Life. Celebrated Daily.

In our few days left, I have started to think about the last ten weeks. What will I miss? How have our lives changed because of these ten weeks? How will things change when we go back home to Springfield? Being in this crazy life, just when something starts to feel like home, you are pretty much guaranteed a change. Love it or hate it, it is our reality. It stinks when two things happen: 1) you move somewhere you hate (ahem...Montgomery) or 2) you go somewhere for a short time and fall in love with it. Tough, because we love the DC Metro area, but I have to admit, good 'ol Norfolk has grown on me.

What we will miss:
1. Blocker Norfolk YMCA. The lovely ladies of the front desk who let us in the back, joke around with Jack, and are just simply nice people. All the really cool ladies in ChildWatch, who became our friends. And the people who work out really hard on the 4th floor.
2. Weekly festivals. Norfolk's saying/motto is "Life Celebrated. Daily." They embrace this with every type of festival possible. Like I said before, we dig the festival thing. They are the cure for the common cause of boredom.
3. Walking out our front door and not having to go down (or worse, up) two flights of stairs. Yes, we are living in a two-story house. Our home is NoVA is stacked...stairs up to the front door, stairs up to the main floor, stairs to the bedrooms, more stairs to the basement. Stairs, stairs, stairs. Maybe this is why I have put on a few pounds here.
4. Being able to walk less than five minutes in any direction from our front door only to find a very cool playground.
5. Being able to drive 30 minutes (or less) to Dam Neck beach. The military super secret beach. Not really. But it is pure awesomeness. A beach that you can only access with a military I.D. Nice. An stretch of the Atlantic coastline that is oddly quiet, absent of seagulls and the sand has minimal sharp shells. Almost as nice as Fort DeSoto.
6. Going for a run in downtown Norfolk with mermaid statues, huge schooners, ships, and the historic USS Wisconsin as my scenery along the Elizabeth river.
7. It doesn't take 40 minutes to get anywhere (unlike in DC, where you plan your life around traffic patterns).
8. It makes me think of home (as in Tampa home). There is a river, a bay and an ocean (close enough to the Gulf minus the tar balls). Sorry. It's still to soon isn't it. Damn BP. Damn you.
9. We have had a crazy amount of time together as a family. It's priceless. We know this and tried to make the most of it. We are very lucky.
10. Missing that we have an almost normal routine...we actually get up, eat breakfast together, hang out a bit, drop Papa off at school, sometimes have lunch together. I am already missing this, because I know back in DC things are going to go back to a more rushed pace. Brad is sad he will go back to having about 4 hours of Jack time and about 1 hour of Anna time. Back to the real world.

We can honestly say we lived life here. And celebrated it. Daily.

Cheers Norfolk!

Anna Marie, Bradley & Jack