well that was fun, now back to reality

well since my last post i obviously had a pretty good month!  i knew that charles was coming home about 3 weeks before it happened but was forbidden to say anything so that he could suprise his family.  not that i had much to tell.  literally until i heard the garage door open on a thursday night this is what i knew:
he was coming home sometime in this 2 day window, he would be off work for 30 days, i needed to drop his car off on post on X day (which meant that he would be driving himself home).
thats. it.
and so the 3 weeks of rediculously stressful cleaning and preparing went into full swing and the adventure began early in may. 
it was wonderful.  from the second i heard the garage door open all was right with the world.  there was no need to cry when i saw him because to put my arms around my husband is to be at home, everything was just exactly as though he had just had a really long day at work and was now back where he belongs.  i'm not going to say that every day was easy and fun-filled because it wasnt.  i didn't want to share him, although i did because he needed it and it was the right thing to do; and we didn't always get along.  i'm glad i didn't really think about it before he came home because it would have just been one more thing to stress about, but going from a single parent to now parenting together is NOT easy.  in fact it's kind of a nightmare.  i was prepared for just the opposite, so that was a bit of a wake up call.  but i'm told that this is perfectly normal, ours was just crammed into a very short period and that is the only thing i am not looking forward to dealing with when he returns.  obviously not the part about our son having a mom AND a dad, but the fact that i have to comprimise and share the decisions about when and how to discipline him and what to teach him, etc.  you know, parenting in a married home, that sort of thing: not easy.  who knew!  :)  but other than that, it was good. 
cameron took a couple weeks to really warm up to him.  he's a pretty easy going kid, so he wasn't running away screaming or anything, but he clearly didn't understand why this guy was all of a sudden in the house trying to love on him.  but we got there and he had a really good time with daddy.  daddy is a lot more fun than mommy i think and makes good faces and noises and doesn't discourage loud obnoxiouis outbursts in public places.  *sigh* 
although we were both thankful that his journey home didn't end up costing us anything, we still feel like he spent enough money while here to make up for the ticket!  there was a lot of going out to eat and some shopping and gas money and such.  but i can't think of any experience that i would take back.  after all, getting to spend 4 weeks out of a year in the same state/country/side of the world as your husband is something worth celebrating.  and even though it was the last month of school, my bosses were kind and generous enough to allow me to take off a week each on his first and last week here.  i am very lucky. 
and so here we are on the downhill side with just 4 1/2 months to go and i am feeling refreshed and ready to tackle the remainder of this beast of a year!  i am working four 10 hr days till late july so the summer is going quickly and by the time school starts in august, we'll have just 3 months to go!  and then we'll start our next big adventure: he was department ofthe army selected to be a recruiter.  he'll go to school for that in january for a couple of months and then will do a 3 yr stint.  so that's 3 yrs of a break from his current job field (definitely a good thing!) and 3 yrs of pretty much seeing him every day.  no complaints here!  we don't yet know WHERE he will be recruiting but our first choice is to stay where we are, for a number of reasons.  so fingers crossed that it works out that way.  HIS second choice is to move back home, mine is definitely not, so we'll see what happens.  i dont know when we'll know but there's nothing i can do about it either way so we're just waiting to see. 

sorry, i tried to add other pictures but it isn't working.  they're all on my FB anyway.  so here's one - i made sure he got to put cameron to bed as often as possible while he was home.  he kept saying "you know, you don't always have to save me the fun jobs...  i'm ok, you can do it too even though i'm here."  to which i say, "yes, actually i do."