One Whole Week Down

It has been a week since Scott left for training. I tried my best yesterday to come up with a beautiful shot of all four girls together to surprise him on this first little anniversary of sorts.

While we were playing at Mimi and Pop's yesterday morning I chased them all around the deck, garage, yard, and pool with my camera. At least I don't have to worry that missing Daddy will be the only thing about his deployment that the girls will remember.... they're also going to vividly remember how nuts Mommy was carrying around her camera everywhere we went!

I tried in vain to pose them nicely, but here was the result... sour Sarah, Kate holding a piece of sausage in hand, and Maggie all excited to get started "painting". Nobody wanted anything to do with picture making.

Thankfully Ella was more cooperative, as usual... at least where modeling is concerned.
My attempt at getting all four together was completely futile!
Instead I decided to just focus on capturing them all hard at work to show Daddy how they are spending their time. They washed and painted (with water and any kind of brush or broom they could find) the entire deck around the hot tub... and the pool furniture.... and the glass doors (sorry Mimi), and just about everything that wasn't already wet when we arrived. Sarah did lots of inspections of her sisters' work.
Kate mostly just bossed everyone else around... not that they were listening.

As is typical these days, the girls played very hard in the morning. After all that washing and scrubbing, we turned on the radio and had a little dance party in the garage. I need to get those dance moves on video very soon! It was too cute. After all that, some friends came over to swim with us. So we swam for a couple of hours.

Exhaustion around noon time is one of the key elements of my super scheduled days so that we can manage day to day during this deployment. I have lots of pictures from today to share, but another critical element to our survival this year is Mommy getting more sleep at night. So I'm off to bed now and will post those another day.

We've had many people call, and email to ask how we're doing. I'd definitely have to say we're missing Daddy, but because we're used to him being gone part of the time already, it is still pretty much business as usual around here.... except for the extra effort we're putting into our schedule every day.