My bad... I got sucked into life and it didn't leave me any time to be thankful yesterday!
Backtracking... Day 10 - I'm thankful for literacy. I love that Ava is bringing books home from school, reading them, and scoring 100's on her AR tests the next morning. She loves to read. She reads to Victoria before bedtime. I never imagined my little girl to be THIS smart - but I'm eating it up :) I giggled the other day because she had drawn a picture to put on her bulletin board. I really should take a picture of it, but I'm already in my recliner with my feet up... so you'll just have to imagine it! At the top, she dated it... November 6, 7 8 9 10. Bahahahha.... I laughed so hard.
Then there's Victoria. She's just turned 4, and she's got quite a difficult name to spell - but by golly... she does it! She had a bit of a hard time making the R for a while. She finally got that down. And sometimes, she spells phonetically, with her speech impediment, included :P "Victoea." It's SO damned cute. I love to see her papers that she comes home from daycare with... where she's working on tracing her letters and writing the alphabet.
Day 11 - Veteran's Day. I was desperately looking for an excuse to get out of attending Ava's little program... but my big, brown eyed girl would have been so disappointed if I hadn't shown up. So I took Victoria to daycare early, and I made my way to the elementary school so I could be one of a handful of veterans that was honored in a special assembly to celebrate all who have sacrificed. We spent 30 minutes speaking to 2 classrooms... and one of the questions was from Ava's 1st grade teacher - she asked what our most memorable moment in Iraq was.
I choked on a huge lump in my throat, and looked away. I couldn't even answer. My most memorable moment was taking toys to children who were injured... meeting a girl who'd had her hands blown off... and having her grandfather ask the translator to tell us "thank you for everything that you do."
Today, I'm thankful that I was given the opportunity to serve. The military taught me more about life, sacrifice, honor, duty, respect, patriotism, and selflessness than I think I could have learned anywhere else. It was a hard, 12.5 years... but I wouldn't take it back, and I wouldn't change it for anything in the world.
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