I have always judged the passing of time by the age of my children. As they have become young adults I have found that a little harder to do. I would never have thought that Active Rain points would be a way to keep track of important moments. In a weird way that is just what has happened.
Most of these AR moments happened to do with our son's military deployments. The first one happened when I hit 50,000 points. My post read 50,000 points and our son back in the United States. I was excited as he had been based in Germany and was just getting back from a tour of Iraq.
You won't find a post when I hit 100,000. At 100,000 points I had just found that our son was getting the stop lost and would be heading back to Iraq. As I was passing the mark "100,000 points and our son on his way back to Iraq" kept going through my head. There was NO WAY that I was writing that post but I know that's when it happened.
By the time I hit 200,000 points our son was back in Iraq and I wasn't really even planning on writing a post. I had ended up with my daughter's old computer and wrote a post Windows Vista so far I'm not thrilled. Bob Stewart called me as I hit the exact mark and I was able to take a screen shot of my points being 200,000. Since I had that cool screen shot I wrote 200,000 points and how to do a screen shot with Vista.
Okay here's one my favorite post of all time 300,000 points and our son out of Iraq. I had to slow down my points a little to make the two coincide but it gave me something to do as I waited for the tour to be finished. My second favorite post of all time was just a few days later Welcome home to Texas 4th Infantry. If you have not been to a welcome home celebration for a returning soldier please visit my post and watch the videos. I can't tell you how many times I have read it and watched the video (and I wrote the post). It was so exciting to have our son back safe and sound!!
The day our son flew back to the United States was a very surreal day. Our daughter is now an International Flight Attendant flying for a charter company that moves our troops. Our children literally passed in the sky one going out of Kuwait and the other one going to Kuwait to pick up some troops. In my wildest dreams I did not see this in either of our children's future!
Our son is now out of the Army and a college student. I'm approaching 400,000 points right now and I don't know that there's going to be a landmark going on but to be honest; I AM TOTALLY OKAY WITH THAT!! I'm one of the lucky one who now has my son home but please pray with me for all those men and women who serve to protect us. Freedom is not FREE!!
It will be interesting to see my future AR point landmarks. So what are your AR point landmarks?
