The week Braden came back to America.

I had to pick Braden up from Idaho since he was an augment to their squadron's deployment. I had gone crazy cleaning every inch of the house, inside and out. I even vacuumed the garage and weeded and mowed and decorated the garage. I was exhausted. I forgot about the part that he is a member of our family- it seemed like the most important guest ever was coming. I was supposed to leave by 8 that morning to make the 4 hour drive to get there in time to meet him in the hangar. I got on the freeway at 8:10 with all the girls dressed and the house spotless. And then he called and told me they were delayed and not to leave for another hour and a half. Hmph. Unwilling to take the girls home and have them destroy the house and their outfits, I remembered we needed an oil change and decided to do that while we waited. One minute after giving my car to the mechanic he called back to say that the flight was back on and to leave now. But they had my car up. And now I had to wait. I explained to the guy that my husband was returning from a deployment, 4 hours away, and that I had to be there when he got off the plane. Missing that was a non-option for me. He hurried my car along and then gave me a DVD player. A brand new car DVD player to help the girls with the drive there. His name is Mike and he works at Firestone and now I won't get my oil changed anywhere else. However, by the time I got on the road I was about 45 minutes behind schedule. For those of you who know that I have been incarcerated for speeding, you will know something of the great anxiety I felt while traveling triple digits for several hours. By the time we got there my whole body was tense and stiff with stress about missing it. I made it to the hangar, took the girls to the bathroom, put some piggy tails in Maiseys hair, and his plane showed up about 10 minutes later.  

He was the second one off the plane. See him in there looking for us? Imagine if I hadn't driven 99 miles an hour and he was walking through the crowd looking for us and we weren't there? Yeah, that wasn't gonna happen.

Anabelle was ecstatic as she was the only one who really got what was happening. Lila seemed confused at first but was so happy as she realized it was really him. Maisey was suspicious. She glared at him out of the corner of her eye all the way home. She treated him rather cautiously for the next month in fact. At about the 30 day mark she ran to him with a big hug and said, "Daddy, I love you!".

We drove home and arrived that evening after picking up some Jimmy Johns. And we put some happy girls to bed. Braden didn't notice that I had sold his car in his absence. I think he noticed that my flower garden looked lovely though.

The next morning Lila had a speech appointment first thing and Braden had to go to work to inprocess back into the base. The girls were arguing and whining and I walked in the house in a moment of frustration, momentarily forgetting that Braden was home. I opened the door and saw this....

And all at once it hit me that I was not alone in this anymore. And that everything wasn't on my shoulders. And that I wasn't the only bad guy. And I felt a wave of relief. The sight of luggage never brought so much joy.

He brought the girls some presents from Qatar.

The first week was sort of weird. I felt overwhelmed by well-meaning people. I felt like we couldn't get any time alone as a family. Our house and phone and computer were swarmed and we needed to be able to have some time as a family. Just to feel like a family again. And adjust. because there's weirdness. The Air Force calls it reintegration. But I call it weirdness. My friend compares it to having a baby. You want everyone to know you had a baby, and to be happy for you, but you don't want everyone in the room when it's born. 

We tried to go to the zoo but we lasted only an hour because Braden had altitude sickness, which he struggled with for the next week, at least. He was supposed to take the GRE that Friday and was too sick to do so. 

We spent a lot of time driving around Utah trying to find him a truck with the money I had been secretly saving. It turned out to be not quite the surprise I had intended as it sucked up so much of our time. But we got to meet up with the Provo sibs one afternoon while car shopping...

And we had the chance to hang out with coolest cousins ever one day at the Aerospace museum, where our children seemingly stripped away a few months of life from the geriatric volunteers...

Then we decided we just had to leave the state and be all alone as a family. So we packed some bags and headed to Cody, Wyoming.