Abbie pictures for Mark

Today Mark was able to call around 11am.  I was so surprised to hear from him at that time!  Usually I don’t get to talk to him until after 11pm, but Abbie was up at 11am, so I held the phone up to her ear so her daddy could talk to her.  She said “Hi!!!” really loudly when she heard his voice and she started to laugh and get all excited.  I cried.  I couldn’t help it.  She definitely knows who her daddy is and that he’s not here right now and she’s never gotten so excited hearing someone talk to her on the phone before.  I know she misses him, but not as much as I do.

She’s changed so much in just the week and a half Mark’s been gone.  She now says “dada” quite clearly.  (She used to say “nana” more often than “dada” when we tried to get her to say it.)  She said bye now.  She tried to say cheese for the first time today.  She plays differently now.  Now instead of just banging things together, she really tries to figure things out.  We have little set of  stacking cups and she’ll dump them all out and then put them all back together.  She’ll put little toys inside the cups.  She’ll put the cups inside bigger toys.  She’ll actually push herself forward by herself on her bug bike.  If she needs help with something, she’ll bring it over to you and hold it up to you so you can help her.  That’s all new since Mark left.  As long as she doesn’t start to walk when he’s gone, we’ll be okay.

I realized 2 nights ago when I was talking to Mark that I hadn’t taken any pictures of her since he left, so I took a few last night.  These are for you Mark.     

On a side note, we’re over halfway done with this TDY!  YAY!  My friend Brittney and I hang out pretty much every day during the week.  We run errands together, she comes over and helps me organize my house and unpack some, we explore the area.  She definitely makes my days go by a lot faster and she helps me out so much.  She’s super with Abbie too, I’ll put Abbie in the car and Brittney will get the stroller or vice versa.  If Abbie gets fussy in the car, Brittney will hand her a toy.  And I like that her husband isn’t a pilot, he’s an EOD officer, so he disables bombs.  She just truly is a godsend to me.  If our husbands deploy at the same time, we’ll most likely travel around Europe together.  We’re going to go to Nova, which is a town known for pottery about 2 hrs from here sometime soon and we’re going to start exploring our area more too.

I feel much safer in this house than I was anticipating with Mark gone.  I don’t really feel unsafe at all actually.  Granted, I lock the place up like Fort Knox every night, but still.  Mark figured out before he left how to deadbolt our door.  You have to use a key from the inside and turn it like 10 times and then it drops like 5-6 bars down inside the door and the frame.  There’s no way someone could break that door down, unless they blew the door apart, but the gypsies aren’t violent like that.  I just set all my alarms and lock all the doors and windows and I actually sleep  pretty well.

That’s all for now!!!