Here she is! Our Home Sweet Home for the next 5.5 months!
(picture below) Master bedroom & bath that we have made a storage/playroom for the boys and the stuff we aren't using.
Here she is! Our Home Sweet Home for the next 5.5 months!
Yesterday was Jt's first day of swim lessons. He was so excited and couldn't wait to go. He is attending with his little buddy Hudson from school.
They had 3 objectives for their first day and that was to open their eyes under water, breath out through their nos and relax floating on their backs. Jackson has always hated floating on his back so I was really surprised to see him do it for Tiffany.
There were all kinds of different jets out there and it was awesome. There were F-18's, F-18 Super Hornets, Eagles, Vipers, Navy f-16's , F-5's, T-45's, and even raptors were supposed to show up but currently they are grounded for some oxygen problems.
The Top Gun school likes to bring out other units to fly against their students to get some real world dissimilar aircraft training. They way it works is we all show up to a mass brief and go over some admin items then we were handed envelopes with a letter that gave us a Lat/Long coordinate, and a time to be ready to fight. We take off as single ships and go to our point and hold, and at a certain time we would be met by our adversary and fight till the death. I had no idea who I was fighting, an F-16? A F-18? A F-15? An F-5? A T-45? It could have been anyone. No one knows who they are fighting until you merge with that dude at a 1000 kts. I was extremely nervous!
My first fight I merged with a F-18C model which is a legacy hornet (older Hornet), but it was a Top Gun instructor in the cockpit. Our first pass was at 1000 kts and 500 ft apart, and I took the F-16 to its limits, rolled my socks down and pulled 8.4 G's. His jet cant turn like mine so I had an advantage after the first turn. I gave him hell for about 2 circles, then he kicked my ass all over the place. You could say I ate a piece of humble pie. This Hornet driver was truly a gifted aviator, and my respect for the Navy and their training program went through the roof.
We fought a few more sets till we ran out of gas and he brought back to the base and we pitched out to do a carrier style landing pattern, 800 ft and 400 kts. It was very cool to see how those dudes fly around the boat.
After I landed I met my instructor and after some high fives we went into a Top Gun briefing room and debriefed the sortie. I was so excited to have a Top Gun instructor take time out of his busy schedule to take some time to talk BFM (Basic Fighter Maneuvers = Dogfighting) techniques. I don't remember the dudes name, but thank you to whoever kicked my ass at the NSAWC EW South point at 1300 on Friday.

Jeff and Jackson when Jeff was leaving
Jackson waiting for Jeff to leave
So sad to watch him doing this, it seriously brakes my heart to see him wanting to be with Jeff like this.