Catch Up

It's time to add a little meat to our blog. It has been looking rather miserable for the last year. If you had made attempts to catch up on the Andy Allred family news, I apologize for disappointing.

So let's sum up the highlights of last year for the Allred family, shall we?

May '08- We bought a house in Grovetown, GA just outside gate 2 of Ft Gordon. Nice place, not bad for a starter home.

December '08- Lauren began going to Nursery at church, a very blessed occasion for Amy and me. We had been awaiting this day for 18 months!

February '09- Amy and I won a free trip to an all inclusive resort at Cancun, Mexico. We won it by getting our Realtor the most referral dollars in 2008. It was an awesome trip, lots of fun.

March '09- Our little family made the 6-hour journey to our new home in Alabama. In November I was selected to become a warrant officer and go to flight school to fly helicopters in the Army. Our move day finally arrived.

April '09- Amy, Isaac and Lauren went out to Houston to stay at her parents for a few weeks while I went off to Warrant Officer Candidate School. They had a blast eating out all the time, swimming in her parents' pool and spa, and doing whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. I, on the other hand, got to experience Basic Training all over again, or at least WOCS felt that way in some respects. Those who have been to WOCS or OCS will say that I'm exaggerating, and I probably am. But the school was more or less an unpleasant four weeks that serve more of a right of passage into the Warrant Officer Corps rather than actually preparing one to become a warrant officer. Either way, come May 12th, I was happy to graduate, get my freedom back, and pin on WO1 rank.

I want to add, however, that to date, I still have yet to be saluted. I figured out that being in a training company of literally hundreds of other warrant officers provides little opportunity to see Enlisted folks to receive that first salute. I'm still carrying around my silver dollar to hand out to that first person.

Lately- We've been hanging out at home a lot. I'm in a hold before starting flight school. I'll be doing a phase here and a phase there with holds in between, they call those "bubbles." They're not as long as they have been, so I should be grateful. But with little to do, Amy, the kids and I have been taking day trips all around just to get out of the house.

On June 18th, we close on our second home purchase. This one is a little bigger, a little nicer, and has a spa. It also has one of the best views in the back yard that I've ever seen from anyone's back yard. We're excited.

Vacation

Amy, Isaac, Lauren and I flew out with Amy's dad in his new plane (Piper Malibu, six-seater) to Houston and from there caught a commercial flight the next day to Phoenix.

Mom's wedding-

Our first intentions were to be in Phoenix for my mom's wedding. But just before we were to leave, the wedding was postponed. At mom's encouragement, we decided to go anyway just for a week's vacation. Then just after we arrived, it somehow became back on for the original time, which was quite a blessing. I don't think my unit would have allowed me to go out again just two weeks after returning from the first trip. So we were able to attend after all.

My mom, Jana Lofgreen Allred was married to Dale Porter. I can't tell you too much about my new step dad except that he seems a very stalwart man, dedicated, and a good guy. He's the great uncle of my best friend Brandon Porter. He does cabinets for a living and he's mostly retired. He and my mom plan to live in Orem, UT for six months out of the year and in Mesa, AZ for the other six months. I hear they plan to go on a few missions as well.

Speedminton-

I was introduced to a cool new game that's picking up popularity these days. It's called Speedminton. It's similar to badminton except that it's not played with a net. Rather you set up two squares about ten feet squared in the grass and stand in it trying to hit the birdie into the opponent's square. He hits it back trying to get it to land in your square. You score points accordingly. It's really fun, but requires a lot of lawn area. If interested, I recommend looking it up online. Check out this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AwcmCOLgz0.

New Home

As I promised in our last post, we have pictures for this one. These are of our new house, us at the beach at Hilton Head, SC, and us at 6500 ft in a Cessna 172N.

No news for this post, all is well and we're loving our new home.

Bandwagon

Don't hate us because we're blogging. We too want to be cool like everyone else.

In case it has been a while for some of you, we'll first give the Allred family roster in order according to age: Amy, Andy, Isaac (2yrs 9mos), and Lauren (11mos). We sorted our family by correlating gender with hair color. It just makes things easier... girls are red heads and boys are brunettes.

Andy just returned from a two-week course called Warrior Leader Course, or WLC. Amy took the kids out to Houston to visit the family and see her little sister's first birth in Dallas.

Next week we're buying a house in Grovetown, GA. It's just minutes from gate 2 of Ft Gordon. It's a nice place and almost twice as large as the space we have in our military housing currently.

Very shortly Andy will be submitting his application for Warrant Officer as a helicopter pilot. Wish him luck.

We spend our days making family trips (which are becoming increasingly more expensive due to rising fuel prices) to Target, Waffle House, and Cold Stone. Life is good.