THINGS IN MY DRAFT FILE

Here are things I started to post but for some reason never did. Go figure.

STOP GROWING!!!

Here are my grandkids, dressed for a cousins wedding and looking so grown up. Sgt. York is going to be a lady-killer, I can tell...broken hearts just waiting to happen. The Little General is all girl. She prefers pink fluffy, dangly stuff over anything else. What am I going to do when they are all grown up?

ORDINARINESS

I had a long call from Sprout the other night. He just called to say "Hey" and to catch up on all the latest gossip. It was a good, ordinary call and it was good to hear him laugh. I need to stop taking ordinary for granted and be thankful for dull days. Ordinary is good. We need more ordinariness.

Okay, I've dwelled on that long enough. Here is something a little out of the ordinary. This is a picture of two little girls wearing one dress - fifty years apart. The little girls are my sister and her first grandchild. The first picture is faded with age so the dresses look different colors, but I assure you, it is the same dress. Kind of neat, huh?

The Absent Blogger

Sorry it's been six months since I have blogged but I just have not been in the mood. And a whole lot of nothing is going on around here. Sprout is home safely from Iraq and I am able to breath again and incoming oxygen is a wonderful thing. I just haven't wanted to do anything else but inhale and exhale. My oxygen level is finally back to normal.

Sprout's time in the war zone was spent well - or rather he accomplished a lot. He worked hard, they didn't lose any soldiers and he earned a promotion. He went before the promotion board in Iraq and he started the new year with a new rank. And you can call him Sergeant Sprout. He is most certainly not the boy he was when he joined the Army in 2004. In some ways I wish that he still was. He is more serious now, more intense, quieter. When we saw him in December, just after he redeployed, I only saw him smile once or twice. His wife told me that the holiday bustle made him a little nervous at first, the crowds and everything. Since then, when I talk to him on the phone, he is usually tired from working long hours and work distracts him a lot. Now that he has soldiers that he is responsible for, he is working harder than ever to make sure they have what they need and that they learn what is important. He likes being an NCO but it is not as easy as it looks. He especially likes the respect he has earned. And while he has changed so much, I do still hear the pre-Army Sprout on occasion when he is relaxed and rested. He does still have laughter in there somewhere and it is slowly creeping back up to the surface.

Unfortunately, another possible deployment looms in the near future and his mind is constantly on that. It must be hard to go back and forth from battle-ready mode to every-day work mode without losing your grip. I'll be glad when he can let it all go and get to living a normal life.

In the meantime, my grandkids are growing like weeds. What is happening here? Sir Duke gave me some of the sweetest grand-children on Earth but they are growing up waaaaay too fast...he must be using Miracle-Grow.

The Little General



Sgt. York, 3rd Grade Stud-Muffin