.  So anyway I woke up around 12:30 AM on Wednesday morning and had to go to the bathroom.  On my way around the bed I tripped over The General's backpack.  That might not have been so bad but I landed on a dog bone and ended up breaking both bones in my leg just above my ankle and tearing all the ligaments in my ankle.  Needless to say it was bad.  The General called 911 and within 5 minutes we had firemen, policemen, and paramedics in the home (guess it was a slow night).  Luckily we live within 1/4 mile from a hospital.  Now I had never broken a bone in my life so I was not equipped for such pain.  And the ER doctor was not very sympathetic to our situation.  He told us that there wouldn't be a wedding - this sent me into hysterics.  Well he told us it was definitely broken and put me in a splint and sent me home with crutches and instructions to call an ortho doctor in the morning.  So we got home and I still had to go to the bathroom.  So I attempt to hobble into the bathroom and I tripped (AGAIN!) but was able to reach out and stop myself from falling too hard (however we would find out 2 weeks later that I had broken my scapula in that fall).

The next day we called an orthopaedic specialist and explained that situation but they couldn't see me that day.  So I called another place (which also happened to be next door to the hospital so it was close to home).  They were going to fit me in that morning.  We go to see the doctor and he does some x-rays and comes into the room and says "well it's broken." (no kidding?!?!?)  Fortunately Dr. D said that the swelling was too bad to even consider surgery so he said we could continue with the wedding and even go on our honeymoon.  We scheduled surgery for the day after Labor Day (2 days after we returned from our honeymoon).

Our Wedding - the show must go on!  Everyone was amazed that we were going through with it.  We borrowed a wheel chair and a walker (I couldn't use the crutches because of the broken scapula).   The General was a good sport about things.  We made some logistical changes to accommodate my wheelchair but for the most part everything went off without a hitch.

Gatlinburg

Finally!! I've been saying forever how I was going to post pictures of the ring and the proposal but life kind of got away from me. We had a fabulous time in Gatlinburg. He totally surprised me with my ring and the formal proposal.

Also, I ordered my wedding dress. I can't post pics because you know who is a reader. But it's gorgeous and I am so excited to wear it.

The Big Day

So we finally settled on a date - August 29. Yikes!!! That's only 4 months away. Lots of factors to think about - jobs, family, and football. That's right I said football. We had to plan the wedding around Ole Miss football. We have season tickets as does his sister's family. It's crazy I know. But we're getting married at his family's church in small town MS. We're going to keep it small (hopefully).

Good News

The General has made it home safely from Iraq!!!

I've been so consumed with spending time with him and his family that this is the first time I've been able to even get to a computer. And to top that...the weekend before he came home my apartment flooded. So I've been just a little bit busy. But I'll be back to blogging this week hopefully. I've missed reading updates.