O'Leary Family Journey: A lot to tell you!

So if you have been wondering what the O'Learys are up to, we have been super busy.

Let's see where to begin. In March we celebrated Sean's 11th birthday and Natalie's 15th birthday. Where does time go. We are so proud of them and how well they are doing in school, athletics and extra curricular activities.

Sean is almost done with basketball. He has a tournament this weekend that they should win as long as they listen to their coach (Pat). Ha ha. He is also playing indoor football now, more as an off season for next fall. Pat is also the head coach for his football team. Guess what the team name is ......Longhorns and no Pat did not choose it, one of the other coaches did and of course Pat did not disagree. At least I have longhorn stuff to wear to the games.

Natalie is almost done with cheer leading and is still continuing dance. She has straight A's each term and we could not be more proud of her. She is growing up quite nicely.

Here is Austin in his big boy underwear. We are beginning to try potty training.

Colby and Austin continue to do well in school. Austin is going on his third week of NO timeouts. For him that his a huge accomplishment. The teacher told us that he is one of the only ones allowed to play with anything in the room because he always puts his "work" away when he is done. They are both remaining very healthy this winter and I am so grateful for that.

This is Austin almost every morning. He gets as many tools as he possibly can to work on things around the house before going to school.

Work for me is still about the same. I would still love to make my way over to the civil service but I never would have thought it would be so hard, especially with 19yrs of government service. Yes, I hit 19 years this month. I only have to drill for one more year to get my 20 year letter for retirement. Granted it will be quite awhile before I can receive my retirement but it will be worth it when I turn 60....yikes.

Here are the boys eating their "BIG ONE" pizza...that means Mommy didn't cut it.

We took the boys to get their teeth cleaned this week and they did great. Austin is such a HAM. He walked in and said "I'm Austin, are you going to brush my teeth". He let them to x-rays which Colby did not want any part of. Austin's teeth all checked out ok, though Colby was not so lucky. He has 3 teeth that never fully developed therefore they are very soft and decaying. They said this is probably related to being a preemie which we were warned about the possibility. Colby has to have 3 root canals and 3 caps. Since he is so small and young they will not do this in the dentist office but at the Medical center where he will be put to sleep. As of now we are scheduled for May 19th.

Now for our big family news....Pat is getting into the Army Reserves to finish his 20 yrs. We are currently waiting on his orders. He has passed his physical, security clearance and those are the two biggies. He will be in my unit which is a Sustainment Brigade in Salt Lake. He will be the Brigade Plans officer and I am the Battalion XO so even though we are both in the same Brigade we have different bosses and work in different buildings. The other part to this story is my unit is deploying to Iraq this fall. Originally it was Afghanistan in Feb but we got bumped up 6 months. We are still awaiting our unit alert orders. We were suppose to get them on the 26th. So Pat will be leaving for training in April, May and June. He will to Texas, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Utah. On July 7th they depart Utah for good to head to the mob station in Fort Hood, TX. Once they have completed mob station they will leave for Iraq for one year. You can imagine our family feels like we are jumping through hoops. I will not be going. We made a deal with my Brigade Commander that regardless of training, deployments etc, one of us will always be home with the kids. We have told Natalie and Sean and they did not handle it well at first but seem to be doing a little better now. Sean was devastated, he cried all weekend and we couldn't get him to eat much either. I hope these next 2-3 months will help the kids prepare for Pat to be gone. It's weird because I have never been one to stay home, so it will be an adjustment for me. I will be the rear detachment commander though I will not be on put on active duty orders. Should be an interesting year.