Beyond Cheyenne Mountain

Today I had the opportunity to do something I've been wanting to do since we arrived in Colorado.  We got in our van and explored the other side of our mountain!  Yes, Cheyenne Mountain has a Western slope and, though I'd never get around to seeing it.  However, today was the day!  After spending an hour or so getting Matt's new Blackberry Storm set just right (I'm only a touch jealous) and uploading my iLife 09, we ate a quick lunch here at home.  I packed our desserts for a picnic of sorts and we headed out.  Thanks to Susie S. giving us directions, we headed toward the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, though the zoo itself was not our destination.  No, we drove a LONG way off the beaten path on a dirt road (my van did fine...it was well maintained) to see what we could find.  We drove for about 30 minutes wondering if we were ever going to get to the point where we could see the back of Cheyenne Mountain, and were close to giving up because Matt had a wedding to perform tonight.  We decided to give it a few more miles and we are SO thankful we did!  We came to the place where we could see the back of our mountain and a part of our city!  This picture is of the TV antennae we can see from our house, but this view is from the back!!   I was so glad we took the time to do this!  The boys climbed on rocks, threw snow, and enjoyed Ghirardelli chocolates and fancy cheeses.  (Okay, Matt and I enjoyed the cheese, the boys stuck with the chocolate.)  I got several amazing pics, including one of our church some 2o miles away!  

Today was a good adventure and I'm glad we were able to, at last, share this one with Daddy!  

I plan to post the rest of our pics on our Shutterfly site soon!

Bloomin' Onion

So, we've made our rounds of our top favorite restaurants, but Matt was missing his ULIMATE favorite:  Outback.  We had just not gotten around to it yet.  I think he was saving the best for last.  I was planning on cooking dinner, but he had a craving.  We checked the mail today and what was in there!?!?  A very sweet note from Matt's "Soldier Angel."  She has been praying for our family, sending Matt letters and care packages, and keeping up with our lives via blog-world.  The letter was sweet and the kind ya just wanna keep!  :)  Inside was an additional surprise:  AN OUTBACK GIFT CARD!!!   WHOO-HOO!  It took all of .0003 seconds for us to decided what we were doing for dinner!  

I just want Betty to know how much we enjoyed our "Bloomin Onion" (and ribs, and cheeseburger, and 3 kids meals...those are a real splurge for us!).  

All is well on the homefront.  4 days off wasn't quite enough, but was just enough all at the same time.  Please pray for our remaining soldiers who are going to be arriving until about the 18th!  Our only hitch was Sunday night when we left Red Robin with 3 balloons.  About halfway home one popped.  It scared Matt to death and let's just say I was VERY thankful I was still doing most of the driving!

If you think of it, pray for our friends, Corie and Matt, as they're going to have our crew tomorrow night so we can celebrate Valentine's Day in style (yes...a day early.  Corie and Matt have and Army Ball on Sat. so we're watching their boys on the actual Valentine's night).  

Reintegration, Part I

Here is a breakdown of the day Matt returned up to the present moment!

Friday:

8:00 am - Bailey goes to school

9:00 am - Hayden and Carson do some school work

11:00 am - I begin to work on last minute things and Bailey comes home from school.

12:00 pm - Lunch

12:30 pm - TJ watches the boys during their nap so I can go get my phone (which I had left at the nail salon the night before...they closed before I realized it...Verizon took care of me, though!)

1:30 pm - I return home and decorate the van.

2:30 pm - I get my shower

4:00 pm - The boys and I head to the Main Gate to watch for the busses to drive through!!

4:15 pm - Yvonne and her crew show up to join us in the excitement

4:30 pm - We hear that the busses are going to come through at 5:30, we decide to wait it out.

5:30 pm - We hear that the plane has not even landed, we're freezing and kids are getting hungry.  We give up, decide to go get some pizza to kill time before the 7:25 pm ceremony (but I give my phone number to a lady who was going to wait it out...she would call if something changed)

6:00 pm - Lady from the gate calls and tells me that the busses are on Powers, about 15 minutes away.  We kick it into high gear to clean the tables we were sitting at in the PX and load 7 kids (ages 10, 8, 7, 5, 4, 3, and almost 1) into 2 minivans.

6:15 pm - We arrive back at the gate and RUN to the bleachers.  (Bailey decides to sit in the van because it's too cold!  We take the extra pizzas to share with the die-hards who had stayed in the cold.)  

6:25 pm - Bailey comes out of the van crying because he wanted pizza

6:26 pm - I'm the first to spot the BLUE LIGHTS signifying their arrival!

6:31 pm - The busses slowly drive up 115 and turn into post.  Dozens of police and motorcycle escorts leading and trailing

6:40 pm - We had just seen a bus that held daddy, though we didn't know which one.  He had seen us, though!

6:45 pm - We take our time getting to the Special Events Center and arrive ready to be INSIDE for a while!

6:51 pm - I get a call from a friend hoping to find out where to meet us in the SEC.  I miss a call, ended up it was Matt trying to call in.

6:53 pm - I call Matt for the first time in 14 months and 2 days...he had been issued his work phone!!  While we are chatting (me telling him where to look for us when he marches in), the phone beeps in letting me know the battery is dying.  So much for updating Facebook!)

Here is the crowd waiting for Matt (not everyone in this shot was for Matt...but 7 of them!)

While at the SEC we listened to music, danced to YMCA, Chicken Dance, Conga, etc.  It was sort of like a Prom with wives and kids, no men.  

7:30 pm - They gave us a 2 minute warning, and one minute later they started "the song."  Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue by Toby Keith.  The smoke started coming in out of the doorway they were about to enter.  And in marched our soldiers!  Some 250 guys from various units, all returning to their families.  They got into position, and we saw Matt!  He had spotted us long before we saw him!  The news people had caught me pointing Daddy out to the boys, and later they interviewed us.  We made the news, even though they called him Captain Mark Hamrick (even after having him spell his name for them!)  Back to when they were standing at attention.  The Rear-D chaplain prayed and then someone told the soldiers,  "Thank you for your service, fall out!"  And the boys were off!  I didn't get a hug for at least 2 minutes as the boys were all over him!  I am not complaining!  It was a beautiful sight!  

Corie and Yvonne were on camera duty, taking video and stills for me!  I was so thankful that I didn't have to lug a camera along with me!

We kissed, hugged, and it all still felt so surreal.  This is when the news crew asked if they could ask us some questions.  This was just for Hayden!  God worked this out just for him!  Our friends, TJ and Nick were interviewed and shown on the news in NOV when he returned from Iraq.  Then a couple of weeks ago when we went to welcome some other friends home, Hayden saw the news crews interviewing soldiers and their families.  Hayden has mentioned a few times that he hopes we get on the news.  We got to the SEC long before the news crews and claimed our spot.  The news crews ended up plopping right beside us, and videoing us off and on even before the ceremony officially began!  We were their featured family! At the bottom of this blog is a clip I recorded from the TV.  Not sure how to view it not in reverse!

The Hamricks together again!

8:03 pm - We leave the SEC as a whole family! 

If you recall, I took a picture just like this the night he left!  One day I'll find the CD I've burned it on and post them side by side!This tent housed all the soldiers bags.

We arrived home and enjoyed showing Daddy all the neat things we had done to prepare for his return.  The boys had "Friday Night Movie Night" and slept downstairs.

Saturday we woke up lazily, had breakfast, and then Christmas.  

After we got ready we headed out to get Matt's real Christmas present...a Blackberry Storm (I'm a little jealous!)  We spent the entire day driving around in our van marked with all the tacky notes I had written all over!  People gave us thumbs-up and waved!  It was fun!  We had lunch at Noodles, and they gave us 2 free meals and 5 free drinks!  There are people out there who are just hoping to show their appreciation!  It is amazing what a wave or a "thank you" does for a soldier!  

After running errands all day, we headed back home and the boys spent the night at Super Woman's house.  We told Yvonne we were planning to leave for church at 10:00 am.  At 10:18 she sent me a text saying the boys were ready to come home but she didn't want to send them without having heard from us.  That text woke us up!  OOPS!  We had slept in!  This is what it is like for those who have no kids!  

So here we are, the boys have each taken their turns on the PlayStation 2, and we're about to eat the Tortilla Soup I made.  (Thanks, Hollie for the recipe!)  

We are loving being a family again!  Matt said he still feels sort of like a guest, until he gets his dresser drawers sorted out the way he wants them.  (He left them this way, but now has other clothes he prefers.)  Also, I'm not asking him to do certain chores around the house for 2 weeks to let him get settled in and see how we have changed.  It will be easier for him to watch and see how things run around here and jump in rather than expect that we do things the same way we did back in December of 2007.  

God is good...reintegration has begun and we are thankful for your prayers!  

LOVE YOU!

~Jen

"I want my soft pants!!!!!"

Okay, I need to journal a bit more about Bailey's condition.  

When we got back from NC he had a rough time adjusting, and I wrote about that on the other site.  All has been very calm the past 2 weeks, but his teacher and I decided that if he had another bad day, she would call and I'd come right away.  

Yesterday I got a call from his teacher saying that he was having a rough day.  The only problem was I was in the middle of teaching at PWOC.  

By the time I was done teaching it was time for me to pick him up.  I headed over there and the teacher, Bailey, and I had a conference.  He had hit one of the children (thankfully it was a child we know and I was able to apologize to his mom...she just roller her eyes and said, "Boys will be boys!! No big deal!").  Still, it broke my heart for Bailey to have been a bully.  

As we were about to leave, his teacher said, "I wonder if he's coming down with something.  He was very whiney today."  

That's when it hit me.  There had been an "incident" at home that may have been partly responsible for his strange behavior.

With his condition - Sensory Processing Disorder - things that feel different on his body (shoes, socks, pants, coats, etc) can stress his body out without him even knowing it.  For the past 2 years, he's been especially fond of his "blue pants" which are jeans.  I have been so thankful that our church is a causal one, because he only wore jeans. 

When we went  back home over Christmas he got some "soft pants."  These were wind suits, sort of like what basketball players wear.  I didn't mind, and neither did Bailey.  I didn't notice anything wrong with him having these until Sunday when I told him he needed to wear jeans to church. He threw a massive fit and because I was on the phone with Matt and running late, I just gave in.  But I resolved to break him of this new addiction.  (As a parent of a child with SPD, I have to pick my battles, and this is one I'm willing to fight.)  

Let me preface the following with a fact so that you don't think what I'm about to say is just horrible.  About 2 years ago, my three unique sons decided they were done with pj's.  They began getting out of the bath in the evenings and putting on their clean clothes for the next day.  Monday evening I told Bailey all his "soft pants" were dirty and that he was going to have to wear "blue pants."  (I decided it was better to get the battle out of the way the night before school and that way he'd be used to the pants by time to leave home.)  He had an absolute meltdown. He screamed and cried for about 30 minutes.  I did the brushing technique that I have been taught by the OT, I put lotion on him, I rubbed his back, nothing would console him.  I told him that if he didn't sleep in the jeans that he wouldn't get to listen to Adventures in Odyssey while falling asleep.  That's a kid's CD of Bible Stories my kids absolutely LOVE!!!  Anyway, he finally settled, I turned on the CD, and he went to sleep.  

All seemed fine and he never complained the next morning.  In fact, I was rather proud of myself for thinking ahead and getting the battle out of the way the night before.  

However, a friend and I were discussing this screaming fit, as her son has SPD as well, and even more severely than Bailey.  Basically, even though Bailey was not conscious of the pants bothering him, they could have still be wreaking havoc on his nervous system as it was trying to get adjusted to them again.  

Then, to top it all off, he vomited last night in his bed, so he has come down with something on top of that.  (Not that I'm glad he is sick, but it is a bit relieving to have a set of reasons to explain Bailey's behavior yesterday.)

Oh, and he did not get to listen to his CD last night before bed, and he cried for a few minutes.  He will remember that next time I use it as a warning!

One final note:  Matt is in Kuwait, so he could be home as early as tomorrow or as late as Saturday.  I'm telling the boys he'll be home sometime next week, to provide a buffer. 

Here is a series of prayer requests:

• That Bailey stays well from now on.
• That no one else gets sick
• That Bailey adjusts to his "blue pants"
• That Matt's flight from Kuwait is SOON but more importantly, safe.
• That there are no delays as he travels home.  One of our friends had a 10 day layover in Spain due to plane trouble
• That our reintegration is smooth!  

You are a blessing to our family!

~Jennifer

14 years and counting... :-)

Matt sent flowers for our 14th Dating Anniversary!

This message was sent using the Picture and Video Messaging service from Verizon Wireless!

To learn how you can snap pictures and capture videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/picture.

Note: To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime� 6.5 or higher is required.