The Venskos Visit!

Last weekend our dear friends, Chris, Nichole, Jake, and Colin packed up their car and drove 6 hours (one way) to visit us!  How lucky are we?!?

~A little blog introduction of the Venskos~ Garrett and Chris both attended the Defense Language Institute (DLI) around the same time but studied different languages so their paths only crossed occasionally. Fast forward to Hawaii where we were all assigned to for our first duty station. Garrett and Chris ended up working in the same general office and in 2005 both volunteered for what would be their first deployment to Iraq for 6 months. Since Nichole and I had only met briefly before that, we all decided to go out to dinner right before the deployment to kind of get to know each other. Nichole and I really hit it off and during the next 6 months did just about everything together! Since the guys were part of small deploying team, Nichole and I were like a little FRG (family readiness group) of two :) . Like in most situations you always remember your first....and for military families the first deployment is right up there at the top. I think a special bond can form between friends (for the soldiers and spouses) during a deployment and I know for this reason we will be life-long friends with the Venskos.


The last time we all saw each other was about 4 years ago, I was very pregnant with Kayla and they were yet to have their first little one (Jake) as well. Chris is no longer in the Army and they are currently in the process of moving from Hawaii to the east coast. Because of Garrett's imminent deployment we all wanted to take advantage of the limited time we all had together so they drove down last Friday evening and got in around 11pm. You guys rock!!

Kayla was SO excited to meet her new little buddies first thing when she woke up in the morning!

*photo courtesy of the Venskos :)*

*photo courtesy of the Venskos :)*

The two days they were here the weather was just perfect so we spent most of the time outside enjoying it!

annnnnnnnnnd we kind of put the kiddos to work ;)

 

*photo courtesy of the Venskos :)*

*photos courtesy of the Venskos :)*

I don't know about Chris, but the kids sure are having fun!  Actually Chris looks like he's having a good time too ;)

Yes that would be little Colin in Kayla's doll stroller.  I think this was definitely more for the enjoyment of the mamas in the room!

    And of course we had to break out the Slip n' Slide!

*remaining slip n' slide photos courtesy of the Venskos :)*

The BEST steaks ever from the local Butcher!

At the end of our visit we really wanted to get a picture of all of us together.  HA!  What a fun adventure that was!  It was really quite funny.  Chris set their camera on the self-timer mode and it had an option to take like 10 consecutive photos instead of just one.  So we ended up with about 30 pictures and if you scrolled through them real fast it was like watching an old flip-book movie; and with 4 kiddos moving around it made for a pretty funny movie!  Here is just a small sample of our attempts :)