Friday, August 31, 2007

She's home, she's home, she's home!!!!!

Our little soldier is home!!!! It's funny how much we missed her here. I mean obvously we knew that we would miss her but to the extent that we did, well, that was a little surprising. Geez, that must sound a little cold and callous.

She was supposed to fly in on Friday but as I said in my previous post, the weather was none to cooperative. So Friday was a dreary, dismal night for all of us in this house. I was at work for much of the night but was kept updated through text messages and messages on my machine. Each call caused me to become more and more cranky and depressed because I was so looking forward to holding my little girl in my arms again. That wasn't going to happen on Friday.

I slept horrible that night because we had no idea when she would be coming in. I woke up at 7:30 that morning, started running errands to pick up the last things for camping, there was a message from our girl that they were still delayed and that she would call.... :0( I was just a snit! Frustrated because we had no idea how the day was going to play out, what the weather was going to do, if we were going to end up camping our first night without her...

11:00, 12:00, 1:00, still no word. We were all getting a little depressed, antsy, confused. We had no idea...FINALLY at about 1:30 my cell phone rings and I leapt over bins, sleeping bags, duffel bags to answer it as quickly as I could...sounds pretty pathetic huh.

I no more then say 'hello' and I hear...."MOMMY, I'M HOME!" on the other end. She was in the cities sitting at the airport! What the heck, we had no idea, it would take a whole hour to get there, ugh but she was home!

On the way there I couldn't stop smiling, I was bouncing up and down on my seat, we were making jokes about how we would greet her deciding that Titanic would be the theme..."I'll never let go...Look, it's a plane...." Needless to say, we were all on cloud nine and the moods that plagued us for days trying to figure out when she would be home had dissipated into the clouds that created all this emotional garbage.

We saw her, all dressed in her uniform sitting with a couple of friends...what a strange sight to see. She ran to her siblings and they all nearly fell over as they crashed into each other and they hugged for what seemed like 20 minutes.

My eyes stung as I took in the sight of my 4 kids together again. Pat stood off to my right watching as I struggled to get pictures of this homecoming. She then ran to him and again, the embrace was beyond words. And I stood there sad because I was the last in line...selfish little old me wanted to grab that girl and hold on for dear life!

Finally it was my turn and the hug was monumental and the air went out of me as I was finally able to hold her in my arms again. Wow, can't say that I've ever had that experience to this magnitude.

Needless to say, we got home, packed for camping and I will get back to that after I run an errand with Pat. But our little girl is home and she's not such a little girl anymore....

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