July 24th

Dashel Edward turned 7 months old the day we left Germany. He had begun crawling and pulling up in earnest a few days into our stay and the Fisher House as lovely as it was, was not designed for a baby on the go. Though I put little stock in "baby proofing" I do try to avoid having large potted plants that are just the right size for pulling up (with lots of dirt inside to eat) in the vicinity of the baby. Once Kirby moved into the Fisher House with us, he was overwhelmed at the amount of activity and was very concerned that Dashel would fall and hurt himself. Compounded by the fact that Kirby could do nothing to help corral him, it was a stressful time.
Kirby started feeling a little better each day and luckily the unseasonal heat wave (and no air conditioning) that plagued us early on had passed and the weather was nice and not too hot. We were also able to visit the HUGE BX/PX (military store) on Ramstein Air Force Base, and once again feel that twinge of jealousy at how EVERYTHING is better on an Air Force Base. We drank German beer and ate some tasty schnitzel and tried to wrap our heads around our new normal.


We drove to Garmisch Germany and stayed two nights at The Edelweiss Lodge and Resort . We'd stayed there a couple times last year and it worked out nicely because it is halfway between Landstuhl and Vicenza.






The highlight of our stay was going on the horsey ride. Look at his sweet face reflected in the window.

This sunset was beautiful and looked like a painting I thought.

The horse and carriage.

July 8th- 23th

The welcome home ceremony after a deployment is probably one of the coolest experiences you can have. Even just seeing soldiers being reunited with their loved ones on TV gives me a thrill as I think it does most people. I missed the last one when he came home from Afghanistan in '08 because we hadn't moved to Italy yet and it just didn't make sense to go and then come right back. I was there for the one in '05 after 13 months in Iraq. The excitement in the room (usually a gym) is overwhelming especially once they march in and stand there for a few minutes. You can actually lay eyes on your soldier. When they are finally released its a mob scene as everyone scrambles to find their loved one. That happy event was not to be for us, not this time anyway.
We got to Landstuhl around 2 in the morning after driving about 12 hours. I was exhausted and of course had a terrible headache. The hospital was basically deserted. I followed Spc Mix down a few halls until we found someone and asked him where Ward 10D was. When we got there Mike asked the nurses if I could see Kirby. They went to see if he was awake and then the nurse motioned for me to come down the hall. I had an increasing sense of dread the closer I got to the room. I just had no idea what Kirby would look like, how he would be, it was pretty scary. The room he was in was small, and there were two other guys in the room. Both Marines, both had been shot. Kirby was hooked up to a bunch of tubes. Not enough to warrant a lot of concern but an IV, a pain pump and a catheter. He was wearing a blousy hospital gown and his beard was coming in nicely from not shaving for a few days. He had dried blood on his wrists and his finger nails were dirty. He was high on morphine.

The following day was Kirby's surgery and the rest of the time was spent visiting him in the hospital, getting him to out-patient status, then breaking free entirely and heading home.

We didn't really take many pictures in the hospital but here are a few when we watched some world cup match. Kirby is pretty blind and the only glasses he had were the ones he was wearing when he got blown up, a pair of huge sunglasses.

July 5th-7th

As an army wife there are two contingencies that you make peace with while your husband is deployed, one is that he'll come home at the end of the deployment and life will go on, the other is that he won't come home at all. Getting hurt and having a life altering injury never even occurred to me.
Kirby called me at about 5 in the evening. My friend Emily, whose husband is also a company commander in the battalion, was over and we were watching the Twilight movies. Kirby was very heavily medicated and at first I almost thought it was a joke. I couldn't quite wrap my head around the words he was saying and when I finally understood I thought he was calling to say good-bye. He told me that he had gotten blown up by an IED and was hurt real bad, he said his back was broken. I didn't know what that meant, I didn't think you could come back from a broken back. He said he could wiggle his toes and that nothing had happened to his spinal cord. He said he would be in Landstuhl (the big army hospital hub in Germany) tomorrow and asked me to call his parents and let them know. It was a pretty short call but it was the worst moment of my life. The not knowing what exactly happened and what I could do was the worst part. The next couple days were a blur of phone calls and plans and emotions. I was talking on my cell phone and house phone almost non-stop. Finally on Wednesday, which seemed like an eternity but was only 48 hours later, we loaded the kids, my neighbor Nicole, myself and Spc. Mix(the soldier tasked with driving the car up and helping us get there) in the flex and drove the 12 hours to Landstuhl. I sat in the back seat wedged between the two car seats, holding the boys' hands and was finally able to relax a little knowing in a few hours I would see Kirby.

July 4th

July 4th was the last "normal" day we had. The deployment had just hit 7 months and things were buzzing along. The weather had been getting progressively warmer and going on post for the Fourth of July festivities was like hanging out in a sauna. Oliver loved riding the "not quite safe for kids" rides and took his driving very seriously. We drank a beer but had to skip the hot dogs because the Italians were bum rushing the stands. They aren't the waiting-in-line kind of people. As we sat at the picnic tables, sweating profusely, a huge storm cloud covered the sky, the wind started blowing like crazy and the temperature dropped at least ten degrees. If I were psychic, I would have thought it some sort of ominous sign. Instead I just gathered the boys and left.

Here's the boys in their red white and blue outfits.