Home at last!

Angela has known for a couple of weeks that Scott would be able to return from Afghanistan before Christmas but she actually managed to pull off the miracle of keeping it secret from her 3 sons. People in her ward (church) and family and Air Force circle knew, but nobody let it slip. The boys left the house Saturday night with the impression that they were going out for some ice cream because they had helped to clean the house. Rather than go to Friendlys' as promised, Angela headed to the airport. It didn't take long for these very intelligent lads to figure out why they were going to the airport. Airports (at least Dayton, I don't know about other places) are now allowing service personnel families to go past security to greet or say farewell to deployed loved ones. So Angela and the boys were able to go to the gate to greet Scott. Russ and I missed getting to see their initial reactions but this is what we saw when they all got to the main part of the airport where we were waiting along with some people from the Air Force base. Sorry about the men in the way but I guess they just didn't realize how important the view was to us! Martin's first reaction was to ask Scott if he was only going to be home for two weeks. It was happy news to him that Dad was home to stay!
I just had to make a sign. Somehow I didn't feel that the sight of us just standing there smiling was enough to let Scott know how excited we were to have him safely returned. I tried to be a little humorous.......

In the bag are some balloons that we had taped around the edges of the sign. We were getting ready to leave when I realized I hadn't gotten a photo of the sign so we unrolled it but didn't bother taping the balloons back on before going back out into the cold wind.

We are happy for the Orme family. Scott has received several medals, including combat medals. I guess it will be okay to hear some stories now that we know he is out of range of the bullets. But he may not want to spend a lot of time reliving it. That seems to often be the case with returning soldiers. I don't blame them. I don't even like reading or hearing the news stories of war or violent crime!

Now we are hoping that our other son-in-law also gets to return home safely. We pray for him and for my nephew who will be having to leave his family to go over for a year. It just goes on and on......