This morning we said goodbye to Nelson and Katy as they jetted back to Florida to prepare for adding the new baby to their family in another 8 weeks or so. We were very fortunate to have them help us along this adventure over the last 5 months and not having to get the girls up at 6:00 a.m. every morning and out the door to outside childcare every morning was worth more than I can explain.
Over the last couple of weeks, we have been talking about the upcoming steps in getting ready for mommy to come home and the girls knew exactly what step came after "taking Nelson and Katy to the airport". All day they have been excitedly saying "Grandma is coming!!" - I dont' know if I'll be able to hold them off until Saturday. As a result, I have a few days of truly playing single daddy while trying to get some work done so when we left the airport we headed to my office. Juneau was super interested in the concept of going to college and the whole way there she talked about how she was going to college too when she got bigger. They were excited and kind of surprised to see various people they knew when we walked into the lab - students who have been over to our house for a get-together but that they wouldn't have connected with seeing them at my work...like Melanie here playing guinea pig for some pilot testing in the lab:
After some time in the lab (where Kaori and I made plans to put reflective markers on them and see if we could do a gait analysis on them), we headed upstairs to my office: 
They were super excited to see my Ohio State helmet. 
I put Shrek on and that kept them semi-entertained so I could work a little bit but they were more interested in tearing my office apart. 
They also loved playing with Kaori... 
As we were leaving, we went next door to Kaori's office to say goodbye and Nova grabbed her head and kissed her on the forehead. Though she was unsure what Nova was doing, Kaori played along and then Nova explained "when you kiss someone on the forehead it means you love them" (that's been our new thing lately so Nova's obsessed with kissing people who she likes on the forehead). 
Luckily, there weren't too many other people in their offices in the KRS department at the time since Juneau decided to run up and down the hall a few times. 
Before we left, I made sure to stop by my Department Chair's office (who is an Ohio State alum) so Juneau could tell her "O-H" (which impressed Dr. Maeda and surprised Juneau when Julie immediately replied with "I-O"). Julie's office is decorated with lots of Ohio State stuff (as would be expected of any good alum) so the girls were having a great time looking at the Brutus snow globe and Juneau amazed Dr. Maeda by singing all the words to the fight song as the snow globe played "Fight the team, across the field..." 
We found this little Boston Style Pizza joint near our house so we stopped there for lunch. 
Finally, after a late nap, we headed out to shopping/play for a bit which allowed me to work on a couple things on my lap-top while the girls were happy to play for well over an hour (Nova even became the little socialite and made friends with 2 little girls). 
Sherpa and Denali made it known they were not happy we were so late to get home and feed them dinner. After scarfing down their dinner, they were ready to pass out and digest for awhile.
Today felt like the first step in the series of events leading up to our family reunion and I'm very happy about that. Emilie is actually getting close enough to leaving Afghanistan that she has had to start making preparations. At this point she is scheduled to fly out of there before too long (only 2 weeks from a day that is coming up soon - that's probably as specific as I should be).
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