We are trying to slow down. Much easier said than done around here!!!
Travis has been home for almost three weeks now and we have been happily and unbearably busy! We are like kids in a candy store trying to have all the fun we can have. Add a never ending To Do list of either stuff that was put off until after homecoming or stuff that recently popped up. I will say it is much easier to handle it all with someone in my corner, always there and willing to help out. I am so wonderfully overjoyed to have my husband home to be busy with... but we need to start slowing down!
In the past three weeks we have...

Relaxed at the Pier

Celebrated three wonderful years of marriage

Made a trip to the San Diego Fair 

Celebrated my birthday!

And much much more! We haven't fallen into any sort of schedule yet nor has work or life really resumed any form of normal. We are enjoying our homecoming cocoon, but all good things must come to an end! Soon work will start back and I registered for classes today which will begin late fall. The funny thing about being busy is it seems there will be no time for work and school! Ready or not though, it is coming and coming up quickly. It has been a wonderful start to our summer but I'm ready to have our "normal" life back. Those content days you just run through your schedule.

I am so thankful for these past few weeks and very excited to see what the rest of 2012 holds. We have trips planned, school to accomplish, plans to be made, big decisions about our future to me made, holidays to be celebrated all over the country. It is going to be a busy second half of the year.

Homecoming came and went and now my husband has been home for almost a week! Homecoming itself was a long day of waiting. The classic, "hurry up and wait" situation that the military often provides us. Travis woke me up bright and early with a nice conversation from him in transit across the world. I hurried up and got the house ready. Then stalled for a bit and forced myself to sit long enough to eat something. Then hurried up and took a shower. Then waited around because it wasn't quite time to get ready. Then hurried up and fixed my hair and got dressed. I got over to the battalion and waited around for the Marines to turn in their weapons and such. Finally after a long day and lots of waiting in the cold at almost midnight, they came marching out! Sharing that first hug and kiss after several long months was amazing!! It's like our first kiss all over again! I wish I could put into words what homecoming means to so many military families. It's something you can only experience if you've been there. So much good and bad anxiety is built up over deployments that homecoming just waiting for the other shoe to drop it seems. It's exciting, magical, relieving, like a big weight lifted off your shoulders, wonderful, and relaxing all at the same time.
Our first week reunited has been wonderful. My cheeks literally hurt from all the smiling and I don't think I've laughed this much in a long time. It's wonderful to be able to see my husband laugh. I truly missed that.
We are also in the midst of some serious nesting. Again like last deployment, I moved while he was deployed. So this is a new house for him and fairly new for myself too. We're having a great deal of fun making this house our home. We've done some decorating and gardening which has been exciting. Hopefully soon we will have fresh tomatoes and squash popping up in our back yard.
As if this past week hasn't had enough excitement, tomorrow we celebrate our third wedding anniversary! I can't believe we've been married three years, yet at the same time it feel more like a decade!

Wow, has it been a week!!! First off, I finished with the semester. I am very happy to have that weight lifted off my shoulders! I didn't do as well as I would have liked, but that's just life. I'm not going to dwell on those grades.
Then, later in the week I received some wonderful news! Travis called and as a huge surprise to both of us... he is coming home early!!!! I am beyond thrilled and still very shocked. We don't get too many good surprises with the Marine Corps. So homecoming has changed considerably. Happily, I am running around like a chicken with it's head cut off. I have accomplished so much in the past two days. I've planned my drive back to California, secured a place for us to live, gotten my mother in law's plane ticket back, planned to see my family before I leave, gotten some clothes packed up, and much more! And this is all happening the week before my brother in law gets married! Family started trickling in today for the wedding festivities and Saturday I will have a new sister in law! Post wedding it's more packing, a dentist visit, and then I am off to Camp Pendleton, California!
I can't wait! I am so excited this deployment is coming to an end!! I absolutely can not wait to see my wonderful husband. We are both so ready to get back to our normal lives. So ready to spend some time together without a looming deployment. Since February of 2010 we have had a deployment looming over us or being surviving a deployment. We are both thrilled to just be together and to be able to actually focus on each other. Elated doesn't even scratch the surface!!