Our last week with Nathan

After Alli's wedding we came home to spend our last week with Nathan. Unfortuantely for him, it was all spent cleaning up after a bunch of sickos. But at least we're cute sickos. Gracie handled her sickness much better than Levi.

The sick couch. This is where levi lived for 3 days before we finally took him to urgant care where he had to endure an IV for about 5 hours. It was a sad state to see him in.

Gracie's getting super silly and making faces these days. She likes to make us laugh. I think we have another little actress on our hands. Soon the day will come when she and levi put on skits.

Well, after about 5 days of sickness, we had ourselves a fresh air beach weekend. I wanted to go to our favorite beach park for some family photos before Nathan had to leave for so long.

I like this one. It's pretty much says, "yep, we live in beautiful Washington."

My strikingly hansome boys. Everybody keep little Levi in your prayers. He's living through something totally beyond his understanding and he misses his best friend Papa. He tells me every couple days that I'm very brave, and the truth is, he's being very brave this time around. My prayer is that these times will add to his strong and unique personality and that we'll all learn together that God is our constant foundation.

I just had to do Valentines Day without my super fine man, and even though I had planned to let myself revel in bitterness and ignore the holiday, I did realize that I am in love, no matter where he is. We've been in the military for seven years and this is the first time we've been apart for our nation's love day. It's sad, but we will have so many more together, and I'm not willing to set any sort of anti-valentines day example. I definitely think love should always be celebrated every year.

The rest of these pictures were taken with my phone, so they are not great quality. However, they need to be included because we had a great rainy day of adventure and family time.

Levi always likes to make sand angels when we go to the beach. That's what happens when a Navy boy watches cartoons that have snow, but he's left with tropical weather. This was his first year to get to make a real snow angel.

I like the moss over our shoulders. We took our possy into the woods and moss covers everything. I mean everything. It's dark and green and awesome.

And finally, our goodbye scene. I know this whole post is a real downer, but might as well keep it real. We took Nathan to the base terminal and waited there with him for about an hour. As far as ridiculously long deployment exits go, this was pretty good, I suppose. Both the kids were in good spirits and played well while we stayed together as long as we could.

So, that's our story right now. Our big daddy is gone and we are here trying to keep some joy alive while we're left incomplete as a family for a while. Thank God He always has plans for us, even when we can't imagine a purpose. I trust in Jesus, and He will take care of us.