Married to the Army

What an awesome Christmas this would be!

Ok, so most of you know that I am completely obsessed with A Christmas Story. Check out this auction on eBay:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320318312873

First I should mention it benefits the Wounded Warrior Project, so the military connection definitely caught my eye.

You get to ride in the family car....try on the costumes (including Randy's snowsuit!).....have the leg lamp delivered to the house, complete with crowbar so you can act out the scene from the movie....spend the night in the house on Christmas Eve in Ralphie and Randy's bedroom!!!....open presents on Christmas morning to include the bowling ball, pink bunny suit and of course a Red Ryder BB Gun....then go out back to practice and hopefully not shoot your eye out!

Someone is going to have a great Christmas!

One Million Posts!

I transitioned the message board over to ArmyWifeChat.com in April of 2007. At that point, we started over with counting posts for the board as a whole. Some time in the last 24 hours, someone made the one millionth post! Wow! That is a lot of talking, supporting, arguing, crying and laughing on a message board together! :)

Just thought I would share yet another milestone!

Longer Dwell Times

http://www.military.com/news/article/longer-dwell-times-on-track.html?col=1186032310810&wh=wh

Are things finally beginning to wind down? According to this article, beginning in 2009, soldiers will be guaranteed 18 months at home between deployments (well, the big Army soldiers anyway....special ops you can ignore this!). And by 2011, soldiers will be guaranteed at least 24 months at home between deployments. Of course, this is all said with the condition that the need for troops overseas remains stable during this time period.

I do think that longer dwell times are important but what I think is even more important is to make sure that applies to soldiers who are PCSing to new units as well. I cannot count the number of times I have heard about a soldier returning from a 12-15 month deployment, PCSing to a new unit and then leaving for yet another 12-15 month deployment within months of arriving. Some of these families are approaching the three year mark only having spent a few months together. That issue needs to be addressed pronto! A normal deployment is hard enough but basically doing two back to back of 12-15 months each is near impossible.

Off my soap box for the day... :)

Candles for Our Troops

Those of you who receive my newsletter should know all about Kat's candles! She just debuted a new candle today and I'm in love! They are SO cute! Here's a picture and yes, that is ALL wax!

They are Smores scented and would make great gifts for the holidays.

Perhaps most importantly, Kat uses the profit from the sale of her candles to send candles to our troops overseas. To date, she has DONATED more than 10,000 candles! Amazing! She currently has about 1,300 candles boxed and ready to go to our troops but is lacking the funds to ship them. Can you help? You can donate on the site or buy candles - both help with raising funds. These are candles that our troops have requested to brighten their holiday season. Let's not let them down!

The website is www.doublehhcandles.com. Please donate if you can!

Skribit

So I'm sitting in my entrepreneurship class listening to Sanjay Parekh talk about his adventures in entrepreneurship. He told us about Skribit that was launched at the last StartUp Weekend in Atlanta. What a great idea! Now all of you can suggest topics that I should blog about or write about on the MarriedtotheArmy.com website.

So let me know what you think! :)