Picture This

No news from Blake in the past 2 weeks really. He's in country waiting to be taken to his duty station from the processing station. The real purpose of this entry is to put the pictures online that we took at Ft. Hood waiting for him to board the buses and leave. So, without any further ado, here we go:

Blake has to check the size of his bag before he can get on the plane. If it doesn't fit in this small box, he has to take stuff out and leave it there. Not very many bags didn't fit. Blake had room left over to carry someone else's stuff for them. Just a portable dvd player and his iPod to get him through the long flight.

We found someone who was more than willing to take a picture of us all. Carol did most of the camera work on all of the other pictures here.

There were several family members in the gym as well as the soldiers. The family in the background was with a young mother who was also being deployed.

This one broke my heart. I don't know the soldier, but the young boy was not about to let go - not even for a minute. His younger brother is standing there also, but it was the older boy that caught my attention. Dad just let him stand there throughout most of the formation until Mom came over and walked him back to the bleachers. There were tears in the boy's eyes, but there were also tears in the eyes of everyone who witnessed it.

The mood of the day was anxious and concerned, but for Blake there was also the knowledge that he was finally going to be able to do the job he had spent this last year training for. He has kept a positive attitude through some of the hardest periods of his life, and for him, it's finally going to pay off.

Show us your "mean" face. I thought these two pictures should be shown together. The one on top is Blake at about 11 when he visited the WWF wrestler The Undertaker at his parents' home in Houston. I thought it compared well with the one on the bottom, taken 13 years later. Some things never, ever change.

Finally, it was time to file out and board the buses for the first leg of the long trip. Everyone was there to shake their hands as they stepped out the doors, from the Commander and First Sergeant to the civilian groups who show up at all of these things for support. And it was time for us to get back in the car and head back to Houston. A short trip, but well worth it.