So Long Farewell, Auf Wiedersehn, Good Night

Oh No! A foreign word! Time for an explanation.

auf Wie‧der‧seh‧en  [ouf vee-duhr-zey-uhn]
German.
until we meet again; good-bye for the present.

For the Record, I do know where this line came from, and if you must know I did not like the movie (sorry mom). But it did play into recent events very nicely.
For those of you who have read previous posts or who were at the parties you know that I’m going away for a little while. Not permanently... yet. But it has been the week of goodbyes for our family.
To bring those of you that don’t know up to speed a little I will explain why it is the whole family now and not just me. First off my plans have not changed and I leave the 18th for Fort Benning Georgia and won’t be back until I’m done with training in about 20 weeks plus or minus... probably plus. But we had some issues with our current apartment and long story short Haley has been moved in with my parents in Oregon and will be living with them until I get back and we move to our permanent station. So she is saying goodbye to a lot of people up here in Washington that up until a week ago were under the impression that she would be sticking around for a little while longer.
We had a party in Oregon and both Haley and I couldn’t have been more pleased with how it went. We think that we got to say goodbye to everyone that was there, but if for some reason you hid in the corner know that we love you and thank you for sharing in our time of goodbyes and celebrating the new chapter that we are entering.
We also just finished up our party tour in washington. Thank you Timm and Sandra for helping us with the location! We had such a good time seeing friends from all of the areas of our Washington life. It is amazing how fast 3 years flies by. It seems like just yesterday that I moved up here without Haley and was living on a futon at my old college roommates parents house (Thank you Phil and Lucy). There isn’t enough space on the internet to mention all of the amazing people that God has put in our lives in what now seems like such a short amount of time.
To those that were unable to make it to the parties we love you just as much still and understand that there is no way that we could pick a day that everyone could make it to. The reason it was so hard to make this change and potential move across the country wasn’t hard because of location or being close to cool places and stores. It was the people and friends that we always think of that make it such a hard decision. But, we know that this was the right decision for our family even as hard as it may be.

This weekend has been an especially hard one for me. I will bring the attention back to me personally. After all it is my blog and you can stop reading if you don’t want to hear about me.
This morning I said goodbye to my son for what could be the next 6 months. And for those of you who aren’t parents yet you can’t understand how it made me feel, but I learned a lot in 30 seconds. As I put him in his car seat and kissed him goodbye I turned around to my mom and for what I believe to be the first time ever in my life I knew exactly how she felt at that moment.
All the times that he pulled on my ears and kicked me in the morning when I was trying to sleep were a distant memory. All the times that he ate marbles, pushed buttons on the stereo, banged on my laptop and tried to escape out the front door were as good as gone. All I knew was that I loved him and didn’t want to say goodbye.

Mom -
I love you too. I will write you because I want to. You can blame this on you and Dad. You raised me to be strong and to fight for what I believe in. You must have done a pretty good job because that is what I’m going to do. I’m not gone forever, just a few months at this point, and look at the bright side. At least I didn’t do this until I had a son to keep you company while I was gone.

Dad -
I know you said that you tried to be quiet and not influence my decision. Well that isn’t possible because I can still read you like a book even in your silence. And you mentioned that I had thought of everything that you would have in this decision making process? Well I wonder where I learned that? So see, you did influence me. You taught me to be the man that I am. And if it isn’t tooting my horn too much I would have to say that I’m proud of you for it... I love you.

Both of you-
Please take care of my family, and please don’t spoil Seven too much.

So this is probably going to be one of the last posts for awhile. You can leave me comments here (haha) for me to read when I get back. I will also have email sometime after the first of the year so you can get my contact info from Haley if you would like. I’ve tried teaching Haley how to update the site, but I wouldn’t count on that, so you may be stuck with some of the current pictures for awhile unless something really crazy happens.

I will miss everyone while I’m gone, and look forward to seeing you all in the future. Whenever that may be... At least we will have something new to talk about.

Goodbye, Goodbye... Goodbye