Reunited at Last!

Well, we finally made it through our first deployment! Mike was already able to update you on his life for the past five months, but mine was a little different "holding down the fort." There is this myth out there that says when your husband deploys all your appliances break during the first week he is gone. Luckily, we escaped that one. However, there was a squirrel stuck in our chimney, and boy did those noises freak me out! But I hired the Pied Piper (yes that is his company name) to come solve that problem. The only other big thing that happened was Mike's car battery died. Again, luckily we have a friend who fixed it for me so all I had to do was buy a new battery. :)

Most of my time was taken up by working and running. I have been training for a half marathon and am coming up on the first one! It's true when they say the first and the last months of deployment are the hardest. The first few weeks were really difficult, but once I got into my routine, the time went by surprisingly fast. We were very lucky that we got to Skype every 2-3 days through most of the deployment...

 I am so grateful to all the support I received from both our family and our friends (not to mention the support I got from other wives going through the same thing). It especially helped to have this cutie to talk to all the time so that I didn't have to talk to myself. She really did a great job of keeping me company!

We made it to the park almost everyday Mike was gone! I took this picture so Mike could see that we knew how to have fun even when he was gone...

 Ella even participated in my ab workouts!

Reunited at last!

Mike could barely get in the gate before Ella was jumping on him!

I brought Mike his favorite cupcake for his return home.

Yes. That is a sparkler.

We took a mini vacation up to Eureka Springs, this cute historical town a few hours north from us. We stayed at an old hotel that has an original bathhouse in the basement where we got massages. There are lots of shops and art galleries to explore and we even did a ghost tour of the most haunted hotel in America: The Crescent Hotel. 

Awesome shower in our hotel room!

We even got a real set of keys!

First neon sign west of the Mississippi.

Details.

They brought breakfast up to our room.

Around town.

One of the many natural springs.

Trolley. Eureka Springs doesn't have buses, they have trolleys.

Looking down town.

Even my dad and nephew have a restaurant there! 

Yep. Kind of creepy...

Ready for our massages!

Now to the Crescent Hotel for the ghost tour! We ate dinner at their pizza parlor before the tour. Delicious! It was built in 1886 as a hotel and later made into a school and then a hospital. The "doctor" who ran the hospital claimed to cure cancer and basically did experiments on patients. Naturally our  tour ended in the morgue, where our tour guide turned out the lights. Yay. There are too many stories and pictures from the tour so I just posted a few. If you are interested in what we saw, here is their website: http://www.americasmosthauntedhotel.com/

It is a beautiful hotel. (But I liked ours better.)

There was something wrong with the horse on the left side of the fountain...

Ramsey the Butler, our tour guide.

Michael the ghost and Michael the hubby!

Beautiful original fireplace in the lobby.

Before heading home we stopped outside of town to see Pivot Rock and Thorncrown Chapel. 

Just following the rules...

Big Rock. Oddly formed. That's about it.

Gorgeous.

This telephone pole broke in half and is currently suspended by the power line across the street. We were sitting at a stop sign in our car underneath it when it fell over. Yikes!

Well now it's back to work! Mike's two weeks of time off are over and he headed back to work today. We're hoping to get to do some fun stuff this summer (including my first half marathon) so stay tuned....