Trips, trips and more trips!

I feel like I haven’t written a blog in forever!  I’ve been pretty busy here, but that’s a good thing.  I love being busy.

Mark leaves for his TDY to Vegas tomorrow.  He’ll be gone a little over 2 weeks.  While he’s gone, I need to finish the quilt for my grandma.  I’m about halfway done quilting the top and then I need to figure out how to bind it.  I need to do all my Christmas cards (about 150 of them).  I have a few of them done, and I just got the pictures ordered.  I have the letter written but I think I’m going to try to emboss the letter since I’m just printing it on plain paper.  And I’d like to finish a few scarves for a few special people.  I should be plenty busy while Mark is gone.

Three days after Mark gets back we’re going to Cinque Terre for Thanksgiving.  Just us, Abbie and the dogs.  We’ve heard lots about Cinque Terre since we’ve been here, so we’re excited to finally see it for ourselves!

Four days after we get back from Cinque Terre, we’re going up to Amsterdam for 5 days.  I’ve never been to The Netherlands so I’m pretty darn excited about that.  Mark has to go there for a session in the altitude chamber and we decided Abbie and I would join him.  Mainly because we’d spent $375 on plane tickets for our Ireland trip that isn’t happening, and they’re non-refundable.   So we paid extra money to switch the tickets to this trip.  It’s expensive, but we won’t travel much next year due to Mark being done most of it..

Ten days after we get back from Amsterdam we head to Austria for our squadron Christmas/Ski trip!  Pretty darn excited about that too.  Childcare is included in the cost and I haven’t been skiing in forever.  We’ll get to go on a horse drawn carriage ride and drink hot cocoa and hang out with bunches of great people!  I wish it was longer than just a weekend, but we’ll take what we can get!

Two days after we get back from Austria Mark’s family is coming for Christmas!  Yay!  I’m pretty darn excited about that and Abbie won’t know what to do with all the attention!  It’ll be good for her to be around family and we’re all excited about sharing in her excitement during her 2nd Christmas.

Six days after Mark’s family gets here all of us are headed to Rome to spend a week there!  It’ll be fun to travel with everyone and to meet Alex’s girlfriend, who is going to meet us there.

Less than a week after we get back from Rome, Mark heads out on another month-ish long TDY.  And then a month or so after that I’ll be headed to the States for 5-6 months!

Life is a bit of a whirlwind right now.  Sometimes I have to just sit down and catch my breath, but as I said, I love it.  I love having lots of things planned and lots of things to look forward too and lots of things to keep me busy.  January will probably be a hard month for me because I get so excited about Christmas and all the activities surrounding Christmas, it’s kind of a big disappointment when it’s all over.  And on top of that Mark will be gone.  But I have lots of great friends to keep me company during his absence.  And honestly, I’ll probably spend the majority of the time preparing for worrying about our trip back to the States.  If I can survive the trip over there with 2 dogs and a 21 month old by myself I’ll be doing good.

In other news, Sadie had a vet appt today.  She’s maintaining, but not really getting any better.  She’s still on steroid pills and she will be for the next 2 weeks and the dr. wants to see her back in two weeks and then he’ll try to have the back dr look at her.  She’s still pretty wobbly in her back end and he said no stairs or jumping on/off furniture, ever again.  Good thing we just moved our bedroom upstairs….  But really good thing that she’s a little dog.  =)

Oh, and all 3 of us are sick right now.  Darn cold season!