He is risen!

Easter is such a fabulous holiday, and not because of the candy and eggs and non-existent bunny (yes, I know its a bit harsh, but the kids know he's about as real as Santa, but also know NOT to spoil it for their friends), but because Jesus conquered death and rose from the grave and has allowed for us to do the same after we die and spend eternity in heaven with Him! In fact, Kylie wrote this note last week in Sunday School.

Now does that mean we are total scrooges? No. I did make Easter baskets with the girls and the woke up last Sunday to find theirs hidden throughout the house. Once they located them, they immediately asked to eat the chocolate. Their Grammy sent a few gifts so I included them in their baskets as well.

Here are their home made baskets. They loved making them. It was messy. I had to walk away from the table a few times and let them do what they wanted to do.

Eyes closed and smile real big!

Juliet so surprised to see her card!

Lip gloss!

Daddy teaching Pez skills.

After church, we came home and got in a few minutes of a nap for the girls then headed to the Schantz's house. We gathered with great friends, and I think we had more food than Thanksgiving!

The kids did get to search for eggs. Since Kylie was the oldest kid there, we told her she needed to look for eggs that were up high and let the little kids get the ones scattered on the ground.

She found one on top of the swing set.


Juliet could care less how many eggs she gathered, or whose basket they were in! She just wanted to dive in and go for the prize.




Kids belonging to the Schantzs, Flottmanns, Registers, Hiatts, Arkemas and us. There are a few more roaming around somewhere.

Happy Easter!

2FS comes to an end

On April 2nd (quite appropriate), the 2nd Fighter Squadron, the "American Beagles" here at Tyndall AFB flew jets as a squadron for the last time. The girls and I headed out to watch the jets take off and it was amazing. 20, yes 20, F15s successfully took off...about 1 every 15 seconds. It may not seem like it, but for all those jets to take off and not have any issues is quite a big deal. We then waited at the squadron with our friend Kelly and little Emily because it was her hubby's fini-flight so we wanted to be there to take pictures and support Trigger when he landed.

Ava, Kylie, Emily, Juliet and Louden in the crew bus all ready to go see their daddys.

Trigger holding Emily and the bros giving each other the congratulatory hand shake.

Our family after Jonathan's flight.

Juliet petting the squadron dog, "Copper".

All the Beagles in front of the commanders jet.

Rolexx, Trigger and Jonathan.

The guys now fly with the 95th Fighters Squadron and we will be in this squadron for the next month until we leave. The 95th is due to close down at the end of the fiscal year, and come then, F15s will no longer fly here! We began our F15 career in this squadron back in 2003 and 2004 when I was pregnant with Kylie.

We are Family

Since the squadron Jonathan is in is officially closed as of today, we are now part of the other F15 squadron here at Tyndall. We had a joint coffee with these great ladies earlier this week at Pure Art to paint F15s. The ladies who own the place walked us through every step and I made one for the girl's play room with their names on it.

Kristen and I were the only braves ones to think outside the box and do a jet that was not either gray or blue. Well, we were making them for our girls so it made more sense to go against the crowd. Most everyone else made one for their front door with their family's name on it.

It took a couple of hours to finish our projects and here are a few of us with our schnazzy Eagles.

Bear Creek Feline Center

On Wednesday the 31st, we took a field trip to the Bear Creek Feline Center and got to see some cool cats. Jonathan was able to go with us and Juliet stayed with Jennie since she's quite young and the animals only see her as food.

Here is a Florida Panther.

Isn't she so pretty?

Here is another one on top of a house that a local Eagle Scout made. She jumped up on that house with such ease!

This is an African Serval. This is the cat you think of when you see pyramids or Cleopatra. This cat was in a "cheetah" club, so use your imagination for that one.

This is a lynx. The owners have a house cat named Psycho that taunts these cats...they are behind a cage and he is not. It was quite comical!

Jonathan and Kylie petting "Sweet Pea"-a bobcat.

The girls and I inside a cage with a 10 year old Serval.

At the end of the tour, we got to go inside the owners home and play with a very friendly 11 month old bobcat named "Uga".

Here he is giving Ava some love.

They passed out drinks and popcorn to the kids once things were over. We told Kylie one more sip of her root beer then we had to go, and she downed this entire cup with only a few stops in between swallows to breathe and make a silly face due to the carbonation she just inhaled. The sugar took a mere 5 minutes to turn her into a crazy kid on our drive home.

Just Kid Stuff

Ava is doing phenomenal with her school work. I'm really seeing a big jump in her reading skills. She has memorized some words and no longer needs to sound them out, the words she does need to sound out she figured out quickly what the word is, and her handwriting is greatly improving. She enjoys her school work and usually asks me to do more when I make her stop.

Since I'm not hard core with certain curriculum yet, Ava just gets to do a nice variety of work book pages or things I've printed off the internet. Here is a 1st grade work book I picked up at Sam's Club. On the page on the left, she had to read the sentences to me and then had to figure out which word to put in the blank, and write it neatly. On the page on the right, she had to read the sentence and draw a line to the correct animal it was describing. I'll say it again, there is nothing like seeing something "click" with your child right in front of your eyes.

Juliet didn't quite make it through "Bee Movie" last weekend. She snored her little heart out and drooled all over her bean bag.

I had to take her to the beginning part of a baby shower I co-hosted last weekend and she thought she was cool stuff sitting in the front seat of daddy's truck.

Oh yeah, Juliet's new talent is fake sleeping. It is so hilarious! Jonathan got suckered into it a few days ago. He turned to me when we got home and opened the van door to get her out and whispered "she's sleeping". I whispered back "she's faking it". He quietly turned back to her and said "are you fake sleeping" and she cracked a big smile and opened her eyes.

Kylie is great at helping out around the house. Her newest chore is feeding the animals and emptying the bathroom trash. She's great at getting down cereal bowls and pouring breakfast for her and her sisters. We just haven't mastered the gallon of milk quite yet....well we haven't let her try.

These sweet sisterly moments happen, but they are usually few and far between these days.

Deep Theological Thoughts by a 5 Year Old

So tonight at dinner we were talking about Jesus and the devil and all that jazz, and Kylie pipes up and says "so mommy....the guys who killed Jesus, they were good!" I asked her why she thought that and she said "because Jesus needed to die for our sins so they had to kill him".

CRUD time

Last Friday, Tyndall AFB had their annual ladies CRUD tournament at the Club on base. This was my 3rd year playing for our squadron and our team consisted of 7 players. Sam, Jonelle, Elizabeth and Laurie (whose husband was TDY) have never played before, ever! Kristen played once in the past, and that one time being the game she was in at her last base (no practices), and finally Tamara (whose husband is deployed) and I who have played before. Sam and Jonelle are active duty in the squadron and the other 5 of us wives have 10 kids between us, so getting us all together to practice was tough to say the least. Our squadron is dwindling down to no one due to its closure in less than 2 weeks, so it was hard to scrounge up a team. But those of us dedicated wives got together when we could and practiced, and at these practices it was apparent that as a whole, our team stunk. And I can say that because we'd all agree!

We would try to get together once a week (starting about a month prior to the tournament) at the community center on base with our kids. No, not with all 10, but usually at least 5, and my 3 have to go to the bathroom every 10 minutes, and Laurie has a newborn so clearly our practices were very distracted. A week prior to the tournament, a scrimmage was set up and games were played between all the teams with the judges so we could be fully aware of the rules and get some strategies and see how other teams played. It was at this scrimmage in which a few of my team members got very down-hearted and embarrassed at our quick losses and they couldn't stand to stay and take it any longer and left for the evening. Last Tuesday and Thursday we got together again in the mornings and luckily we played against the other flying squadron teams and slowly, we sort of got our act together. We just accepted we'd be out of the first two games and get home to pay our baby sitters and call it a night.


Friday night, we all arrived at the club in our black F15 embroidered Tshirts. The other teams got WAY more creative than us and their shirts were really cute, but at least the rest of us can wear our shirts again. :) I was our team's captain and after we re-heard rules from the head judge along with the other team captains, and after we drew for our order and to see who we'd play against first, we were all ready to go! We shockingly started out pretty good and wouldn't you know it...one of our least experienced girls won the game for us with just one life left! We played the Med group gals, who were last years champions (none of us knew this at the time, which was a good thing because I think it would have psyched us out in a bad way). It was awesome! We screamed and shouted and got ready for our next games. Could we really stand a chance?

Next game-we played the F22 gals and they pretty much whooped us. It was fun to heckle those girls since most of them are friends of ours, but they practiced a lot more than we did and they were really good, so they deserved to win.

Next game-we played the girls from the 83rd. We quickly lost lots of lives (each girl gets 3 lives then they are out---this makes for a total of 18 lives per team per game). It came down to just me playing for our team (having 2 lives left) and 4 girls from the other team, and between them they had 9 lives left. No pressure, right? I assumed I'd be out after a few plays, but wouldn't you know it, I ran the table and our team won again! We weren't out yet! I do need to thank my husband as well as Kristen's husband for continually screaming at the girls from the other team. I'm convinced their yelling distracted them and helped me play better.

Next game-we were up against the Med group gals again. This time, we lost against them. I don't want to make excuses, but we had already been there for about 2 1/2 hours, we were tired and had to sit and wait to play this game so our energy had dropped, and the Med group was really good. I think we got lucky to beat them the first time.

Game 5-FINALLY we got to play the other F15 squadron, the 95th. I was hoping to play them because my wonderful friend Candace is on the team and I was ready to go up against her, and boy did we heckle each other. It was so much fun! We had a great time playing them, especially since we'll all be in the same squadron next week, so it was friendly competition, but we needed to step up our game because we weren't going down like that! It came down to me and one other girl playing single man against each other and
I WON AGAIN!!!

Myself, Kelly (who has played on our team in the past, but she's with child) and Candace.

In the past, we would have normally been done after losing 2 games, but this year there was a losers bracket playing for 3rd place, and this is where we were. After beating the 95th, we had one last game to play, and wouldn't you know it, it was against the Med group AGAIN! It was about 10:45, about half of the club, including our judge was drunk and we had all calculated our babysitters were making a small fortune between us all. We just wanted it to be over! We were happy we had made it this far, but we wanted to get the game over and done with. Yes, we lost and ultimately came in 4th place. However, our team came home with the Grand Champion trophy (frog holding a ball), so you could say we came in first place!