{"id":5894,"date":"2012-08-16T18:36:32","date_gmt":"2012-08-16T23:36:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/?p=5894"},"modified":"2012-08-16T18:41:15","modified_gmt":"2012-08-16T23:41:15","slug":"afghanistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/?p=5894","title":{"rendered":"Afghanistan"},"content":{"rendered":"

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AbelGraffamStrange Family Pic 2012<\/p>\n

This past weekend, we headed up to Nashville to meet up with the rest of my family to say goodbye to my brother Kevin who is headed to Afghanistan with his ARMY unit, the 101st Airborne out of Ft. Campbell, Kentucky.\u00a0 Kevin went to Iraq back in 2006 for a long tour.\u00a0 This tour will be a bit shorter, but it won’t include a mid-tour leave making his time away around 9 months long.<\/p>\n

Kevin is the middle child in our family between me and our little sister Katie.\u00a0 The three of us have always been extremely close…especially giving each other headlocks and whatnot as kids!\u00a0 Our mom sacrificed a ton while we were growing up to make sure that we had all that we needed and a lot of what we wanted.\u00a0 As a result of that, the Abel 4 have always been a tight bunch.\u00a0 That hasn’t changed even when I got married, Katie got married, and well, Kevin is still weighing his options in that department!\u00a0 My husband and Katie’s husband and Kevin get along like three crazy brothers.\u00a0 Our family always looks forward to getting together…especially now that Mom, Katie, and JD are in Memphis, Kevin is in Nashville, and we are in Georgia.<\/p>\n

We spent Friday evening at a great hibachi place near Vanderbilt called Kobe Steaks<\/a>.\u00a0 It was a little interesting to take our shoes off to eat, especially because the floor was very sticky!\u00a0 I told the waiter it was Kevin’s birthday and Kev seemed to get over his initial confusion about the birthday (his is in April) and he enjoyed the ice cream with Emma.\u00a0 After dinner, we all hung out at the hotel, talked about Kevin’s deployment, watched the Olympics and called it a night.<\/p>\n

Saturday we got up early and went to the Tomato Art Festival<\/a> in East Nashville.\u00a0 It was a cool festival with lots of arts, crafts, food, and tons of people-watching.\u00a0 We ate pizza on the patio at Mafiaoza’s <\/a>in the 12 South area of Nashville.\u00a0 The guys went to see the new Bourne movie while the girls took naps at the hotel.\u00a0 The evening was spent at Opryland Hotel <\/a>walking around before we ate dinner at Solario<\/a>.\u00a0 Our time back at the hotel was spent with more Olympics and hanging out.<\/p>\n

We got up Sunday morning and took some family pictures.\u00a0 Our last family picture was shortly after Emma turned 1…almost 3 years ago.\u00a0 It was time for some updating!\u00a0 We headed over to Dave and Buster’s<\/a> to bowl.\u00a0 In the first five minutes we arrived, one of the D&B workers accidentally crashed into Kevin with a tray full of sodas.\u00a0 Kevin was soaked, but he was a good sport about it.\u00a0 We got free nachos out of it and Kevin got a sweet D&B shirt that he said he wouldn’t be wearing anywhere else…ever.<\/p>\n

The last stop for the Strange’s was Sakura<\/a> for a sushi lunch on our way out of town.\u00a0 At that point, we said goodbye to Kevin and had some great hugs.\u00a0 Mom, Katie, and JD stayed over until Monday because Kevin’s unit was delayed in their departure.\u00a0 I had to be back to start school on Monday…and it was good to not have the whole crowd at the base.<\/p>\n

We know that Kevin arrived safely in Germany and will make his way to Afghanistan in the next couple of days.\u00a0 We covet your prayers for his safety and the work that he will be doing.\u00a0 Kevin feels very strongly about what they are doing and is eager to get on the ground to get started.\u00a0 We can’t wait for May to get here so that we can have our Kevin back!<\/p>\n

I also managed to get a quick picture of Emma with my sister Katie and me.\u00a0 Emma absolutely adores Aunt Katie and her awesome uncles Kevin and JD!<\/p>\n

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AbelGraffamStrange Family Pic 2012 This past weekend, we headed up to Nashville to meet up with the rest of my family to say goodbye to my brother Kevin who is headed to Afghanistan with his ARMY unit, the 101st Airborne out of Ft. Campbell, Kentucky.\u00a0 Kevin went to Iraq back in 2006 for a long […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,33,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-emma","category-family","category-restaurants","category-travel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5894\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}