The Surprise of a Lifetime!

The Surprise of a Lifetime!  05/30/2011

Saturday, May 28, 2011. What a day! It started out great. The sun was shining, the weather was warm. My friends and I woke up after our monthly girl's night and had a wonderful breakfast together. It's nice to have people to talk to and have breakfast with, after spending so much time alone. The plans for the rest of the day were to pick up my friend Joy from the airport, hang out for the afternoon and then head to a military wives get together that night. So when the girls left after breakfast, I decided I had lots of time to worry about getting ready to go out later so I threw my hair in a ponytail, put on jeans and a sweater and was off to the airport. When Joy and I got back home, we decided a nice afternoon on the couch with a movie and nachos was what we both needed and since she was already in comfies and grabbed one of my husband's hoodies so I could be comfy while watching the movie too.

About halfway through the movie, the phone rang. My friend Jill was calling to say she and her husband, were standing outside a paint store, fighting over paint colors for their bedroom and she asked if she could show him the color of my basement so he'd see the color she really wanted. I thought it was kind of a strange request but said to come on over. When they got there we all went downstairs so Jill could show Dave the wall color. It's always hard to compare colors on the wall to the ones on the paint chips (Jill had actually brought a few with her) so I offered to upstairs to get my paint chips to compare. As I was starting to head upstairs, Dave stopped me (a very stern voice too, I thought he was mad at me for something!) and then his phone rang. After his call he said he was taking Titan (who was acting really strange) outside for a minute. I had this uneasy feeling so I told the Joy and Jill I was going to go check on Titan (and find out why Dave was mad at me!). I got to the top of the stairs and asked Dave what was going on with Titan. He was just standing in the backyard, playing with what I thought was a phone (found out pretty quickly what it was!). He said he didn't know and that Titan was occupied with something in the yard. I got outside and looked at Titan and saw what he was occupied by...

My husband was standing in the middle of our backyard!!! My husband who just two weeks ago was involved in a helicopter crash. My husband who had been telling me for those two weeks that he wouldn't get to come home until the end of June. My husband who separated his shoulder in the crash and was supposed to be doing some kind of special military thing (which he had told me about last week). And there he was, standing in the middle of the yard! My jaw dropped, my eyes welled up and I literally threw myself into his arms, completely forgetting about his shoulder. Somehow between the crying and kissing I asked him how he was here, if he was ok, how long he was going to home for, and who knows what else. I turned to see our friends standing behind us, watching our reunion with huge smiles. And Dave was fiddling with his video camera. He got the whole thing on video! My response to that was "I don't even look cute!" I was still in my husband's hoodie with my hair in a ponytail. This is what my husband came home to after being in a war zone since March. Later that day, when we were alone for the first time in months, he answered my "how are you here" question.
We had been waiting to find out what his leave dates would be so we could plan some kind of vacation for when he was home. The dates he kept telling me were at the end of June. But a couple of days after the helicopter crash, he  found out he was scheduled to leave Afghanistan for a three week break on May 26th. Rather than telling me this bit of information, he worked out a plan with Dave and Jill. He figured it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to completely shock and surprise me. So he made sure all of our friends overseas knew it was going to be a big surprise and made plans to have Dave pick him up at the airport. Jill was supposed to take me out for lunch, which was where the surprise would have happened, but I ended up changing their plans when I said Joy was going to be at my house. Which is how the paint story came up. And how I got the biggest surprise and the best gift my husband could have ever given me!

The last two weeks of my life have essentially been hell. The helicopter crash affected me emotionally more than I thought it would. I have a wonderful support system between my family and my friends but among the positives came quite a few negatives. So the stress of the crash and the stress from the many conflicts that came up have really taken their toll on me. I  woke up every day feeling sick from the many emotions running through me. It was only towards the end of last week that the sick feeling started to go away. But when I saw my husband standing in the yard on Saturday afternoon everything I had been feeling since the crash immediately disappeared. The second he put his arms around me and I started to cry, I felt safe. I felt like my world was finally the way it was supposed to be and that everything over the last two weeks could finally go away. I know he's only home for a short time but it was the perfect time for him to get back. These last two days have been some of the best of my life (a very close second to the day I met him and our wedding day!). My husband is home, he's safe and he's healing. That's all a girl can really ask for!