Proud...

My younger brother Joel is in the Marine Corps and last week he received a promotion to Staff Sergent. Joel has faithfully served our country for almost 8 years now. He's had two tours to Iraq and will be going back next Summer. I'm so proud of him for his hard work and sacrifice. We always knew he was a great Marine, but we are even more convince now after the Colonel who was in charge of the ceremony talked with us at length about how wonderful Joel was and what a great Marine he was. He went on and on about Joel's talent in his job and that it was an honor to work with him. My mom was able to come up and she and I went to the very nice promotion ceremony. It was at 7Am (so Joel must really know I love him to make it that early!) but was about 1 1/2 hours away - that's without rush-hour traffic which is a nightmare. We figured we'd need to leave by 5am to make it in time. So the night before the ceremony we decided to drive down to Quantico and get a cheap hotel to make sure we made it in time. I'm glad we did! Here are some pictures and a video of the ceremony.