Everyone in our family has always said that Joseph is Dan all over again. It’s a fact. The first photo is Dan when he was about five or six. The second photo is Joe at six:
See what I mean? I had nothing to do with Joe except as an incubation system. We have that photo of Dan in a frame in our living room. Everyone always thinks it’s Joe. He is his father through and through. And not just in looks. He’s a very charismatic, onery, funny person that everyone loves instantly. They are buddies because they understand each other so much better than the rest of us do. Daniel and I would have been bored silly over this last year without Joseph. Daniel and I are more serious. When we go shopping I can find Dan and Joseph anywhere in the store because I can hear them. Two kids, one big and one little, having a ball no matter where they go.
Joe gives me stuff to stick in Dan’s packages when I send them. He sent a letter to his dad with a secret message in “code” in the last package:
Yesterday we got this email from Dan:
When we were reading it the boys were laughing hysterically. Even Joseph realized his “code” was pretty easy when he looked at it again and his dad was pulling his leg even from 3,101 miles away.
Ahhh… at last Advent is here! Last year, in preparation for Dan being gone this Christmas I bought a little 2 foot tree for the boys and I for this year. After a beautiful Mass this morning I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t settle and put that puny little tree out. This is my very favorite time of year. A little strange this year without snow (cold for that matter) and without Dan.
It took everything I had but I got our tree out of the attic and the boxes and boxes of ornaments and decorations. One of the great things about Germany is they do Christmas VERY well. We have beautiful decorations and ornaments that we’ve collected over the 12+ years we’ve lived here.
If you haven’t heard it yet, check out The Nativity Story: Sacred Songs. Absolutely beautiful music. I also love all of the Mannheim Steamroller Christmas CDs.
We live in Bavaria and Bavaria is very Catholic. One of my favorite things each year is to scour the florists for the perfect Advent wreath. Not really a “wreath” but I fell in love with the one I found this year. After we decorated the tree tonight the boys and I sat down and said a prayer and our intentions for this Season and then lit the first candle.
The boys and I had a great Thanksgiving in Garmisch. Three years ago we hiked half way up Kramer Mountain with our long-time friends to find snow and have hot chocolate at the St. Martin Hutte half way up:
We did it again this year:
I’d say the kids have grown a little, wouldn’t you? Good thing because Joe was not riding on my shoulders most of the way like he did on Dan’s three years ago. These pictures were taken in the exact same spot. It was almost 60 degrees when the boys and I left Garmisch yesterday. Not good for the skiing tourism.
Here’s a view from St. Martin Hutte where we had a nice cold beer (soda for the kids) and pretzels fresh out of the oven:
Meanwhile, Dan was having a fantastic Thanksgiving of his own. Country Music star, Aaron Tippin, surprised them at Bagram with a concert.
We have about ten Saturdays until he comes home! I can do that standing on my head.
Last Tuesday night the Spouse’s Club had a “Make it, Bake it & Take it night to raise funds for the club. Everyone baked or made something (most brought gift baskets of some sort) to be auctioned off. Here’s the large tote bag that was my contribution:
Both fabrics came from a German thrift store. I’m positive the yellow is quite old. Love it. I found the flower tutorial at Wisecraft. The pattern for the bag is from this book:
That’s how the boys and I count down the rest of the deployment. We have 18 Saturdays left. It’s so much more easy to swallow than 127 days. Thank God because I’m about at the end of my rope. Single parenthood is for the birds. I don’t know how people do it on a permanent basis. I am on the go from the time I slap the snooze button for the last time at 6:15 until the boys are in bed at 8:30. Doesn’t help that I’m a moron and started the boys in Tae Kwon Do before the soccer season was over. We have something every single day of the week now. Even on Sundays there is Mass and CCD (and I’m the Religious Ed Coordinator so I have to work that day).
We did get to spend about an hour with Dan (sort of) a couple of weeks ago. He was promoted to CW3 via video conferencing (think really high speed web cam). It was nice. He was actually promoted on September 1st but held off on the ceremony until all his troops were back in Afghanistan from R&R.
I have good days and I have bad days. I’ve told you all a little about my “battle buddy”, Pam. She has been my rock. Always there and we always seem to be on the same sheet of music. Her husband is in Iraq and due home in December. She has three kids and two of them are younger than the boys AND she has a full-time job. On top of that, her husband had only been home from Iraq for about eight months before he had to leave again on this deployment. We had three full years between Dan’s deployments and that was hard enough. It just stinks no matter how you look at it but she always has a positive spirit and keeps me laughing. I mean that awesome gut-busting kind of laughter where you start tearing up. You can see why she’s my hero and I’m so proud to call her my friend.
We’re training to run together in the Berlin Half Marathon in April. She ran it last year. Both guys will be home by then and it’s our Grand Finale to the deployments to come out strong. So I’m going to have a little contest to liven things up around here. We’re running in a 10K next month to keep us motivated. The prize? A full pound of the lavender yarn I have up in the last post. If I can’t sell it, I might as well give it away. Your mission, should you accept it, is to tell me where we’ll be running. I’ll take all the correct answers and draw a name from them. Don’t spoil the fun and put it in the comments, email your answer. I’ll give a hint per post until I get the right answer. I have a feeling someone will get it right off though. Here’s the first hint:
On the knitting front I picked up the shawl kit that I bought in Shetland. It’s a simple lace pattern but I’m having a heck of a time getting it set up and going. Could be because I’m trying to watch “The Unit” while I’m knitting. lol.
Today Dan and I spend another anniversary apart. It’s our 14th. He asked me to marry him only a week after dating and I said yes. This is the first photo ever taken of us together. We were engaged for about a week and had gone up to my visit my family in NH and my Aunt took this snapshot. We were in an Army school together at Ft. Devens (closed now, but it was about an hour west of Boston). We got married by a JP in Annapolis, Md. almost exactly two months after we met with just a couple of witnesses. We just knew. Everyone else thought we were nuts (except our families – they seemed to know it would work). Like a lot of military couples we had two weddings. The JP one was to get the paperwork rolling so we could be stationed together (I was at NSA in Maryland and he was in San Antonio). It only took the Army about two months to get the paperwork through and I moved to San Antonio on Thanksgiving weekend. The picture below left is us after the JP marriage on the courthouse steps and the one below right is a photo from the big church wedding that we had for family almost a year later at the Ft. Sam Houston chapel in San Antonio. No laughing at the poodle-do please. Even Oprah had bad do’s and she had someone doing her hair.
I think I picked the right guy. Even from Afghanistan, he has managed to do well in the gift department:
The Celtic Knot arrived for my birthday back in May and the Midnight Sky one arrived yesterday. They’re getting to know him very well at Golding Fiber Tools! Let me tell you… these babies spin FOREVER! Beautiful to look at and so nice to work with. The fiber is some that I hand dyed last year.
Last but not least, I have done some knitting during my hiatus. A bunch of us on the Elann chat site had a knit-a-long for the Bed and Breakfast sweater from 2003 Winter issue of Interweave. I have most of the back done and most of the front. I cheated and just did the rib pattern on the back. It wasn’t laziness … I swear…. it wasn’t…. it was simply a matter of comfort. I thought it’d be weird on my back with those cables. You call it a weak excuse but I call it practicality. The color is a darker green. Not so grey as it came out in the photo.
Dan’s uncle was released from the hospital today for three months of rest at home! Yeah! Thank you for all your well wishes and prayers.
Just got an update on Dan’s uncle. Looks like he’s going to be okay. He’s breathing on his own and actually joking. A couple of weeks in the hospital and two months of downtime at home with lots of loving care from his wife and he’ll be almost good as new. Thank God. Thank you for all your prayers and well wishes.
More Shetland pictures to follow. Just didn’t want everyone to think I’d lost all my creativity and would just be showing pictures from our trip forever.
I have a confession to make. I haven’t been knitting much this Summer. There. I said it. I have been sewing though. I decided that I don’t care how it looks and set up a little sewing corner in my dining room so I could get to sewing and finally put my machine to work. There’s absolutely no place else in the house with enough light and space to do it. There’s a huge walk-in closet (unusual in Germany) upstairs but it’s dark and full of wool. With Dan gone we don’t entertain now, so who cares what it looks like.
Having to pull everything out and put it back again when I feel like sewing something really puts a hamper on my creativity. I have this awesome machine and I use it so little that I have to reinvent the wheel whenever I take it out because I can’t remember how to do the gazillions of cool things it can do. So when I’m actually sewing, the dining room table is covered but it’s easier to clean up by just putting stuff neatly in this little corner than to haul everything up and down the stairs and I find I’m sewing more now. Which I like.
A neighbor girl (her dad also works in Dan’s office) is turning five tomorrow. I have all boys. It’s a treat when I get to make something for a girl. I went all out girlie-girl because once-upon-a-time in a far away land I was a very girlie girl and I miss it. With some inspiration from Autum (Creative Little Daisy) and the Amy Butler “In Town” pattern, this is what I came up with for her gift:
I used the main purse fabric for the pocket on the back side of the little zipper bag (which I used this pattern for). Yes, I messed up and somehow ended up with the pocket on the back instead of the front. Worked out though because I also cut it wrong and if I’d put it on the front the pocket would have covered the zipper. So when I screw up it’s kinda like a double negative. lol. It erases itself and no one would ever know…. except you.
I bought a handmade tissue pouch at the local fabric store and tore it apart to see how it went together. There are plenty of tutorials on the web so don’t ask me why I didn’t just go the easy route. The edging in red was also an accident because I had to use the scraps as I could. Just turned out that way. I was using a set of fat quarters and didn’t want to cut into another set just to make a little tissue pouch. Really funny because the fat quarter pack is called Serendipity. Guess it’s true to it’s name.
I was so excited about it that yesterday I told the birthday girl that I couldn’t wait until she saw what I made for her. She said, “I hope it’s not a baby present!” LOL. I assured her that it was very much five-year old style, in fact, people would probably think she’s six! She was very happy to hear it. You’d think she was 36 the way she talks. It’s hilarious. The ensemble will go very well with her beautiful red hair. I also put a little tube of kids hand creme I found in the German apothecary (the tube is the perfect shade of orange) and a tube of cherry flavored lip balm (also German) that matches the red in the bag. And it’s bad luck to give a wallet without money it it so there’s a $1 bill in the pouch. I hope to hear squeals of delight this afternoon.
How long do you think I can milk these photos for? lol
Obviously, the highlight of our Shetland trip was our visit to Fair Isle. I knew the plane would be small, but holy cow! Where’s it’s mother? When you have to flip the seat up, like getting into the back of a car… well…. I’m just sayin’… it was small.
I could reach out and tap the pilot, John (who was very friendly… very young, but friendly), on the shoulder… and I was in the 2nd seat. I was just glad Joe didn’t keep asking, “Are we there yet?” like he usually does. It would have caused John great angst and we couldn’t have that. To tell you the truth, we didn’t talk much because you couldn’t hear over the engine anyway. For the first time in my life I was nervous in a plane. I love to fly. In real planes.
I forgot all about it the second we landed though. As I was getting off the plane a woman approached me, “Jean?” I assumed it was Florrie, the woman we were renting a car from (the island is small and walk-able but with two kids and unpredictable weather we wanted to be sure to see the whole island and have shelter from rain). Nope. It was a Kathy Coull whom I’d met online through the group that I went to Mull with a couple of years ago. I hadn’t emailed with her in months. She handed me a map of the island (don’t laugh – it actually came in handy for the two roads) and invited us to lunch! She’d spoken with Liz Lovick (one of the Mull group) in Orkney the day before and Liz had reminded her that we were coming in. I was very pleasantly surprised. She put out a very nice spread of breads, cheeses and tomato soup which was perfect for a misty, windy day. If you get the chance to go to Fair Isle, she does run the only B&B on the island so if you google her name and Fair Isle you can contact her. She’d just moved into the house she’s in now from another one on the island. There were a couple of nice young men staying at her B&B who had lunch with us. They were doing research on the social aspects of living in such a small community. I’d love to read the paper when it’s finished. The boys fell in love with Kathy’s dog. Another picture I forgot to take. I need to send her a thank you gift for her kindness.
I love this little photo from the war. It’s was meant to show how the soldiers built relationships with the islanders. Sappy, but cute. For such a tiny place, it actually saw a bit of action. The South Lighthouse was actually bombed a couple of times in WWII. You can read about it here.
What I can’t seem to get my head around is that this teensy little speck in the sea is known the world over for it’s knitting of all things. It’s incredible. They have a little museum that was open during the afternoon we were there. If you click on the thumbnail of the knitting display, you’ll get a bigger view.
If you look up in the right-hand corner of the museum photo and squint really hard, you can see a long knitted sampler. I’m a dork. I forgot to take a picture of it. I didn’t even get it in the video. But you can stop squinting. I tried cropping down to it from the museum picture for you:
You can also see part of a sign off of one of the older Good Shepherds. That’s the boat that brings mail and supplies to the island from Shetland. We thought about going this way instead of the plane but we heard it’s a very rough ride and it’s longer. We didn’t have the time this trip. I’d like to try it next time though and actually stay on Fair Isle for at least a week.
Here are more croppings from that museum photo:
I forgot one of the sheep pictures in the last post. We always try to hit Science Centers in cities we visit because the boys love them. This special sheep was at the Science Center in Aberdeen. You push a button and watch as the sheep eats some hay and then it either poops or pees. Sometimes you get lucky and it does both! 🙂 You could hear people yell, “Jackpot!” when that happened. Okay. I’m lying. Would have been funny though.
Some of you may read tea leaves or tarot cards but in our house we read milk spills. Okay… that’d be ridiculous but…. one morning a few months ago I poured the boys’ cereal. When I was putting the milk back in the fridge Joseph got all excited saying we had our own lamb. ???? I turned around and saw what he was talking about. Turns out that I spill milk in shapes. You be the judge:
In keeping with the theme here are some of the gazillion many sheep pics I took in in Shetland:
This shot was taken on Fair Isle. That’s one of the two little churches. They are really close to each other and apparently the islanders use both.
I watched a dog for some friends at church this past weekend. Her name is Charley, she’s old, very sweet but she does not like Aggie very much. Charley doesn’t get that the young whipper snapper just wants to play… really bad. And Aggie doesn’t get why the old woman snaps at her whenever she tries to get to know her better. I think they finally came to an agreement though because I found them somewhat close together for the first time in three days:
Aggie has that innocent “What?” look on her face and Charley just wishes she’d go away.
The Tooth Fairy visited our house Sunday night. We took this picture for Dan because the tooth was quite the topic most of the time he was home for R&R.
At bedtime it went something like this:
Joe: Mom… do you put the money under my pillow?
Me: WHAT?! Who told you *that*? I wouldn’t say that too loud, you’ll offend the Tooth Fairy.
Joe: Okay. I was just asking.
Santa, Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny all exist in our house until the day I’m pushin’ up daisies. If you don’t believe, you don’t receive. Daniel’s known for quite a while but he won’t admit it. Not to me anyway. I think he thinks I actually believe or he’s just smart enough to not want to ruin my fun. I’m pretty sure he’s had a talk with Joe, “Mom still believes in them so don’t tell her”.
So the Tooth Fairy must have heard Joe because she left him a note telling him how great the tooth looked and how if he brushed really well, he’d get more money because the better the teeth look, the more she pays. Yeesh. She never left me a note. Joe is one lucky kid. He’s also easily bought off so I’m hoping the promise of extra cash will get him to brush better.
One of my favorite things from both of our trips to Shetland was the Jamieson’s Spinning Mill in Sandness on the West side of the main island. You can just walk around and watch the tons and tons of wool become yarn,
sweaters:
and woven fabric:
I love how cleverly they can weave several different color ways on one warp. This is only three of the several color ways of scarves that were on this particular loom. They just slightly felt the fabric and then cut along the yellow lines in strips and then cut the strips into scarves. Amazing how the weft works through all the warp colors. They had bolts of warps ready to go onto the looms. I was sad that the weaver(s) weren’t there when we visited. I did get to watch the women doing the joining on the knitwear though. Very cool.
The staff are very kind and don’t seem to mind visitors. Even small, curious boys who make the knitting machines stop by accident. :-O
When we went there in ’97 Daniel was only three but he loved it and cried when it was time to go. On this visit we gave the boys their choice of where to go on the last day. Even though we’d spent about three hours at the mill the day before, that’s where they chose to go back to. The staff greeted us with smiles and ran the boys around showing them different things that we’d missed… somehow… the day before.
Well, tonight’s the big night. First school night of the year. Good thing next weekend is already a long one. I think we’ll need it. Both boys are really excited. I’m actually not ready yet. The last month has been a blur so it kind of snuck up on me.
We made it through the halfway point of the deployment! The rough patch is behind us and everything is looking up now. The boys and I took Dan back to the airport on Wednesday morning for his flight back to Afghanistan. There were lots of tears but we’re back to “normal” deployment routine and ready for the next five months or so to fly by. This picture was taken last week on Fair Isle. One of the local dogs greeted us as we walked North from the South Lighthouse.
School starts on Monday. Joe starts soccer practice the same day and Daniel starts Tae Kwon Do in a month. It’ll start looking like Fall in a couple of weeks, the Holidays will soon be upon us and before you know it, Dan will be home again.
The new Agent taking Dan’s place here at the office has finally arrived. He and Dan were in Warrant Officer school together and have been good friends since. I met his wife at their graduation but didn’t really remember her. She’s terrific. So are their three boys who are all around Daniel and Joe’s ages. Their oldest and Daniel will be in class together. Yes, things are definitely looking up. I’m in much better spirits than I was a few months ago when I had the wind knocked out of me and my self confidence took a nose dive. Dan sat me down when he got home and made me remember who I am. He tried over the phone but it was a lot different and much more convincing with his arms around me. No wonder I like that guy. 😉
Dan came home five days after the family left. He was a day late because he got held up in Kuwait but they extended his leave by a day so that was okay. He was home for a few days before we left for Shetland. What a great trip that was. I’ll share pictures bit by bit. I took about 300 of them so it’s going to be tough choosing. Fair Isle was magical. We just flew in for the day on an itty bitty eight-seater plane. You could see the whole island as we approached the tiny little runway. I’ll fill you in on everything as I share the pictures. Here are a few to keep you in suspense for a couple of days:
The boys and I on Fair Isle
Fair Isle as we flew in. The big white spot on the tip closest to us is the North Lighthouse
Here you can see the houses on the southern part of the island, the South Lighthouse and the big rock in the foreground is Sheep Rock
