To my Abbie Rose

 

My little pippers,

It's hard to believe you're already five years old.  These past years have flown by and it has been so fun to watch you grow into the little girl you are now.  I tell you all the time that you need to stop getting big and you scrunch up your face and flex your little muscles and grunt a lot and say, "I try Mommy, but I just can't stay little!"

You are such a little girlie girl right now.  You love to go shopping with me and get so excited if I tell you you can pick something out.  You meticulously look around for the perfect dress or pair of shoes, touching everything you pass, but very obviously on the look out for something specific.  Your current love is long dresses that you can twirl in.  I bought you a long, yellow dress with flowers on it, and you would wear that every single day, all day and to bed if I let you.

You love to do your own hair now.  You spray detangler in it and brush it all out pretty well.  You can pull it back by yourself into a pony tail and then place the barrettes on either side of your face to hold your fringe hair in place.  You love to wear stick on earrings and you smear chap stick all over your face frequently.   You almost always have a necklace or bracelet or both on before we leave the house.  You like to grab your purse every time we leave the house and you put your sunglasses on top of your head just like you see your daddy do.

 

You are such a loving little girl.  Often times I will be working and you'll come up to me while I'm sitting at my desk to give me a kiss and tell me you love me.  You are ALWAYS up for an adventure, and you love getting out of the house and doing just about anything.  You are able to make friends easily wherever you go and you are quite obviously a natural leader.  You love to be in charge and when you are around little ones your age, you are usually coordinating things and making sure everyone is involved.  I hope you never lose your fearlessness and your confidence.

Sometimes you and Ben play so well together, and sometimes you fight like crazy.   You are usually happy as long as he’s going along with what you want him to do.  If not, you tend to try to force him to do what you want him to do and he’s getting to the point where he doesn’t like to be bossed around much.  You are all in to Barbie’s right now, and you love dressing them up.  You still like to do anything artsy and our kitchen table is usually a complete disaster with markers and paints and paper.

 

You are growing up so fast and I can’t believe you start kindergarten this year!  You are VERY excited about going to a new school and meeting your new teachers.  I wish I was as excited about it as you are.  If I could keep you this age forever, I would.

 

I love you more than you’ll ever know.

 

 

Love,

Your mama

A long overdue update

It’s been almost 3 months since I wrote my last blog.  That’s the longest stretch I haven’t posted since I started it 6 years ago.  I’m hoping I don’t regret slacking off in the blogging department in years to come, but I’ve been so busy and blogging (and photo editing) has just taken a back seat to everything else going on in my life.  I miss it though.  And I miss the past when I had time to blog weekly.

Things are good around here, just really busy.  My job as a realtor has been good.  I started working for Sean and Elisa Bell and I just love working with them.  They are great people and so knowledgeable about real estate.  It was a good switch for me, for sure, and I’ve been learning a lot from them.  Real estate is a tough business though.  I don’t really like working for commissions only and not ever knowing where you’ll find your next client.  In the past 2 days, I’ve had a bunch of clients fall through.  I found out one of my buyer clients when on realtor.com and found a house to buy and worked with someone else.  Other one of my rental clients found her own house to rent and a different one decided to buy and used a different realtor.  It’s just been tough and I take things like this too personally and it takes me a few days to get back into the groove after it seems like everything falls apart.  Real estate seems to have pretty high highs and pretty low lows and I don’t handle all the fluctuations all that well, especially when I put time and energy into helping people and take time away from my kids and pay for babysitters and then find out the client has used someone else.

I was sworn in yesterday as the 1st Vice President of the Luke Officer’s Spouses club and I’m excited about that, although it might turn out to be more than I bargained for.  It’ll be nice to know other people though and to be involved and give back to the base some.  I just have a lot on my plate already.  Abbie is done with preschool in a few weeks and the kids both start swimming lessons the last week in May.  Hopefully Ben won’t scream through every single lesson this time around and hopefully Abbie will get better at swimming.  They both love the pool and I really want them to have confidence in the water but also be cautious at all times.  They ask to go in our pool all the time.

Mark’s brother just moved in with us and it’s been nice having him here.  We also just got a new (to us) car, thanks to my parents help.  My dad found us a 2005 Volvo S40 with 65k miles on it up in MO and they brought it to us in Albuquerque a few weeks ago.  We love it and now we can finally get rid of the Passat we both hate.  Oh, and we paid $4000 to have the valve body fixed and the transmission rebuilt in that piece of junk and Mark got into an accident with it 5 hours after we picked it up so now we have to pay another $500 in deductible.  And then hopefully we can sell it and get at least a little bit of our money back.  I’d give the car to someone at this point, but we have to pay my parents back for the Volvo.  Hopefully it’ll all be behind us in a few weeks.  I can’t stand that car.

 

The kids are growing up so quickly.  And so is Sam.  He’s such a good dog now and Mark and I both love him more ever day.  He’s the perfect fit to our family.  Just a big old lazy dog, with just enough puppy in him to make him fun.  The dog LOVES to swim and he looks like a big polar bear when he’s in the pool.  We’re glad we got him for sure.

Mark is still looking into going to TPS (test pilot school) and he’s already applied for the masters program at AFIT (Air Force Institute of Technology).  He’d love to get a masters in Electrical Engineering, but he REALLY wants to get into TPS, and I would love for him to get into that also.  That would be the perfect fit for him and I think he’d be good at it and he’d enjoy it also.  And just by chance, yesterday Mark met a guy in his squadron that was there for some training that is going to be a commander at one of the TPS squadrons at Edwards this fall and is going to sit on the review board for choosing people to go through the program.  Mark talked to him about it and told him he was interested and then changed the flying schedule so Mark could fly with the guy today.  It’s fun to see Mark get so excited about stuff like this and hopefully him having a chance to fly with this guy so the guy has personal experience with him helps his odds of getting selected for TPS.  The guy also said he would be happy to write Mark a letter of recommendation, which is HUGE, and highly weighted in the selection process.  Mark deserves it and I wouldn’t be too surprised if he gets selected his first time applying, even though that is somewhat uncommon.  Time will tell.

It’s funny, we’ve been here a year and our next assignment has been on my mind a lot lately.  I don’t really want to move.  I have great friends here, I love my job here, we have a nice house here.  But this military lifestyle as been engrained into me and moving 6 times in 9 years does that to you I guess.  It’s fun to think about the possibilities, but then you think about the reality of having to move 2 kids, 3 dogs and all our junk all over creation and then it’s maybe not so exciting anymore.

Hopefully I can start to be a little more regular on my blogging.  Maybe I can make a goal to write 1 blog per week or something.  It’s not really the blogging that takes so long because, heck, I can ramble away with the best of them.  It’s more of the photo editing and organizing everything and sitting down to do “my” stuff at the computer vs working or networking.  Until next time!