Joe is HOME!

It's been great having Joe home! He's been back at work already for a week and will work another week and then will have 2 weeks off! We have a little family vacation planned to go to the Outer Banks, NC for a week while he is on leave. This will be our first family trip out of town (as a family of 4)! Hopefully it will be a fun time!

A photographer came to capture the moments of us seeing Joe when he got off the boat! She did an amazing job and these are pictures I will treasure forever as it is the first deployment for us with children. There is a program called http://www.oplove.org/ that you can get a professional photographer to come take your homecoming pics and it's FREE! They even send you a free album of all the pics they take! I ended up buying a cd of all the pics from the photographer. She did such a great job and I wanted to be able to post the pictures and also order several of them to put in frames around our house. The photographer also used a picture of Joseph that she took as her background on her website under the Operation Love United button on the bottom of her page! http://www.rsutherlandphotography.com/

Thankfully we got a new desktop computer last week so I'm back in business with blogging!!! I'm trying to figure out my new iMac apple computer. So far I LOVE it, but it is quite different from a regular "Windows" computer so I'm trying to train my brain to a MAC right now instead of what I've been used to using for so many years. I LOVE the photo program on my new computer and have also downloaded Photoshop as my photo editing program! So in my spare time (haha....that's not very often these days with 2 small kids), I'm trying to learn more and more about editing pics to enhance them and make them more pleasing to the eye! I'm also trying to keep up with both the kids scrapbooks also. Whew!!!

If you want to see all the pics from homecoming, click on the homecoming link on the right side of my blog under photo albums.

Enjoy these homecoming pics.....






I can hardly believe how fast my little boy is growing. Isn't he just so sweet?!!!

I LOVE making him laugh! One of the best sounds in the world!!!

My sweet princess is growing up fast too. I could just kiss her cheeks all day!!!

One of my favorite family pics. I love how Joe and I are looking at Joseph and he's looking at Maddy and she's looking at the camera! Perfect!!!

Daddy couldn't wait to play with his "mini me"!

Interviewed by the news crew...

This one will be treasured forever!

Heading home...