Operation Stand Down & Magazine

I have had such a great weekend and I don't want to forget any of it, so I'm going to document and then hope that i can go back and add pics, I posted them all on fb but not had a lot of time to do this kind of documenting...
With the 4 of July being one of the most incredible holidays for me, I am sooo patriotic, my favorite color combo is red, white, and blue, I'm a sucker for anything Americana. SO, this is one of my favorite holidays.
I really never thought that it would be so hard this weekend, not having Darin at home, he has missed a few of our 4th of July's, whether it be in Iraq for 2 of them and then one year he was doing border patrol so he wasn't here, so I really didn't think I would be really emotional but I was... its funny how our feelings can really take over us. I was determined that since I wasn't going out of town or doing anything realllly spectacular I still wanted to celebrate and keep this holiday close to home and not forget the real meaning.
On Friday, it was such a wonderful day, Darin and I were featured in a magazine about military life and it was a great day to see that come out and to hear people talk about it, I stopped by a local restaurant ( this is something i love about our hometown) having owners in there businesses. Anyway i stopped by to pick up a few magazines ,and i noticed they all had combat boot t-shirts on and alot of red white and blue so i asked what was going on and told me that they were hosting a benefit that night, with an old fashioned cruise in bar b que, live music all that fun and it was for Operation Stand down, this is an organization for Homeless Veterans, this is such a great cause, and as i sat there watching these veterans my heart sank, these people fought for us during some hard times, they had a hard deployments, long deployments, with out the gear our soldiers have now, with out the technology they have now, only communication was letters from home, they didn't have phone centers, emails, cell phones, or skype. amazing the sacrifice they made, and the lack of respect that they deserve... So we sat there and watched the live music, the kids had hula hoop contest,bubble gum blowing contest, so awesome...


I didn't realize how much I did this weekend and so that I don't make this to long of a post, ill add tomorrow what we did on Saturday.... and the rest of the weekend. It was an amazing weekend.