Marriage Retreat

Today, I completed the first Strong Bonds retreat as a chaplain. I've provided some marriage enrichment classes, but this was an overnight retreat at a resort in Grapevine, TX. Everything seemed to go well. The administrative stuff ran very smooth. The resort and my assistant both excelled. The seminars themselves seemed to go ok. There was good participation through both days. It's always hard for me to really judge how well any retreat goes when I am the one leading or teaching. It was a very different experience for Emily and I. In previous retreats or camps I've led, she and I went almost completely different directions. We actually ended up spending more time together as a family than normal, which was nice. The resort we were at had an indoor water park. Isaac loved floating, sliding, and pretty much anything else that put him in a swimming pool. He danced for the child care providers. In general, he seemed to have a good time. It'll take us a week to get him back on his normal schedule. I would post pictures, but I left the camera sitting on the entertainment center at home. Hopefully I'll get some from some of the soldiers that had their cameras.

Battalion Ball

Last night was the battalion ball for 1-12 CAV. For those who don't know, cavalry units are allowed to wear the black Stetson hat instead of the normal headgear. I'm sure Emily would have more to talk about with it.

Update on Previous Post

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that I would add more pictures from the marathon Stan & I ran. I've added them to the online photo album, but wanted to give a few explanations. We all wore tshirts in honor of my sister-in-law, Julie. She is going through chemo treatments for breast cancer. Robert was supposed to be at the race with us, but stayed home to help care for Julie. We took pictures of his t-shirt in various places over the entire weekend. That's the reason for the random pictures of a tshirt in front of a plate of food or sitting in a chair by itself. I think the rest of the pictures are fairly easy to figure out.

Who'd of thought?

I grew up a Saint's fan. One thing I never really expected to see is Tom Benson holding up the Lombardi trophy. Anyway, you can see from the picture that Isaac was more focused on eating bleu cheese dressing than watching the game. He didn't seem to approve of getting meatloaf and eggplant while Em & I ate chicken wings. Once he got out of the high chair, he grabbed chicken bones, dipped them in the dressing and would have eaten it until he got sick if I had not taken it away from him.

Otherwise, things have returned to somewhat of a routine. At work, I'm trying to finish up working on married soldier and single soldier retreats for my battalion. There seems to be a constant series of changes or confusions surrounding funding for these things coming from the Chaplain Corps. One of my biggest frustrations will military ministry at this point is the poor communication and inefficient channels of authority within the chaplain corp itself. I love the ministry to the guys in my battalion, but I am constantly frustrated in dealing with my branch.

Emily is doing well. School is ok. She's ready for the summer, but what school teacher isn't. Isaac is learning more words, but still sees little point in saying much more than "more" and "all done." The child likes to eat. He does enjoy trying to catch his football, and does well with that. He feels he needs to applaude each time he catches the ball.

I'll try to post a few more pictures in the photo album. Some of them are from a trip to Houston to visit relatives from last weekend.

Race details

I'm supposed to have a few pictures taken by photographers along the route of the Disney World Marathon. I'm still waiting for those to download, and I'm a bit impatient. Here's the weekend. On Thursday morning (around 0130), Dad, Stacey, Stan, and I left the farm for Disney world. At about 0530, the trailer the car was on had a tire blowout. It's great fun looking for a trailer tire before dawn.

We got to Orlando, picked up our race packets and listened to part of Hal Higdon's presentation at the health fair. Robert was supposed to go with us, but decided that he needed to stay with Julie. The weather had been projected to be icy and dangerous. On Friday morning, Dad and Stacey ran the 5k race. Stan and I didn't run the marathon until Sunday morning. We started near Epcot. Our race cut through Epcot and we were at the Magic Kingdom right after sunup. Leaving the Magic Kingdom, we had a long road run before going into the back of Animal Kingdom. This was Stan's toughest stretch. He's had IT band problems and his knee started hurting soon afer the race started. From Animal Kingdom we hit MGM Studios. About mile 20, I began hurting. By mile 22, I hated every step. Late in mile 25, my knee went out. This wasn't expected as I've had no knee pain throughout the training. Regardless, Stan and I both finished, which was the goal.

I've got a number of pictures to upload to the online photo gallery, but I'll leave that for whenever I get the rest of the pictures.