A letter.

Dear summer,
You have teased us here in Washington a few times now. Please come out soon! We'd all love it very much :] It is the middle of July and I have yet to wear shorts.. somethings not right with that. I think you can agree. So from every cold person in Washington... summer please show us! Pretty pretty please :]

Thank you,
Emily

The best breakfast smoothie EVER.

Right now since I am doing a 24 day challenge my breakfast consists of a meal replacement shake. By themselves they are AMAZING but I like to make them even better than amazing... what would that be?!

Usually I do all of this minus the shake with my muscle gain every morning, but for the cleanse I use only 1 scoop of muscle gain for some extra protein since I don't eat meat.

So ladies and gentles meet my favorite breakfast shake cast....

A berry or vanilla meal replacement shake

spinach (LOTS)

frozen bananas chopped up

frozen mixed fruit

muscle gain (vanilla is best)

fresh fruit if you have any (we have some blueberries that needed to be used)

Start with 8oz of water, your shake mix and one scoop of vanilla muscle gain.

Add in as much spinach as you would like. As you can see I like a lot of it!

Mix away...

Now you have yourself a nice green smoothie :]

Add in a handful of frozen fruit and a few slices of banana (make sure not to put in too much frozen fruit or you will end up with a VERY thick smoothie that you have to eat with a spoon!), throw in some fresh fruit if you have some... and mix that bad boy up.

All done!

Now you have yourself a very healthy, very filling and very delicious breakfast smoothie.

mmmm... so good :]

Happy 4th!

Hope everyone is having a safe and fun 4th of July!?  I personally can't wait for it to be over! Days and days and days of listening to fireworks is no fun for me.  Especially when they light them off till 4:30 in the morning! I don't even want to imagine what it must be like for someone with PTSD.. and when I say fireworks I mean the ones that sound like bombs going off. I do like the pretty ones though :]

Anyways, while I was searching for "God bless the USA" by Lee Greenwood (perfect song for today of course) I came across this little ditty! This was back whem American Idol was good to me, everyone looked normal still.. not like they were rock stars in waiting ha.

Strawberry Festival

My goal for the summer is to blog about things a little faster than I am doing now! We'll see how that goes...
A few weeks ago my mother in law, sister in law, two of the nephews, the sil's roomie, her friend and myself headed out for the strawberry festival parade. I haven't been in YEARS so I was pretty excited for this.

 Blue tongues!

 Courtney waving to the firemen ;] ha

 This was pretty cool!

 LOVED these dresses, so pretty.

Just for Frank... even though he doesn't get on the Internet much ha.

Dog park fun

So these pictures are from a week in a half ago, I thought I had posted them already.. but I guess I just "thought" about posting them so much I thought I already ha ha. I'm on the slow side. Today I was enjoying the first day of summer (YAY) at the park with the girls and as soon as I got there I wished I would have remembered my camera. It was beautiful out. Hopefully the weather will be nice to us in Washington this summer so I can get lots of pictures to share :]

 This dog was too cute!

 Yup they were VERY happy to have the tall grass to play in.

 Hanging out in the mud puddle :]

I want to do a post just on Molly at that park. She is my favorite.. subject ha. Ellie doesn't like getting her picture taken so whenever the camera comes out she stops what she is doing, or she turns her head. Little stinker!

Hey hey hey...

... GOODBYE! To credit card debt that is!! We are officially free of credit cards and that pesky debt that goes with it. Man does it feel amazing. We still have two car loans left that have a hefty total together, but it feels like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders now that the credit cards are all paid off and closed out. I've been telling anyone who will listen that we our credit card free ha. I'm sure it's getting annoying by now.
I'm hoping to have the Explorer paid off by November, December at the latest. With Frank coming home for leave in August that puts a little detour in our journey to total debt freedom. It's a pretty good detour so I don't mind :] I did tell him though that we won't be spending much money if we can help it since our debt still is important while he's home. And to make things even better we have to pay for 3 plane tickets for him. His flight out of GTMO is free, however, he has to pay to get home from Jacksonville. I had him book his tickets since he knew the times he had to work with. Well he made a little snafu and had his returning flight get back to JAX an hour AFTER his flight back to GTMO. They only have one or two flights a week in/out of there so he CAN NOT miss it!

I tried calling the company he bought them through but it seems shady because I can never get through and my calls end out of nowhere. So now we will have to purchase a one way returning flight to JAX so he is able to catch his flight back to base and not get into trouble. Needless to say I will be taking care of all flight travels from here on out ha.

So that's our excitement right now!

Fun in the sun

 Zoey had knee surgery about a month ago, and still has a month plus till she can resume play time. She hasn't been too happy about that! ha

Well...

I hadn't planned on taking a blogging hiatus.. but I have nothing to really share :/ I have no idea what it is about Washington, but it makes me super LAZY! I have done pretty much nothing since I've been home. I love being busy.. exploring.. anything! I don't like the base gym at Everett, so trying to make myself go is a little challenging. I don't have warm work out clothes so I can't do outdoor work outs which are my favorite of course. I have been seeing family lots and it has been going great. Praise Jesus!!
Lets see... Frank put his leave in for August, YAY! We are one pay check away from having our last credit card paid off. So close to being DONE with credit cards :] I found a church I like and I have family that goes there as well, I didn't know it at the time when I decided to check it out.... I am back volunteering at N.O.A.H and loving every minute of it.

Life is still very much up in the air for us over the next year year in a half and it continues to scare the crap out of me :[ I know that everything will be okay... He doesn't put things in our life that we can't handle! But for someone (me) who has control issues it's not so easy. We'll gladly take prayers!

Here are a few pictures from when I first got home, I was meeting our newest nephew Zaedan for the first time.

NOTE: I just read this post and man is it poorly written! ha It's almost embarrassing... however, my mind does feel like it's all over the place these days....