Parties' Over

The pictures above are of Jasen in his Texas shirt, and one each of us getting our awards on Friday.

Thank goodness, our wild weekend is over! It wasn't so wild as just busy. Last night, we returned home from the Wine and Cheese party at Jasen's brigade commander's house around 9, about an hour after we really wanted to be home. I told Jayme, our babysitter, not to feel slighted if we didn't call her again for awhile; goodness knows she's gotten enough of our money this weekend!

Do you want to know what a great sitter this girl is? First off, she let Grace help her feed Davis. Wow, that's something Grace's mom doesn't even do! Grace said Davis had two sitters last night: Jayme and Grace. So Grace got to help a lot. Then, when I was trying to pay Jayme, she kept refusing to take our money, saying we had already paid her enough for the weekend. She ended up taking some of the money, but not as much as she should have gotten. She's a sweet girl and the kids like her, too, which almost seems to be bonus!

The Hail and Farewell last night was really nice. The garrison (meaning Fort Riley) commander and his wife were there, acting as "hired help" for Col. and Mrs. Gibbs. They are both Aggies (well, I guess she isn't but both their families are) so we had a great time visiting with them. One of their oldest friends in the world is the (a?) professor of military science (PMS) at A&M right now. That's a good contact to have, especially as Jasen gets back from Iraq. We don't know if we'll be able to go straight to Jasen's next school, which is at Fort Leavenworth, outside of Kansas City. Anyway, last night we were talking again about the option of going to A&M as part of the ROTC cadre. Something not to get too excited about right now, but Jasen's keeping his options open.

We were welcomed into the new unit last night and Col. Gibbs could not have been more nice to us and about us. He said he only keeps Jasen around because of me. I think that might partly be true, because all he says about Jasen is a "darn Aggie." And he doesn't say darn. I don't know if he knows that I am the one that actually went to A&M! I'm pretty vocal about my support of the Aggies, but I think Col. Gibbs thinks it's just because Jasen likes them.

Anyway, it was a sticky situation for Col. Gibbs last night because the commander Jasen replaced was there, too. So he couldn't talk about all the work we'd done already without being ugly about the old guy. However, Col. Gibbs did tell us (and Jasen's new first sergeant and his wife) how much he appreciated our hard work and that we'd already done priceless work for the unit by getting the FRG going. His wife, Nolly, was especially complimentary in front of the whole group of people, which I appreciated. The fact is, I couldn't have done what I did without her.