Maughanstrs Making Magic: 2011

Updates for Afghanistan

So we are on week 10 of Travis being in Afghanistan. It's been a little bumpy after a break down or two and I am sure there will be more before we can be done but I think we are holding up alright considering. The girls have been extremely forgiving and loving to me. They love their Daddy so much that is has been beyond hard for them to be home with mean mommy. I myself am looking forward to school starting to help distract us all from the craziness. Travis is doing well. He has his good days and his bad. The hard ones for him generally are the hard ones for us as well. Distance doesn't change that fact. We are being strong for one another though and getting each other through. He has been staying busy with work, work and more work. Building up new shops and doing his three jobs as best he can. The temperatures if I am not mistaken Trav may correct me later but from what I understand them to be in the 120's most days. He is losing weight from lack of apatite and insane amount of sweat at least his office has AC and his tent which helps him to sleep at night. =) He says the food is fairly good but he is getting sick of it pretty quick. He isn't sleeping well and the prayer music of the locals wake him up pretty early. The guys are doing as well as they can be. He says his soldiers are wound pretty tight and with the heat on top of tension its making for a hard atmosphere. But he is working hard at keeping everyone's tempers to a minimum and smoothing over bickering as best he can. The girls and I have been trying to write him letters so that he can have mail. Emails are great but I know he likes to have a bit of home he can hold in his hands so I am trying hard to make sure I write him a few times a week. The girls love drawing pictures for Daddy and Katie is working hard at her writing so that she can write Daddy letters all by herself. Brooklyn is becoming quite the artist and loves to paint him pictures. Preston is pretty clueless but he works hard at snuggling with mom at night to help fill that huge old king size bed up for me. The girls and I for family home evening the other day decided after hearing about moral being low a few weeks ago to make the soldiers some goody bags. The girls carefully stamped fifteen bags for Daddy and his soldiers to decorate them. They then went to the dollar store and picked out funny toys to put in the bags. We baked some cookies and then filled each of the bags with the loot. They received them yesterday and Travis said it was good to see smiles on their faces. It was rewarding to see that our girls hard work helped even for a minute to bring joy to these soldiers. I do believe we will have to make some more soon. =) Anyway here are some pictures of Trav and his soldiers.

Travis and one of his soldiers putting up a shop tent for training.

Travis in his office

Stake dinner with mango smoothie. =) Nice plate Trav.

The girls "thank you" for the goody bags. =)

Trav in front of one of his shipping containers.

Butterfly, butterfly fly away home. . .

So our dear friend Kadi has a daughter just between Katie and Brooklyn's age. She invited the girls over for a butterfly party. She has been watching the butterfly's grow during the summer in this nifty little net. So Kadi being the amazing teacher she is told the story of the hungry hungry caterpillar after a fun filled afternoon of face painting, bubbles, water balloons, ect. After the story was told and each of the kids had a chance to help with the felt board they let these two little butterfly's go. The girls had a blast and want to know if they can "grow" butterfly's next year. Here are some pictures of the day. =)

Sprinklers. . .

So this is what happens when you go on vacation for a month and a sprinkler head breaks. :( Dang Colorado and it's lack of rain. In Tennessee we wished for a little less rain but after living in Colorado Springs for two and half years one starts to miss the moisture. Oh why must these things happen during deployments!?! Thankfully we have great friends who can rescue me from this frustration and teach me while they work. Pretty soon this girl is going to know how to fix just about everything. ;-)

New Roof!

So thanks to Colorado's wind and product that wasn't worth much we have a new roof. We had to replace the roof on our home this year. We had a type of shingle on our roof that basically you can't get any more because it sucks, so after we lost a few shingles due to crazy Colorado wind storms we needed to replace the entire roof. So the final product looks great, we are crossing our fingers that it will be a good selling point when it comes time to sell, and all in all we are pretty happy. The company who did the installation has been amazing to work with and they were able to install it in one day. Oh the joys of owning a home. . . I still think it beats renting. =)