I did a really...  well, probably irresponsible thing today and bought a couch.  For under $1,000, it will be delivered and set up and my current (heinous) government furniture will be returned to the government furniture warehouse.  It's a beautiful couch.  I am looking forward to movie watching on it.  It has a right hand chaise.  I am already imagining Mark on the chaise and me spread out over the rest of it, my head in his lap, watching movies.  It will be good.  I can't wait.

Amaris had a great week at school.  Cadence ate her first solid food (avocado).  I shipped off FOUR big care packages to Mark, who got settled into a new location in the dump, with a new email address and all.  It's been an eventful week.

Trying to teach Amaris the celebration of Fridays, I took her out for ice cream.  She excitedly picked strawberry.  I got myself a scoop of red raspberry (I don't care for strawberry).  She took two bites and then decided mine looked better.  So I had a few bites of sorbet and then ended up relinquishing it to her and throwing away the strawberry scoop.  And I couldn't help thinking to myself that if Mark had been home, that would never have happened!  He'd have inhaled her little piddly scoop of strawberry ice cream without thinking twice!

I've been missing him a lot these days.  I don't think deployments ever get "better", really.  I don't buy into that.  I think they become routine, and that it makes it seem a little bit easier.  But realistically, there isn't a lot to call easy about the situation at all.

We went to a deployed spouse meeting last night.  I'll admit that my loser self is a bit eager to be involved and do volunteer work for the command.  I applied for that family readiness officer position when it opened up (and clearly didn't get it, I figure due to my lack of college experience), but honestly the more I think about it the happier I am that I was passed over.  I'd rather do it on a volunteer basis - come and go as I please, set my own hours and don't abandon my kids.  Till they are school-aged, I think that's really the only appropriate work for me.  It's not really about the money anyhow.  (As cheesy and cliche as that sounds!  Don't get me wrong, I'd definitely take compensation...  Just saying that I'd happily do the work [and have in the past] without monetary incentive.)

Anyways things are moving along.  Just trying to keep myself distracted.