Valuing relationships

Lately I have really been feeling like I put more value in certain relationships than the other parties do, and it sucks.  There are a few friendships I’ve really been feeling like I put much more value on the friendship than the other people do, and it’s a tough pill to swallow.  More often than not, I feel like I’m the one asking people to do things, or I’m the one keeping in touch with people.  The transient lifestyle of a military spouse really plays in to this.  I know most of the people in this small town have been here for years.  They all know each other and I am the outsider.  Some of them have been very accepting and welcome me in to their already well established circles, but most of them don’t.  And then there’s some that you think welcome you in but really aren’t.  Those ones hurt.  I am hoping and praying that we can grow much deeper roots in NY and that we won’t be the “outsiders” there in a few years.  That we can grow lasting friendships with people that put as much value into the relationship as we do.

(My aunt and uncle did make the trip to CO to see us and it was great to see them.  And my dad was cut off in the group picture.. He was next to Mark.)

But what sucks even more than friendships, is when you feel this vast divide with family.  We recently drove to CO to give my parents our dogs during our move.  We drove 12 hours (not including stops) with 4 kids and 3 dogs.  I asked one of my extended family to drive 4 hrs to see us so they could meet some of our kids and we could meet theirs, but they couldn’t be bothered to drive that far.  That hurts.  I would LOVE for my kids to have cousins that they could play with or see once a year or so, but we’ve never lived near anyone of our relatives that have kids.  We’ll be within driving distance of some of Mark’s cousins once we move so hopefully we can plan some meet ups with them when we live on the other side of the country.  Mark’s family seems to just plan their trips with just them.  They go to Europe together and rent lake houses together and never once suggest that we all meet in the middle to include us, or even invite us to join them in their trips.  Of course we couldn’t go to Europe with them, and we wouldn’t go all the way to where they live with 4 kids, but I feel bad that Mark’s pretty much been ostracized from his own family.  He says it doesn’t bother him and that he has his own family now, but it’s got to be a little weird for him to see them all getting together and going on trips together when he’s never even invited.

My hope is that my kids will try to keep in touch with each other when they are older – that their kids will all be friends and that they’ll be able to see each other more than once or twice a year, if that.  I am thankful for all the opportunities the military has afforded us, and all the friends we have all over the place, but it is hard to not have people physically close to you to develop deep relationships with.  And as soon as you do develop a deep relationship with someone, either you move or they move.  We are looking forward to the guard side of the military for sure.

In the valley

This move has been really tough for me.  Usually I’m excited to move and explore new places and meet new people, and I was this move too.  But this base operates very differently from any other base we’ve been to.  So far I haven’t seen any sort of squadron function except for one afternoon bbq we couldn’t attend.  I haven’t been contacted by any wives and I’m not sure there even is a wives group here, and it wouldn’t really matter anyway since we live 45 mins from base.

I feel really alone here.  Mark is busy with work and is usually gone from 6:45am or before until after 5pm.  Things haven’t changed much for him because he’s just doing a different job but still has adult interaction and the automatic system of friends with the guys he works with and sees every day.  Meanwhile, I’m at home with the kids and dogs in a house that’s an absolute disaster.  This house has pretty much no storage so I don’t know where to put things to get them out of sight.  I just shuffle boxes around and sweep the floor so it’s somewhat presentable.  The kids managed to scratch the new wood floors we put in less than 24 hrs after we took the cardboard off of them.

Mark gets home from work in the middle of the dinner hour chaos and then it’s trying to get the kids fed and bathed and to bed and then Mark wants to just veg for a while, which I don’t blame him since he gets up early and has been working all day.  I just give him his space to do whatever he wants and then we go to bed and start it all over again the next day.  My one job now is to be a mom and I feel like I fail miserably at that most days.  I have no patience with the kids who are constantly making bigger messes than we already have in the house or breaking/ruining things.  I want to be a fun mom who does fun projects with my kids and I find myself just shoeing them away most of the time or telling them to be quiet because the baby is sleeping and there’s no door on his room that’s right in the middle of the house.

I’ve asked my mom to come out and help with the kids and unpacking/organizing, but she said her garden will die if she leaves and doesn’t water it and “It’s not like they sit around doing nothing”.  Mark’s parents were just here because he wouldn’t tell them to wait to come out until after we were moved in like I asked him to do way more than once.  I remember when I was pregnant with Abbie, both my mom and Mark’s mom came out to help us get unpacked and organized.  And now that I have 3 kids and 3 dogs, neither one is available.  I feel like it’s pretty much on me to get the house organized except I don’t really even know how to do that since we’re lacking so much storage.  And the list of things we want to do to the house just keeps getting longer by the day so I see all of our weekends from now until about December being consumed with trying to get this house done.

Hopefully things will be better when Abbie starts school tomorrow.  She is so excited.  I asked Mark last week to get tomorrow morning off so he could be there for her first day, more so to support me than anything else, but they scheduled him to fly and he thinks flying is more important so I’ll fight holding back my tears while dropping her off myself.  I’ve been doing that a lot lately anyway so I guess tomorrow won’t be much different.

Struggling

Life has been a bit “blah” these past few weeks in the TLF’s.  The ones at Luke were gross – old and dirty.  We found a few cock roaches and a lizard and the floors are constantly dirty because of the dogs and kids.  It’s stressful.   But at least in Phoenix we had friends and civilization nearby.

This was taken at our house in Phoenix, not here in CA…. 

Since we’ve been in CA, it’s been tough.  Really tough.  Edwards is out in the middle of nowhere.  It’s pretty much a 45 minute drive to any sort of civilization.  We are very close to a grocery store and a bx, but anything else is off base, and this base is so big that it takes 10-15 mins just to get off base in any direction.  We’re still in the middle of a desert – the Mojave desert this time – so it’s usually 100+ outside.  Read that as too hot to be outside much, especially for my 2 month old.  So we basically stay in our little TLF all day long.  I spend pretty much all day telling the big kids to be quiet so Jamison can nap and sweeping up dog hair and dirt.  Literally, that’s what I do all day long.  Our internet here cuts out quite frequently and our phones don’t get reception here so unless we want to pay for a long distance call somewhere, we can’t call out either.  My patience runs thin with the kids because keeping a 3 and 6 year old quiet all day is next to impossible, and the few times I do get the baby to sleep when he’s not on me, they normally wake him up.  If Jamison is on me, he’ll sleep all day, and so will I, in all honesty.  I try to do Abbie’s work books with her in the mornings and let them watch a few shows on PBS, and sometimes they are pretty good about playing together, but usually Ben is screaming about something Abbie is doing.  It’s just been pretty rough and it’s hard to not feel really secluded here.  I’ve thought about driving to town with the kids myself, but last week I ran to the post office by myself with them (3 mins away) and Jamison was crying so hard in his car seat he couldn’t breathe so I got him out right away and tried to calm him down while getting my post office stuff done.  He screamed the whole time we were there and Ben was all over the place and Abbie was annoying Ben so he was screaming at her the majority of the time too.  It was exhausting.  But I actually did manage to take them to the commissary by myself after that and they were good.  I just can’t drive 45 mins by myself with Jamison in the car right now because I can’t reach him when he starts to cry.

Mark’s parents are coming in a few weeks and I’m stressed about that too.  It’s pretty bad timing since we’ll still be in TLF’s and adding 2 more people to this tiny place isn’t ideal.  There isn’t even enough places for everyone to sit in the living room.  They decided to stay up in Tehachapi, which I guess is as good of place as any, but it’s 45 mins from us and we don’t even know if they can get on base without us going to get them at the gate every time they come.  Mark is going to try to take time off, but the day after they leave is when we get into our house and can start doing work on it, so he’s going to need that time off to redo the floors in the house before we get all our junk and then be there to help me when we get our delivery of our stuff too since I can’t handle 3 kids and the movers by myself.  And that’s right about the time he should start flying here as well, so it’s not an ideal time for him to take a lot of time off work, but he’ll make it work.

Mark and I are both anxious to get into our house and get all of our own stuff.  He figured that throughout his Air Force career we’ve been without the majority of our stuff for around 6 months between all of our moves.  It’s just tough living in this stage of “in between”.  You can’t really ever settle and this place will never feel like “home” no matter how hard we try, so it’s just trying to bear it until we can get into our house we bought and start making that a home.  It’s usually 10 degrees cooler up in Tehachapi so that’ll be a welcome change as well.  We are also looking forward to making changes to that house to make it a little more “ours” for however long we might be there.

I just keep trying to remind myself that at least Mark is here with us and not in Korea for a year.  Things could be much worse, and I know that, but this isn’t the easiest situation I’ve ever been in before.  Luckily we’re over halfway through it, I think!

 

***All of these pictures were taken with my new camera and aren’t edited at all.  I might give up editing for a while so I can just get photos on the blog in a timely manor.  And they were all taken in Phoenix, not in CA.

2015 Spouse taxi

Before we left AZ, I got to take part in my 2nd spouse taxi day.  Just like last time, this was my first time leaving a baby with someone else.  First time it was Abbie, who I left with a military spouse friend.  This time in was Jamison, that I left with Megan, our awesome neighbor.  Actually I left all 3 of my kids with her to add to her 4.  Really, she’s awesome.

Riding in the jet is fun, but it’s even more fun to see my husband in his element.  Last time I did this Mark was in the B-course so I couldn’t ride with him.  I had to ride with an IP.  This time, because he is an IP, I got to ride with him and it was 10 times better!  I still don’t really envision him doing this when he goes to work.  When I picture him at work, he’s sitting in his office behind a desk, not strapping on a jet and doing all kinds of crazy stuff.  It’s an odd experience, in a way, watching your husband walk around this multi-million dollar aircraft like he owns it.  Mark is the most humble and modest person you could hope to meet, but he does have a pretty cool job.

   

The mask still makes me claustrophobic so I never hooked it up all the way.  I feel like I can’t breathe when it’s on.  I don’t know how Mark does it.

Mark didn’t make me do all the radio calls, which stress me out.  I had to do them all last time and I was so worried about screwing them up.  It was a lot of fun listening to him talk on the radio though.  Seems like just yesterday he was telling me how nervous he was about radio calls when he was learning to fly the Cessna before pilot training.  (Over NINE years ago – seriously, where does the time go!)  Now it’s like 2nd nature to him and he talks so fast I can barely understand what he’s saying.  It reminded me of how far he’s come in his flying career.

  

I feel pretty lucky to be married to Mark and to be able to do cool things like this.  Never in a million years would I have dreamed I’d be doing spouse taxi’s in an F-16.  We are pretty blessed.

 

Survived

We’ve had a crazy few weeks but it’s amazing how most things fell into place.  We manage to ship all of our HHG (household goods) on a Monday and Tuesday.  They had estimated we had around 26000lbs….. which I about freaked out about.  The government will pay for us to ship 14500lbs and the rest we pay for ourselves, so that would have been a huge bill.  Turns out we only had around 15000lbs, and they give a 10% allowance for all the packing material so we were under the allowance.  It was a bit stressful though.  We rented a trailer to bring a bunch of our stuff ourselves too and we had another 1200lbs in the trailer and our SUV.  Over all it worked out well. 

I can see why she estimated 26000lbs…  This was just the garage..

While they were packing our stuff, we went under contract on a house we’re buying in CA and two days after that we closed on our house in Goodyear.  Things really fell into place well with selling our house.  It couldn’t have worked out better and for that we’re pretty thankful.
On Tuesday we also got Abbie’s cast off, which is amazing to me.  I can’t believe she had a totally displaced break of her ulna bone and can get her cast off 4 weeks later.  They gave her a brace to wear for another month, but she’s good to go!  Crazy!

We still have a bunch left to go, but hopefully it’ll be a relatively painless process from here on out.

Falling into place

Life just seems to be flying by right now and we have so many changes coming up in a short amount of time.  It’s been a bit challenging, but everything seems to be falling into place.  It’s almost a bit scary and I’m kind of waiting for something to go wrong as it kind of seems too good to be true.

These past few weeks for my business have been really good.  I’ve gotten all 3 of my listing under contract in the last few weeks, while I was trying to get my own house ready to list at the same time.  One of the houses I listed had a full priced offer in under 48 hrs.  All three of them are due to close in May, along with a referral that I gave Sean.  It’ll be so nice to be able to build my work savings account before I stop working when we move.

We listed our house last Friday and 6 days later we also received a full priced offer on it, with a closing date that will work perfectly with our move.  Granted, we have a long way to go before we seal the deal, but it is encouraging (and terrifying).  There are 2 other houses in our neighborhood that have our exact floor plan that have been for sale for 48+ and 65+ days and are still on the market.  I truly think the sod we had installed (top picture) is what helped us sell the house.  We had 3 showings and they all mentioned how they loved the back yard.  It’s a relief to already have the house under contract, but I know we have a long way to go to closing.  Hopefully everything will work out.

 

Mark has been flying nights the past 2 weeks and has a few more weeks to go.  I HATE night weeks.  He goes in to work around 2pm and usually doesn’t get home until after 11pm.  With being almost 37 weeks pregnant, I don’t have a lot of energy to make dinner and deal with the kids by myself, and they have SO much energy.  I lose my patience with them a lot and then I feel guilty for doing so.  Nights seem to go so much smoother with Mark around and it’s really tough for me now without him most nights.  Seems a lot more bearable when he’s around anyway.  Luckily Mark’s brother gets here on Monday and then for the next month we’ll have guests, so I won’t be alone doing night time routines anymore.

It’s still a little weird to me that in the midst of all of this other stuff going on, we’re going to have a baby sometime in the next few weeks.  I get a little nervous about his birth when I think about it.  Hopefully he won’t have issues after he’s born because of my diabetes.  Today my numbers have been all over the place (with my highest reading yet at 213….) and it makes me worry about him having issues with his sugar or breathing after he’s born.  I’ve talked to a few dietitians today and my normal one said she thinks it’s all the stress.  I’ve been trying to drink more water as well, since that’s supposed to help lower blood sugar.  I think I always get more nervous about giving birth the closer I get to having babies.  And now that I already have 2 kids and know what it’s like, it adds to my nervousness.  I’ve heard lots of stories from friends about what has gone wrong with their births so I’m not as naive as I was when I had Abbie.    I’m hoping my good luck hasn’t run out with everything else going on, and that the birth will go smoothly and baby #3 will be healthy.  (And we’ll actually come up with a name shortly after he’s born.)

I’m really hoping after the move and after I’m not working outside the home any more, I’ll be able to keep up with this blog more often.  I feel like Benji got a little bit jipped since I didn’t blog much at all last year and I haven’t done much this year either.  If everything with my job and selling our house goes well and according to plan, I’m going to be upgrading my dSLR again (and keeping up with the tradition of upgrading it every time we have a kid), so I’m really looking forward to that and hopefully I’ll be able to take my photography to a new level.  First things first though!

And we’re off to…..

After waiting WAY too long to finally get our assignment that we thought we’d have before the end of February, we finally found out towards the end of March that Mark is being assigned to Edwards AFB in CA!

Mark and I were both getting pretty anxious, mainly because we were thinking he was going to get sent to Korea for a remote tour for a year by himself and I was about making myself sick thinking about the possibility of being a single parent to 3 kids and 3 dogs for a whole year and him missing the first year of #3’s life.  We would have gotten through it, I’m sure, but it was definitely wasn’t our first choice by any stretch of anyone’s imagination.

We were also thinking getting sent to Holloman AFB in NM would have been a good possibility since they’re opening up squadrons there.  I kept telling Mark that I had a feeling this assignment was going to come out of left field, and it sure did.

Edwards is the home of TPS – test pilot school – which Mark applied to last year and didn’t get chosen for.  When he first filled out his “dream sheet” for the assignments of his choice, he had put Edwards at the top, in hopes that he could go there and apply for TPS again and get another shot at it.  After we discussed it at length, we realized that he probably didn’t get chosen because of his time in service – he’s been in too long and doesn’t have much left on his commitment.  We decided that maybe it would be best if he put F-35’s first, solely because we could stay here at Luke and I wouldn’t have to quit my job and we wouldn’t have to sell our house.  So he completely changed everything on his dream sheet, although we think the porch (the fighter porch is the place that gives out all the assignments) might have gotten his initial one and his revised one, which could be why he got Edwards.

So Mark called me from work and said “I got my assignment.”  I knew right away by the way he said that that it wasn’t Korea, so at that point I didn’t even care where we were headed.  I was just so relieved!  And then he told me he got Edwards and we were both a little shocked but not in a bad way.  Edwards just wasn’t on our radar anymore and we were totally thinking we’d get sent to Holloman or Korea, or possibly stay at Luke.  Mark is excited to be around the test world though, even if he can’t be a test pilot.  He pretty much always has a good attitude about anything that’s thrown at him though, and he would have found something good about any place he’d been assigned to, with the exception of a remote tour.

**Photos taken March 2014**

We are still working on the dates we will be moving, which is stressing me out quite a bit due to the fact that we have to sell our house and moving into temporary lodging with 3 dogs, 2 kids and a newborn sounds like absolutely no fun whatsoever to me, but it’s all temporary and we’ll get through it some how.  At least he’s not going to Korea!

The wait.

 

I’m not the only one that would have a hard time leaving Sammer.

It’s that time of year for us again, or every few years, I guess.  We are due to find out our next assignment any day now.  When we moved here in March of 2013, they told us we’d be here at least 3-3.5 years.  Well, if you’re math is decent, you realize that was 2 years ago and we are already finding out our next assignment.  Liars.  Good thing we bought a house….

So the best possibility would be that Mark gets chosen to transition to the F-35 and we get to stay here for the next few years.  This would be amazing for many reasons – mostly because we’d get to stay and not have to move shortly after having our 3rd baby.  We finally have amazing neighbors right next door and the kiddos love running back and forth between our houses.  I could keep my real estate license active and continue working.  Abbie would be able to stay in a great school and not have to switch schools for the 4th time in 3 years.  Our house could appreciate more and we could do the upgrades to it we’ve been wanting to do.  Mark would pretty much be non-deployable and flying the F-35 would open up more possibilities for jobs after his AF career is over.  We wouldn’t have to try to find a place to rent with 3 dogs and 3 kids.  I could go on and on.  However, this could be a slim chance of him getting this.  I think quite a few people on this VML (Vulnerable to move list) put transitioning to the F-35 as their top choice.

The worst possibility would be that Mark gets assigned to Kunsan, Korea, and go there for 12+ months by himself.  It’s not really feasible to take 3 kids to Kunsan since they don’t have schools over there for Abbie and we wouldn’t be command sponsored.  Mark would be working a lot and he could have to live on base so he might not be able to live with us anyway.  When guys get stationed there and they just have a spouse, it’s a lot easier for the spouse to go as kids complicate everything.  I wouldn’t 100% rule out trying to go with him, but Mark has said if he gets Kunsan, he would prefer us to stay here than go with him.  He didn’t even put this on his ADP (his dream sheet) so he’s a non-volunteer for any Korea assignment but the most openings out of any move we could do would be to Kunsan.  They need pilots there and they said your best chance of staying in the jet is to go to Korea.  Luckily Mark doesn’t necessarily care if he stays in the jet.  He would like to but not if it means being away from his family for a year, including a newborn.  He’d miss pretty much the entire first year of this baby’s life.  And thinking about raising 3 kids, including a newborn that doesn’t sleep, along with 3 dogs for an entire year is enough to give me a panic attack.  I seriously don’t know how I would remain sane doing this for a year by myself.  I don’t have family nearby.  Most of my friends will be moving in the next year or so.  I would pretty much be on my own as a single parent and that scares the absolute shit out of me.  If this wasn’t at all a possibility, I wouldn’t be half as nervous about getting another assignment, but it is.  I am just praying to God he doesn’t get it.

Mark basically put after on his ADP that he is willing to go anywhere, as long as it’s an accompanied assignment.  Even if that means not flying the F-16 anymore, his preference is to be able to have us come with him.  A good possibility would be going to Holloman in Alamogordo, NM, which is in the middle of freakin no where.  The schools are crappy, the area has pretty much nothing except a Wal-Mart, the housing market isn’t that great, but at least we’d be together.  I could handle any place for 3 years as long as I’m with Mark.  I wouldn’t even mind going to Osan, Korea if he could get an accompanied tour there.  I’d just have a hard time leaving Sammer and the other dogs behind.  I’d just have to keep myself busy with crafts or something, but it would be do-able.

There are a bunch of other possibilities, although the chances of getting them are quite a bit less than getting Kunsan or Holloman.  We could go anywhere from Alaska to Nevada to Utah to South Carolina to Mississippi or Texas to Japan to Germany to Italy again plus more that I probably don’t even know about.  I would love to go back overseas but Mark isn’t so sure he wants to go back into the CAF (combat Air Force).

We found out months ago (November??) that we’re going to be on the spring VML and we probably won’t find out until March what our next assignment is.  I wish there wasn’t so much time in between when we found out we could move to where we’re actually moving because I get more and more anxious as time goes on.  Mark is usually the calm one about all of this but I think this time he’s just as anxious as I am.  I do love moving and love meeting new people and seeing new places and we’ve gotten really lucky with our assignments so far.  I just hope our luck hasn’t run out!