Love at first sight

Chad's birthday is March 25th so I am making him an 8X8 album to send to him....mostly containing pictures of him and Sandy with some family ones too. Here is the first page. I scanned it a little crooked...sorry. It's pretty and simple, but I didn't want to take attention away from the picture. I know he loves this picture and so do I. Plus there's not a lot you can do on small pages. We got to talk to him tonight, during that time they brought in his care package from Sue and set it on his cot. It was neat to be on the phone with him while he opened it. He loved everything and wanted me to express his gratitude to Sue and to Brooke who sent him a package last week.

They are now sleeping in large tents instead of the barracks and has no way to send mail right now otherwise he would mail you both a thank you letter. They have him busy with different trainings. He's been doing night firings, learning how to do IV's on each other. The guy that did Chad's was not good and poked the needle all the way through his vein. It's just scary to me that they hand these guys needles and say poke each other till you do it right. Hello...that's just crazy! Today he sank in the swamp up to his head 3 times. He was freezing and was so glad to get back to camp tonight so he could shower and put on some warm clothes. He's been sounding stuffy. I sure hope he doesn't get full blown sick. Happy mail really cheered him up, so thank you ladies for being kind enough to set this up for him. We all appreciate it!
I got some happy mail today too. Lara, a very nice blog reader sent this for baby Mark. As soon as it even remotely fits him, I'll be doing a photo shoot with him and grampy Mark on the motorcycle. Can't you just picture it...cute outfit, sunglasses, bandana on his head...so cute! Thank you so much Lara. Big Mark thought it was very cool too! I don't know why the small version of this picture is so blurry when I attached it in here, but you get the idea.

Soup recipe...hmmmm...I'll be honest and tell you there is no measured recipe. It's more of a dump it in kind of thing, but here's how I do it....

Cheesy potato corn chowder

You can either peel and dice up potatoes into teeny pieces and boil them until tender and drain or cook up a bag of cubed hash browns. Yesterday I used the hashbrowns because we were hungry and didn't want to take the time to peel and dice. I put them in my soup pot with some oil and butter. Seasoned them with salt, pepper and onion powder and cooked them until they were hot and tender and a starting to brown. Dump in a can of corn-drained, a can of cream corn, about a cup of velveeta cheese, cubed up (it melts best) whisk together 1/2 gallon of milk with1/3 to 1/2 cup flour and pour in. Stir together until hot and cheese is melted. Can season more to taste. At the end add cooked crumbled bacon. (optional, but good...everything's better with bacon, right?!)