today is Veterans Day

Before I write anything else I want to thank all the brave men and women who have served and are serving our country. For those who lost their lives in the line of duty, you paid the ultimate sacrifice and are remembered today and every day. To the men and women who are currently deployed, thank you for the sacrifice you and your families are making for our nation. And to my husband, currently deployed, serving his country, thank you! Thank you for everything that you do. We are so proud of you! We love you! We miss you!

Ok… I don’t know if I will be able to get through this entry. I’m trying to upload photos to FB and the stupid photo uploader keeps crashing my Internet. I hate uploading photos to FB but I’ve been putting it off for a while and I have soooo many photos to upload so since Nicholai is napping I figured I better upload now. Or at least try to make a dent in them. Ha!

Nicholai woke up at 1:45am and 5am but after about 20min each time I got him back to sleep and he ended up sleeping until 7:30 so that was ok I guess. At least we weren’t up before the sun at 6am.

I went to a ranch today with Nicholai. We wanted to get out of the house and Katie from Kindermusik was going. Jules text me to see if I was doing anything and she and her daughter decided to come along. It was a lot of fun… Nicholai LOVED feeding the animals. He fed a buffalo, a deer, some goats, emus, and he watched me feed a bear. Yes, I said a bear. I’ve never fed a bear before and he was HUGE. I’ve never been that close to one before and he just sat there as I fed him nuggets with a metal pole.

Nicholai got to run around and see animals and feed animals and be outside. He did great. We just have to work on him coming when I call. He is at the stage where he thinks it’s funny to run the other way when I call his name.

Tomorrow is Friday… not much longer now til Jersey. I really need to sit down and start getting ready for this trip but I’m having enough trouble getting this place clean and I have so much stuff going on. Sunday Aurora goes to the vet at 4:30 (I have to have this written down somewhere or else I will forget because I just remembered now haha). I was thinking about taking Nicholai out on Saturday but I think I’m just going to stay around the house and really get it clean. Candice actually came through and helped me with the packages I had to get in the mail yesterday. She seemed surprised that Nicholai was so big and walking…. well… she hasn’t seen him since he was about 2 months old because she has just been "too busy" to get together. She insisted that we get together before I leave for Jersey. So she has Monday or Tuesday to pick from, the other day I’m going to go to Jess’s cause she wants to see me before I leave too. Wednesday is Kindermusik and a meetup at the mall with my mommy group. Thursday is Monkey Joe’s with the mommy group. Friday is Kindermusik again and then the weekend will be nothing but cleaning and packing. Then NIcholai has a ped appt and then I will finish packing the car and we will be on our way. So it’s pretty much non-stop from now until I leave. Which is a good thing because November is dragging, which is making the deployment dragging which is making me miss Chris a lot more then I usually do.

Gah…