Friday, April 27, 2012

Weekend!

Today was lovely! I attended a luncheon for all the volunteers in the family readiness program for the regiment (see below for a high-tech illustration) where I got to spend some time talking to a couple of my friends whose husbands have more or less the same job as Paul. We're so fortunate in our battalion that the guys at Paul's particular level are all studs and their wives (us) are pretty awesome, too.

Then, one of my friends from my other volunteering gave me her carseat stroller frame...which was pretty sweet because I was able to immediately turn around and spend the little stack of money I'd set aside for that item on this lovely, happy print, wanted-one-forever Vera Bradley weekender bag. I picked it up at the PX, so it was at a discount and tax-free. Yay! Happy early Mother's Day to me!



I realized today that we've spent the last month focusing pretty much solely on getting Paul ready to go to long work and have almost completely neglected to prepare this child who is about to make her appearance. There are a couple more things I still need to take care of, so part of my weekend will be dedicated to that, as you will see in the following itinerary:

Saturday:
-Aquarium with some friends in the morning
-Mandatory naptime for my exhausted children and their exhausted mother
-Hiking with those crazy Daisies
-Have our new fabulous carseat (thank you MomMom and PopPop!) installed at the fire dept.

Sunday:
-Church and the Catholic version of Sunday School...I forget the acronym
-J-ville fabric store to cover up the weird trim on the nursery curtains and find some fillers for the embroidery hoops I found.
-Finish packing for hospital JUST in case my appointment Monday turns into something more productive than your standard...which, for the record, I do not believe it will. Paul predicts her due date or later...which logistically just won't work for me so I'm sticking with the 5th. =)

And that will be that! Then we'll roll into another week and just keep this thing flowing. To close, I will close the non-educational portion of today's post with a photo of Carly's previously-posted awesome hilarious homework (this is the illustration to her spelling words poem) and some of Bree's cute new play clothes. You are welcome.

Note how huge these clothes are! I'll take a picture at the end of the summer and we'll see they will be significantly less roomy. =)

**Okay, a regiment. Here's the Wikipedia Link which gives very vague, very secure information about this particular regiment. You can follow further similarly unhelpful links to Paul's battalion and it's cool to me at least to see his battery listed on that page. Alright, here's how it more or less works, from the bottom up:

Platoon: 15-25 Marines, led by a Lieutenant. There are between 3-5 platoons in a...

Battery: 80-200 Marines, led by a Captain (like Paul). There are four batteries in Paul's...

Battalion: 300-1000 Marines, led by a Lt. Colonel. There are four battalions in this particular...

Regiment: 10th Marines has about 4,000 Marines, led by a Colonel. These are grouped into...

Division: 2nd Marine Division (not to be confused with 2nd Battalion, 10th Marines) has a little over 10,00 Marines and is led by a General. This Division includes all of the ground combat forces aboard Camp LeJeune, such as artillery, infantry, tanks, light armored vehicles, etc. It is part of...

II Marine Expeditionary Force (or "Two Meff). This is the entire base, around 40K. We have a Major General (2 stars) in charge right now.

I found a handy little illustration but I cannot seem to get it and Blogger to agree. Imagine a pyramid, right? But instead of gullible investors and greedy schemers, it's filled with battle-ready Marines. =)

2 comments:

Our Family of Four said...

I'm so bad at this stuff - the marine talk that is. Thanks for the primer. Mike keeps insisting Paul will be a general 1 day because his lovely wife is so knowledgable and involved whereas my dear husband's wife (aka me) couldn't care less. I'd like to defend myself but I can't... he is right and I suck. But hey I DID make breakfast for him and his guests this morning even though I was hosting a tea in the afternoon that had been scheduled for over a month and this breakfast popped the day before. So I don't entirely suck.

Unknown said...

Thanks for the Marine break down, it helps a lot :) Grady has decided that he wants to be a Marine. He prays at night that he will be a strong brave Marine when he grows up.