A wonderful night

Jayda's Pumpkin

Bryan's Pumpkin

My Pumpkin (which really was the BEST!)

Tonight we finally carved our pumpkins, they turned out great and we all had so much fun doing it together! Ok, more like we had fun watching DADDY do it, haha! Bryan was a great sport about it though. I tried my hardest to get Jayda to help me clean out pumpkins but she kept telling me "It felt too icky, with an i" (Thank you Leap Frog, my daughter is FINALLY learning about the alphabet!).

Nights like tonight feel too good to be true. We are all used to him being gone, it's so weird now that he will be home for longer than a few weeks at a time! It's like we get to have a little glimpse of civilian life and what it would be like to have him come home every night. I know it won't last long, three or four more months and then it will be back to the crazy schedule and never knowing whether he is coming or going. Last October when he came home, we only got two months of "in port" time before they started work ups for their next deployment which happened five months later. And I was so incredibly sick from being pregnant that all i remember was being able to puke in privacy when he would come home!! This time it's different, we are all soaking up as much Daddy time as we can and cramming as much family stuff in as humanly possible! Even if it's just us all laying on the floor rolling around together.

And I am VERY excited that he will be around for the little part of Dallyn's life. He missed so much with Jayda.....crawling, walking, talking, weaning, birthdays, big girl beds! When he left last time she was a baby and he came home to a toddler. I am sure that was really hard for him. I mean, it was tough on me and I was even there to witness the transistion!

I am not one of those wives who says that they love their whole life and everything about it. The truth is that I HATE when he is gone. I hate having to explain to Jayda a million and one times why he isn't just on duty and won't be coming home the next day. I HATE e-mailing him and being all happy and peppy even though I just want to bawl my eyes out. But the time he spends away makes times like this one hundred trillion times better than it would be if we didn't have to go through it. I don't want to be a wife who takes her husband and family for granted, even though sometimes I want to ring his little neck!!!