coming up for air

It has been over three months since I have blogged.  Oops.  It's been an emotionally tumultuous three months, but three months of continuing to see God's faithful hand carry us.  I want to get back in the writing groove as I think that I now have emotional bandwidth and headspace to process on [electronic] paper once more and want to continue to chronicle the goings on of the day-to-day in our life.  So, it'll take a bit to catch up but here are highlights I want to cover in the coming days/ weeks:

* April
* The goodbye
* The last day
* Coping
* Colorado

Tonight. . .

April - what a weird challenging month.  With deployments there is always this not-fun rocky reintegration period.  Some of the best advice I got before we got married was "after separation the first couple of days [or in our case 24-36 hours] are great but you will inevitably fight shortly thereafter"  - it helps to always be able to hold that in mind and label what's going on when the falling out happens.  It's inevitable when two people have developed to new, separate routines and then join together to be a united team under the same roof again.  What I didn't remember about Iraq was how bizarre and challenging that the spin up to the departure is.  April was weird and kind of hard.  You reach a point where you are tired of the anticipatory anxiety and you just want to get the show on the road.  We were definitely there.  We enjoyed a great visit with Philip's parents two weeks before he rolled out.

We also had a great weekend with some of our best friends in North Carolina over my birthday weekend/the week before Philip left.  After recharging relational batteries at Fort Bragg we drove to the Outerbanks and enjoyed a wonderful, restful couple of days enjoying the sound of the water and each other's laughter.  It was exactly what we needed before the send off.