What a Week!

This has been a very long week. It's been a good week, but a long week. I spent rainy Monday hanging out chilling because I knew I had a rather busy week coming up. Tuesday started with Army Family Team Building. We had an Instructor Course and that can be stressful just because we have few instructors who are qualified to teach so we are always on standby to fill in. We had 10 students this go round which is HUGE, we were very excited all week about that fact.

Oh back to Monday real quick...I was chatting with one of Kev's friends online (gotta love facebook) and he was kind enough to share with me a pic of Kevin from high school. I have never seen him with this much hair!

Tuesday also marked 3 years since we lost our friends Bryant and Jose. It was a very emotional day for many reasons but this was certainly one of the top reasons. Their legacy continues on because we will not forget.


Tuesday night, I attended the Volunteer of the Year Ceremony. It was a great event. I was nominated by Army Community Services. There were 39 nominees. I took the boys as my guests and we had a great time. The kids loved the name cards and loved being my "guests".
They also quite enjoyed the food. In the pic below are 15 plates but they polished off 17 total, lol. They had a lot of fun. Daniel was funny because he told me his cupcake smelled weird but it didn't stop him from eating it up.After we ate, all the nominees were called up and given their awards. We got a framed certificate and a really nice watch. After that there was a performance of "One Moment in Time", the song got me emotional thinking about missing Kevin, thinking about Nita and Bryant and Jose's family. Then I let myself look at my boys and they were just so handsome. I was sad thinking about how fast they were growing up. I was getting pretty worked up inside. So after the song when they did the announcement of three top winners, I wasn't really paying attention. I knew one of them and was so happy for her. When they called my name, I couldn't even really hear my name and certainly didn't believe it. I was a bit emotional, it was a shock. The boys joined me on stage to accept my award for Installation Volunteer of the Year and the Yellow Rose of Texas Award. The only thing that could have made that night better was if Kevin had been there. The story they wrote made me sound like a crybaby and had a dramatic flair to it but it was a decent article (you can read it HERE), I did leave active duty 10 years ago but did Reserve time after so I didn't don my uniform for the last time 10 years ago, wanted to clarify that, lol.
Here is a pic of us with CSM Ciotola, he is just the most awesome person...Here's a pic of me with all the stuff I brought home. The basket had a lot of great stuff in it, the boys had a good time checking out the loot.The rest of the week was just busy. On Wednesday, I had more AFTB Instructor Course and then we had our ACS Volunteer Appreciation luncheon where I received ACS Volunteer of the Year and a yummy lunch.

Thursday we graduated 10 new instructors for AFTB, woohoo!!! Thursday night, Nita and I went to the Sugarland concert. It was a FUN concert. I wish I had pics but we never know when they are going to let us take pics or not so we always leave the cameras in the car and when we do, we realize we could have taken them! But it was a great concert minus the bubble happy girl in front of us. They gave out bubbles to blow when their bubble machines went off but the girl liked to just do hers (and someone jacked ours!). But we did get our bubbles and I blew them later when we were on the top level of the parking garage trying to take pics of the capitol.

Friday was a PTA kind of day where we headed to Sam's to get some stuff, sadly we couldn't get the hand sanitizer we needed for one of our Teacher Appreciation week because everyone is freaking out over the swine flu and have bought out the hand sanitizer. We had to change it up but I think it will turn out okay in the end. I'm pretty random and different things strike me funny. It's been a long and tiring year with PTA so when we came across these bags, I chuckled and made some comment about the PTA driving us to using these bags...
Friday night the boys went camping with a friend of ours from church. His wife and I took the opportunity to go to dinner and movie for a girls night out. We had a good time and so did they!

Today, we hit the barracks to make the beds for our Single Soldiers who start returning home in the coming week. Woohoo!


So a busy week indeed but a great week too!