Happy Belated Birthday to ME!!!!!!

I know I haven't been on for a while and its because I've been pretty busy with our new baby (puppy) named Emily!  She is 8 weeks old and Yellow Lab, she extremely cute, smart, and very funny.  I'm still trying to get her to realize what her name is and working on potty training, which I know will both take some time.  Emily was our late Anniversary gift to each other, but the main reason we got her was because last week when I took Jake to the vet and we discovered that he had been abused in his past and that he is overly protective of both of us and our home.  The vet, wonderful lady, said we need to socialize him more so we decided to get a puppy!  I know some of you are asking why a puppy and why a lab?  Well Jake has no fear for big dogs, for example David was taking a walk with Jake one day and came across one of our neighbors walking their Bull Mastiff and Jake gets all feisty and starts barking like crazy, so this dog looks at Jake and starts to bend down to eat him, David yells "NO" and picks Jake up, who has no fear at all and continues to bark hysterically!  So we decided it would be best if we got a bigger dog so that he would learn to live with one and slowly be able to be more hospitable towards others.  A puppy, because we think it would be great for them to grow up together, which they are doing great together!

Now for my Belated Birthday gift from my husband; who is as excited as me?  Ready?  He got me this BEAUTIFUL washer and dyer set!  I'm in LOVE with it!  We were spending about $60 a month on doing laundry at the mat here at the apartment complex, so we decided to get one so it would eventually save us some money each month. On Tuesday when it got installed I was super excited and did about 7 loads of laundry!  Yeah I know that is a lot, but we've been kind of behind in laundry, well mainly I did all of our clothes including all of David's uniforms, sheets, towels, and quilts and such!  I had so much fun!

Now for some Military talk, I've recently learned that after living apart for some time it does take a lot of time and patience to get back into the swing of things.  For instance David and I have been arguing a little more than usual, I mean we have been married a little over a year now and we really haven't lived together all that much except for on weekends while were stationed at Fort Lee, Va.  So we are trying to learn to live with each other.  So my advice to those of you with deployed spouses or significant others in training; COMMUNICATION.  We need to work better on that, I guess a year apart we have learned to communicate in a certain way, but we need to communicate better as a couple.  Right now he is away for the week with his company for field training, its weird because I miss him like crazy and getting tired of being cooped up in the house all day and night with no one to talk to but a baby and Jake, who obviously don't talk back.  The weird part is the fact that it also feels comfortable because I've been this way for a year now.  As other wives have put it, they say that they have a routine and when their husbands come back they end up having to learn to live with each other again.  So my advice is for everyone to try, yes their are going to be hard moments when your communication is off, but you still have to try, that is the key!  So I'm going to try and follow my own advice when David gets home this weekend.

Time for some reader interaction, haven't done this for a while:  What was the favorite gift a significant other has gotten you and why was it so important to you?  Mine was going on a cruise with David to the Bahama's as a Christmas gift to each other, it wasn't the fact that we had gone to foreign country or anything like that it was because I had gotten to see him for the first time in six months and it was great to be able to spend the that week alone to ourselves, well kind of alone.