Turning 40 in Texas!

I haven't been blogging much since we moved to Texas because there isn't a lot to do around here and I've been spending an embarrassingly large amount of time pouting about it.  And we allllll know that when I pout I have to be all "extra" about it and lay on my couch with a big fat pouty face boycotting my own blog (because that makes total sense, Melissa).  

I don't know how my husband puts up with me.  

I have been going to the gym though!  For the past year I have been doing a High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) workout 3-5 days every week and have managed to lose some weight.  I've even managed to turn flabby parts of my body into actual muscle, and am doing things I never thought I ever could (1 whole minute of squats with 40 pounds on my shoulders?!  Ummm..... yeah, I can totally do that now (hair flip).  1 minute, 2 seconds with 40 pounds on my shoulders....?  Are you kidding me?!  Forget it, that's insane!).  It makes me really happy, despite my ability to be a giant brat for no good reason. 

But I am still struggling with my brain and the seizure medications that it now requires to keep it working somewhat normally, which makes it hard for me to find my words and put sentences together.  My husband and I have this weird thing where we know what we're each thinking before we say it out loud, so most of the time we can communicate telepathically.... it's super weird, we know.... but this has been hugely essential lately since I get flustered when trying to explain something with words so I resort to flailing hand gestures and then it's just a disaster so I stop communicating all together and go pout some more.  After an initial adjustment period I felt like I was emerging from the fog of the first medication and thought that things would be okay, but then my Neurologist decided to increase my dose and add a second medication, and welp, I basically had to start over with the adjusting thing.  

But when the love of your life turns 40 years old in Texas, you dust off that funky brain of yours, knock the whole pouting thing off, and CELEBRATE!

Just about every single one of our summer plans were ruined by the Army so we couldn't celebrate Eric's birthday the way that we wanted to or the way that he truly deserved.  But I wasn't about to go off and go pout about it, nope, this was his day and dammit we were going to celebrate as best we could!  So our little family headed up into the mountains of southern New Mexico to see FLUFFY!!

Gabriel Iglesias (a.k.a Fluffy) is a comedian and actor that you may have seen on things like Magic Mike, Modern Family, or his comedy specials on Netflix.  He is HILARIOUS and we love him, especially Isabelle, so when I found out that he was coming to our neck of the woods... literally in the woods..... in the mountains of Ruidoso, New Mexico, I just had to get tickets for Eric for his birthday!  El Paso is a great city with great people, but it's not much to look at and we've been painfully missing trees and grass since we got here.  Eric and I aren't desert people so our moods were immediately lifted the minute our eyes saw all the beautiful green stuff we hadn't seen in what felt like forever.

Seeing Fluffy in person was way better than we imagined it would be!  His show wasn't scripted and was geared for our specific crowd and area of the country he was talking to so we hadn't heard any of his jokes or stories before.  He played outside next to a small lake so we sat in the grass on a hill soaking up the sun loving every second of being in nature again.  We had a blast!  There is nothing on this earth sweeter than sitting in the sun and getting to hear your daughter's giggle for two straight hours - if I could ever figure out how to put her laugh into a bottle I would have the cure for World Peace.  

No pictures allowed of Fluffy's show, but it was the best night we've had in a long while!

It turns out that all I needed was one night in nature listening to Isabelle's giggle to get my pouty ass off my couch, because goodness, once we got back to El Paso I felt like it was just dumb to be sitting around wasting anymore time doing nothin' now that we had forced ourselves out of the house for the first time since we moved here a year ago.  

And can I just reflect on that for a sec?  An an entire gosh dang year.  We let a whole year go by without barely doing anything because.... I don't know why.  No good reason that I can think of off the top of my head, that's for sure!  So yeah, my seizures put a wrench in life and I had to figure a few things out.  But we sure wasted a lot of time not enjoying this little spot that God put us in, and that was just dumb.

So Eric and I decided not to be dumb anymore and we took Journey to Elephant Butte Lake, also in New Mexico, for a day of swimming and walking along the beach.  It wasn't quite the beach vacation we had originally planned for Summer 2018, but we were happy just the same.  We spent a few hours climbing the sand hills, and for all of the exercising I've been doing this last year I still struggle a lot catching my breath - if an ax murderer was ever after me, I am so totally dead.  A side effect of one of my seizure medications is that it feels like my lungs are bleeding, they aren't but it feels like it, so I've learned that slow and steady is the name of the game for me and that I loooooove the feeling of sweating and burning muscles (who knew?!), so as long as I am not being chased, I'll eventually climb whatever mountain I'm trying to climb, or on this particular day, sand hills.

Lawdy, I hope ax murderers don't read this blog.

Journey gets his smile from his daddy.

Joy

Pure joy

The sand hills were extremely hot and we hadn't anticipated that they might be a little dangerous for Journey to walk on.  **Note to self: Put doggy shoes on the Amazon shopping list.**  He was a trooper, though, and handled the hiking pretty well, he knew when to stop and we ran to shaded parts of the sand as quickly as we could.  But hiking for as long as we originally went there for just wasn't in the cards for us, or we risked doing serious damage to our precious fur-baby's paws.  Instead, we let Journey do his most favorite thing in the whole wide world... play in the mud.  If you've ever wanted to see joy in it's silliest purest form, just watch my JourneyBernieSanders play in the mud.  Joy like that will make you forget all about your germophobe issues.... even when you suddenly remember that you forgot to pack towels.

I packed a picnic lunch and water, but had forgotten towels to dry Journey off so we were good and dirty by the time we left the lake.  But we weren't ready to head home yet, so next we stopped at the Dianne Hamilton Military Museum in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico (that is the actual name of the town) for a quick stop to let Journey dry off and because we can't pass up a Veteran Memorial Park when we see one. 

The park had a replica of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Wall in Washington D.C and a big area to walk around with information about all of the different wars our country has fought in, benches to sit and remember the Soldiers who served, and other replicas our troops used in one way or another.  We wandered around for a long while because it was quiet and beautiful and the exact sort of thing Eric and I enjoy doing when we're I'm needing to be reminded that there are very few reasons to waste any amount of time pouting.

We weren't done celebrating Eric's birthday just yet, though!  The big 4-0 deserves celebrating until you can't celebrate anymore!  Am I right or am I right!

Since none of this was what we originally planned or hoped for, we knew that anything we did to make up for it would pale in comparison, but we were gonna do the best we could.  So for another day trip we headed southeast to the Fort Davis National Historic Site.  Fort Davis is a good 3.5 hours away from El Paso - close enough that it makes for a good day trip, but far enough to make being lazy sound like a pretty darn good option too.  

Except that, when are we ever going to be in this area of the world ever again?  

Okay, well when you put it that way, Melissa, I guess it's.... hello Fort Davis!

Fort Davis operated from 1854 to 1891 as a fully operational frontier military post where families lived with their Soldiers just as they do on military posts today.  It was considered to be one of the nicer posts of it's time!  It was established on the eastern side of the Davis Mountains in a box canyon near Limpia Creek, so once again, Eric and I found ourselves surrounded by all the things that make our souls so happy!  

We might not have been celebrating a birthday in all the ways that we had thought we would be, but we were doing it in a way that made us happy all the same.

Gosh, he's cute.

 Only the best out here in the middle of the desert. ;) 

We walked around the Fort Davis Site for as long as we could, we were in no hurry to leave.  Even when it started raining we happened to be close enough to a building where one of the Park Rangers was giving a small tour so we were able to stay out of the rain long enough for it to stop and then continue with exploring the buildings and ruins.  It wasn't much, but it was better than staying home and boycotting this poor little blog of mine, and it actually ended up being a perfect day.  

We had seen all that we could in our little area of Texas for Eric's big birthday in the time that we had, and I'd say we made the most of it!  

Eric spent his actual birthday reflecting on his past decade of life; reflecting on how much he's accomplished, how much he's endured, and how he says he wouldn't change any part of any of it.

The birthday card Isabelle made for Eric.

Hahahaha!!!  There's no body better than Seu's Caketory for cakes/cupcakes!

Eric has big plans for this next decade of life!  We will have to wait and see how his plans align with the Army's, so as God continues to form all of this in Eric's heart we'll try our best to not pout so much (cough, Melissa, cough).  But if there is anything that this last decade has taught him, it's that anything is possible!  

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BABE!!!!!!!!