Hello blog, it's been a while! And it's been a heck of a year and a half. We've done nothing but bounce up and down the east coast since two January's ago. Between moving to New York, having a baby, TDY training in Virginia, starting a deployment, moving some more, finishing a deployment, and then a surprise thrown on top, all I can say is WOW. Praise God for what looks like a stretch of relative ease laid out ahead of us. But everything we've done in this last year and half deserves to go down in the record book, because even for Army standards it's pretty crazy. So here goes...
We moved out of our last home in Georgia in January of 2013.
> Stayed with friends in the area for a week.
> Drove to Virginia and lived with family for three weeks.
> Drove to New York to find housing, put an offer on a house, then back to Virginia for a little longer.
> Moved to New York and into a hotel for ten days.
> Moved into a friends house {God bless her} for about two and a half weeks while we waited to get the keys to our new house.
> Moved into our new house. Started unpacking and doing tons of necessary renovation projects while in the third trimester of pregnancy with Silas {exhausting...}.
> Found out Thane was going to deploy in the fall, and started the long strings of out-of-town training for weeks at a time. Bonus: Spent an awesome week with my bestie Sarah in Massachusetts who I hadn't seen in six long years!
> Thane got done with his training and my due date approached. There was a lot of back and forth over whether he was being sent to another month of training that overlapped my due date, but he didn't go in the end, praise God.
> Silas was born!
> Family came to visit the new baby.
> Packed up and moved to a hotel in VA where Thane had a TDY course for two months.
> In the meantime, we went back and forth to see family on the weekends and prep for where we'd live (in VA) for part of the upcoming deployment.
> The TDY course in Virginia ended and we drove back to New York.
> Two weeks later, Thane deployed.
> Less than 24 hours after Thane deployed, I shut the house down, packed us up, and drove us back to Virginia.
> The boys and I stayed in Virginia near family for three months, then drove back to New York.
> After three months in New York {and a very cold, snowy winter}, we went back to Virginia for a five week visit.
> Then it was back to New York for the remaining eight or so weeks of the deployment.
> Thane came home, hallelujah! I had my husband back, the boys had their daddy back, praise God.
> We had a great few days. I felt like I could actually breath again.
> Then the exhaustion set in.
> And then came the surprise I mentioned earlier.
Oh. My. Gosh.
And so my few days of "normal" were followed by a few months of the first trimester yuckies. Which wasn't exactly the plan...at least not so suddenly. But His plans are usually different than mine {understatement of the year}, and they're always for the best. And needless to say, we're very thankful for a big surprise and a big blessing all rolled up into one! {Yuckies included}. Now I'm very very hopeful that the next few months will be energy-filled and maybe even a tad normal, if that still exists. And maybe- fingers crossed- that means more blogging! But no promises... :-)
