Completely Random

Since I have been so slack with the blog, I feel that I have so many pictures to post from over the last few months. I am going to try to narrow it down to just a few to get caught back up. There is no particular order to the pictures. These are from our last days in Italy, Dad's new house, Christmas with both our families and then some other random ones. Enjoy!




This is a picture of Josh with Emily and then one of all of our close friends from Italy.


RT receiving his "going away" award.




His "gift" from the younger guys in his squad. Payback for all the times he yelled at them. They were giving him a pretty good beating. Pretty amusing to watch actually.... he held his own considering there were 4 or 5 of them!




Our last dinner out in Vicenza. This is RT with his two best friends from Italy, Josh and Torrez.


Emily and her cousin Briane playing in all the leaves at Dad's new house.


Waiting to see Santa


Emily and PawPaw opening a gift; Me and Brittany






These are all from Christmas morning. Emily got so many things from Santa including a big rocking horse, a new red wagon and a doll house. Not to mention numerous other toys. It was so much fun to watch her enjoy everything since RT was not able to be with us last year. We were so thankful he was home this year!


Opening a gift with Aunt Rana




Lucas; Austin; several of the kids opening gifts at Aunt Ruby's house.

At the park on Christmas day.

At Monkey Joe's this past weekend. She loved this place!

I think that brings us up to date. I will be much better about blogging now that we are in one place and are starting to get settled in.

Update

Hey everyone. I am sorry that I have been terrible about updating the blog lately. I wanted to do a quick little update and let you know what is going on with us now. We have been very busy lately. We left Italy five days after Thanksgiving and have been on the go ever since. That is why I have not been able to really sit down and write. The plane ride was ridiculously long and exhausting. We had a layover in New York where we ran into all kinds of road bumps and missed the flight to Atlanta. We had 9 pieces of luggage, Emily, the stroller (which Delta broke into two pieces), the car seat and our 65 pound dog in his large cage! It was chaos to say the least. However, we caught a flight that evening and finally made it home. It took all of us about a week to really get adjusted to the time change. We hit all our favorite food places that we had missed so much while in Europe. We had to try to get things together for Christmas as quickly as possible because we had not been able to buy any gifts prior to coming home. We spent Christmas Eve and Christmas morning at my Dad's new house and we really enjoyed being home with the family this year. We finally found a house to rent a few miles from the back gate of Fort Benning. The military delivered all of our household goods in three shipments this past week. We have spent quite some time unpacking and trying to organize. I think we are getting there. RT signed in and started his in-processing this past week. He seems to be really happy with the unit that he has been assigned to and we are very thankful for that. Emily is doing really well and is so happy that she has her own room again. She is growing so fast and is so smart that it is scary! I am still looking for a job and keeping hope that something comes along soon. So, that is the Harris Family in a nutshell for the last few months. I will post some recent pictures from Christmas soon so everyone can see how big Emily is getting. We hope everyone is doing well. We are certainly happy to be home in the states again!

Snow Day!!!

Yesterday morning we woke up to a beautiful snowfall. Our entire yard and everything around it was covered in snow. They closed post down and RT had the day off and was able to stay home with us. We all got to go out and play including Bronx who loved it! Here is what we saw when we went outside for the first time yesterday.



Megan and Kasen came over to play. This was Kasen's first time ever being in the snow. Emily and Daddy built somewhat of a snowman together. This is me showing Kasen what snow is like.



This is Emily being silly!
I threw a snowball at RT and it hit him right in the neck. We happened to get a picture of it right after it hit him.

Then it was payback time! This is him trying to take me down in the snow!

Holly, Adam and Ethan stopped by on their way home from post. We had lunch and then it was back outside to play again! This is Emily and Ethan.

Here is Emily making a snow angel.

I almost had a heart attack...

Yesterday I had taken my wedding rings off while I took a shower. I was in the bedroom afterwards when I heard something clinging. Emily walked in so very calmy and said "Mama I dropped your earring." I walked into what is now her completely empty room and asked where she dropped it. I knew that it could not have been my earring because I had put those inside the cabinet in the bathroom and she cannot reach that high. She looked down at the air vent that is on her floor and said "in there." I almost had a heart attack! My two year old had dropped the most important thing that RT has ever given me down an air vent in a house in Italy that I was moving out of in two weeks. RT comes up stairs and I explain to him that my wedding ring is the air vent somewhere while almost in tears. He takes the vent covers off and lays flat on the ground while sticking his ENTIRE arm down the vent. Luckily the vent did an L turn and it had stopped just within his arm's reach. Lesson learned: don't leave your most valued possesion unattended with an exteremly curious (and clumsy) child in the house!

Ghetto or Redneck?

RT wanted me to label this post as "RT missing his truck" but I just could not get past how insane this was. This is either the most ghetto thing we have ever done or it is certainly the most redneck thing we have ever done. What do you think? We only have our BMW left since we shipped the Volvo. We also had the movers come Wednesday and Thursday of this week to pack up our household goods. We had already sold our living room furniture to some friends of ours and needed to get it out of the house before the movers got here. We had no way to really get it to their house. Most people over here in Italy drive small cars and we do not know anyone that has a truck here. Well my exteremly creative husband came up with an idea. "Why don't we just strap the furniture to the top of the BMW and drive it to their house?" he asks. I thought he was kidding... he was not! So he and I literally carried our couch, loveseat and a chair and strapped them on the hood of the car. We had to make two trips obviously. The loveseat and chair went first and then the couch went on the second trip. I could not resist getting pictures of this. I cannot even tell you the looks we got as we drove across the neighborhood with furniture on the hood of a BMW!

Exhausted

This past week we have been preparing for the movers to come and pack up our household goods. We have moved so many things and tried to arrange things to make the packing as easy as possible. Emily has been there the whole time checking out all the things we have been going through. She has found things to play with that she did not even know that we owned. The other day, I realized that things had gotten really quiet and when I went to find her, this is what I saw. She was so exhausted from playing that she just passed out. And yes her chair is upside down!

Happy Birthday Kasen

This past weekend we went to our neighbor's house for their son's first birthday party. Emily was so excited about the birthday cake! She had a hard time understanding that she could not open all of Kasen's birthday gifts. RT decided to designate her as the "gift helper" where she was allowed to hand Kasen his gifts to open instead of making her sit there and watch him. This was a good distraction. Here she is wearing a birthday hat.

Family Picture

As you know, the Georgia-Florida game is one of our biggest games of the season. We all got into the spirit and wanted to cheer the dawgs on. AFN actually carried the game this week so we were excited that we were able to watch it. Not so excited about the outcome however!

Happy Halloween!

We were so excited that RT was home for Halloween this year. The weather was really bad all day but it did quit raining long enough to take Emily trick-or-treating. There was a small "carnival" at the youth building in our neighborhood that we took Emily to first. Our friends Jim and Megan have a 1 year old son named Kasen that went with Emily this year. After the carnival we decided that RT would take Emily trick-or-treating and I would stay home and hand out candy since he missed it last year. It was chaos! The community was open to American kids from 6-7 and then they opened our neighborhood to the Italian children from 7-9. It was hilarious. Italian children do not trick-or-treat so I think they love coming to the American houses and getting candy.

Here is our beautiful butterfly.



This is at the carnival and Emily is having a tattoo put on her hand.


Emily and Kasen

Trick-or-treating


Emily and Mommy


Sharing a Twizzler with Daddy

Emily and Kasen excited about all the candy!




I thought that this was funny. Everytime that the kids rang the doorbell Bronx would bark and get all excited. We had to put the baby gate on the stairs to keep him from scaring the kids. He was so sad that he had to sit by himself.

The Volvo

I know that this is a really random post, but I told Jenn that I would post pictures of the Volvo on here so she could see what it looks like. We shipped the car last week so it is on it's way to the states. I took a lot of pictures the day we shipped it to document what condition the car was in. These are from that day. They are coming today to survey how much stuff we have to ship from the house. Next week they will actually be back to pack our household goods. The reality of us moving is starting to set in...