First off, I want to thank Christina Conrad Photography for these amazing photos we will now get to cherish for the rest of ours lives and thank you for being such a great friend!!!  Second, I have never posted a “personal post” on here before so this is new for me.  When my husband left for Afghanistan back in November 2013, it felt like it was going to be forever until I seen him again.  The thought of your best friend and love of your life just leaving for the next 9 months was not an easy thing to cope with.  I decided a few weeks before he left that I was going to move home during the deployment so that I could spend that time with our families. Little did I know how stressful moving back and fourth it was going to be and how much money was going to be spent doing it. YIKES! But it was so worth it, I was able to be around all the people that loved me and it surely made time go fast.  I luckily also missed out on one of New Yorks worst winters in years! I mean, Indiana has a lot of snow and cold days but nothing like the North Country’s brutally cold and feet upon feet upon feet of snow in an hour. haha!  I moved back up a few months before Mike got home to get us a new house and settle it into a home.  I had three of my closest childhood friends there along the way to help me and I will never be able to thank them enough!! The few weeks before he came home I felt like time was hardly moving.   At some points I’d check the clock and only 5 minutes had gone by what felt like hours.  A few of my close friends up here were also prepping for their husbands to come home, so we all kept each other pretty busy with get togethers, tanning, the gym and getting our nails done!  Then the day finally came.  I was sure that our date was going to be delayed because everyone else’s did, but ours never changed, only by 1 hour.  That morning I got a text from a friend that her husband just texted her and said that they landed, I immediately starting crying(tears of joy obviously).  When Mike called me to say he was finally on American soil and that he would see me in a few hours, I lost it.  Crying all over again, more like sobbing.  So I put ice cubes on my face so I didn’t have a puffy swollen face(thank goodness I didn’t put make up on yet).  Then that moment was here, I got in my car and started to drive to Fort Drum(about 3 minutes from our house).  I started tearing up as I pulled in the gate, and then pulling into the parking lot of the gym where the ceremony was being held.  I told myself to hold it together because I didn’t want puffy raccoon eyes from my make up smearing.  Sitting there, they announced  “2 more minutes”.  I look to my left and my friend Jeri started crying and I told her I couldn’t look at her because I couldn’t cry.  Then, the soldiers start walking through the doors and it was like a wave of tears, from left to right we were all crying. The feeling you get when soldiers walk through the doors and you know that this deployment is finally over is the most incredible feeling in the world.  My heart is pounding just writing this.  I honestly don’t even remember them saying dismissed I just remember running and immediately Mike and I finding one another. In that moment my heart has never been so full. It was honestly the best day of my life.  Deployment is such a terrible and amazing thing all at the same time.  You get to fall in love all over again.  Hugging him all I kept saying is “are you really here, am I really hugging you?”  I never wanted to let go.  Living a military lifestyle is far from easy but it is an incredible bonding experience and I wouldn’t want to go through it with anyone other than Mike.  <3