Homecoming!

There's Daddy's plane!

Patiently waiting

There he is!

First hugs

Happy boy

After 357 days, Robert made it home VERY EARLY Sunday morning.

Not to complain or anything, but couldn't the best Army in the world somehow manage to get folks home at a decent hour? If course out of the four flights for his unit, we had the worst time. Seems like that happened to me before. At first the ceremony was slated for 1:30 AM. It then changed to 5:20 AM. At 930 PM the night before, it finally settled at 4 AM. Oh yeah, and this was daylight savings night so that's after the change so really 3 AM. What a mess! So my attempts to get the kids in bed early so they could get a little sleep were automatically negated by the lost hour. I finally got them in the bed about 8 (9). Then I had to get everything ready to go since forgetting something at 2 AM was very possible. I finally got to bed at 10:30 (11:30). Gabby was out but Sam, my night owl, was just barely asleep at this point. My alarm was set for 1:30 (new time). So I got about an hour and a half of sleep, since falling asleep was very hard. If I could have slept all night, I probably would have taken something to help me go to sleep. Up at 1:30. Not just up at 1:30 but having to dress and look beautiful for my husband I haven't seen since November. This is not an easy task at 1:30 on two hours of sleep.

I got the kids up a little after 2 and we left the house at 2:30. We got to the gym just shy of 3. Not much traffic out at 2:30. We snagged a parking place and good place to sit and settled in to wait. The flight was a little later than anticipated. It was not my goal to be there to see the flight land on the screen (I didn't want that much wait time in the middle of the night) but we were there anyway. It landed at 2:58. They ran a video feed over of the flight landing and everyone getting off the plane. We saw Daddy heading in to the processing building. There was also feed from there so you could keep up with the progress and see everyone. When they loaded up on the buses, we knew we were about 20 minutes out. Whew - that last 20 minutes! Finally we saw them pull up outside and unload from the buses and line up. They marched in about 4:30, we had a prayer and a couple of words by somebody (don't even know who!) I was waiting on the National Anthem since they said it would play and they dragged the poor band out in the middle of the night. Without the song, and almost without warning he released them. Maybe they took pity on us because they were a bit late and it was the middle of the night. Shortest ceremony I have ever seen in any case. We got all our hugs and kisses and smiles and then loaded all the bags in the van and came home. We got home about 5 AM.

I have to say we were all worn out, but running on steam. The kids played with Daddy and we ate breakfast again. By the time the Wii came out, I couldn't keep my eye open and took a short nap on the couch. Sam fell asleep literally playing Cars on the Wii. One minute he was driving, the next minute, he was out. Gabby fought a long time but eventually gave in to sleep. Everyone napped on and off all day, in between showing Daddy everything and playing and just being happy. We finished the day with supper at IHOP and then tried to get everyone to go to bed. No easy feat with one jet-lagged person and two over napped and out of schedule kids. I had no trouble once I got everyone else settled!