Friday, July 16, 2010

My first time to Asia

As most of you know, I left Ft. Hood a few days ago for Afghanistan. Due to operational security I can't say exactly where I will be, but I can say that I am being deployed to northern Afghanistan as part of the presidential surge that was called for back in the fall of 2009. Our job here will be to provide MEDEVAC coverage for our area of operation.Well, we aren't quite to our destination yet but I wanted to post a real quick update to our progress.

Right now we're in in Kyrgyzstan for an unknown number of days prior to moving south. The camp that we're in is actually pretty nice - there is air conditioning in all the tents/buildings (sometimes working better than others), free wifi internet in a lot of places, decent enough food (not MREs, always a plus), and there isn't much work to be done. It's a nice transition from the states because we still have some of the niceties that we won't have where we are going, and our combat zone pay benefits started the day we arrived here.

I have a feeling my updates will be few and far between going forward, but I'll do my best to post some pictures that I take along the way.

Here we are waiting for our transportation to the airfield, not too long after saying good bye to our families:


This one was taken right when we arrived here -- standing around in the rocks waiting for something:


The first of what I presume will be very many dust storms. I imagine they will get a lot worse than this, but it still wasn't much fun cleaning dust out of my ears.


I found a way to get my British Open fix:


I also want to say a quick thank you to everyone for their prayers and support for our family. It has been overwhelming to experience the love and support from so many people and really means a lot to us.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Make it FUN

Despite the circumstances, we have been having a lot of fun around here!



This is what Joella thinks about Matt deploying



Fun time w/ dad - trying to use the computer




Arrrrgh



Breakfast was so pretty she thought she'd wear it




Couldn't have planned this one if I tried...

Thursday, July 1, 2010

A couple tricks...

Joella waves for us...



She claps too!



And today she surprised us again by standing for the first time on her own (pulling herself up onto something and holding on). Our friend Chelsa said it best when she said that it's amazing how quickly kids learn new skills! Two weeks ago Joella didn't even know how to sit up on her own.

For those of you wondering if she has started "actually" crawling yet...nope! She still does her lizard/army crawl everywhere! She's so efficient with it that I don't think she has much incentive to do the hands-and-knees thing.
 

Copyright (c) 2009 Matt and Johnni. All rights reserved. Design by NodeThirtyThree + Free CSS Templates. Bloggerized by Free Blogger Template.