So...here is a little on what has been going on with us for the past, oh, 5ish months. And just for me to look back and remember the hard times we've over come.
Ok so, as you may know, we left Stafford, VA and spend Christmas in California with our families. Chris was starting a new course in ground intelligence in Virginia Beach about 3.5 hours from Stafford. Since he wouldn't be making that long daily commute to Stafford each day, we decided that the kids and I would stay in Cali with family for 4 months until he finished his course. I thought things would be easier for me considering I had all my family around, but it wasn't. I tried to keep busy but I was so depressed and hated every day I spent apart from Chris.
3 months into his course, he and 5 other marines in his class got reassigned to a new intelligence course, Air Intel. Chris was extremely discouraged about it especially since he had successfully completed the Infantry Officers Course right before that. This all meant that he would be in Virginia Beach for another 3 or 4 months finishing this class and more time apart from his family. We could not handle being apart any longer, so the kids and I flew out to VB in May to be with him.
We got there in early May and stayed in his hotel room for about 2 or 3 days until our apartment was ready to move into. We are staying in a nice place in a good area, walking distance from the beach. I was happy to be doing my own thing again with my family the way we wanted to do things. I was in the middle of my second trimester and I was feeling great.
Chris would leave for work around 5:30 am and would usually get home around 10 pm. He usually had to go into work on the weekends as well. So that meant it was just me taking care of the kids by myself, which really wasn't hard for me considering i was already used to being apart from him and doing things on my own...but my growing belly was making it harder for me to keep up. Oh, and did I mention I didn't have a car the whole time we were here in Virginia Beach. We walked to the park and beach a few times, but the hotter it got, and the bigger my belly got, the less we went anywhere and we ended up just finding ways to entertain each other at home...eventually I entered survival mode, just waiting for him to finish this class.
About a month and a half into his course, we were given another surprise.... Our duty station changed from Okinawa, Japan to Camp Pendleton, CA and we could not be happier about the change. We were really looking forward to living in a new country, but nothing beats being close to family when you've got kids. All I could think of was my children having their grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins to play with and build a real relationship with them! And to add to that blessing, Chris was assigned a ground unit which is what he really wanted over and air unit.
Chris graduated from AIOC on August 9th and our "plan" was to fly out to Cali on the 10th. Well as you know, you can never fully rely on you "plan" when you're in the military. So it is now August 19th (Monday) and the the packing people were supposed to come today but changed it to tomorrow without telling us. Then Wednesday the shipping people are coming to load all of our stuff to take to a storage unit in Pendleton. We'll stay in a hotel that night then hire a taxi to take us to the airport Thursday morning at 4:45. Thankfully we have family in Southern California because we have no idea where we're going to live. So once again our "plan" is to live at my mom's old house for hopefully less than a month while we look for a place to rent near Oceanside then find a home to buy in Temecula somewhere. Yep, that's 5 moves in one year alone! But I'd rather just skip the whole stressful buying a home step, and settle into a little place by the beach. I forgot to mention, I'll be having a baby right when we get to CA if I don't happen to deliver on the airplane!
There it is, a little update on what's been going on with us... It's amazing that we've been able to make great friends and great memories in the short amount of time we've lived here, and I'll be sure to write another post about that later.
