P is for Plan. And Pencil

There is a lot going on over here. There always is within a month or two of a move. And we are getting very close to that time. We knew we were only going to be in New England for a short time, but it seems as if the time is shrinking at an exponential rate of decay. (That was some math talk for the husband.)

I've mentioned all of the things we've been doing in preparation for our move. We are trying to sell our house in Virginia so that we could all move to San Diego as a family. We had a back up plan that I would live with the kids in Virginia if the house didn't sell, refinance it at a lower rate, and move when we got new orders somewhere else, unless the orders were back to Virginia. If we got orders back to Virginia, we'd just hold on until Daddy could join us and beg the Navy to pay us for the move we'd financed ourselves. His job in San Diego meant that the first year we wouldn't see much of each other anyway, so we were all okay with this back up plan.

It's a good thing that Daddy after 13 years (plus college) and I after 8 years have learned that with military life, you need to make all of your plans in pencil. Plans change, orders change, and things don't always work out the way you'd expect.

We've had a few disappointments in the past few months. We tried to find and purchase a new camping trailer that had a garage for the motorcycle and room for the kids and friends. It fell through. This entire time I've had a hard time making plans for our upcoming move and getting excited about where we were going to live. I assumed that part of it was that I didn't know where we were going to be living. I didn't know what to expect -- Virginia or California. Only the Lord knew. No matter what we did, I didn't get that 'rush' that comes with an impending move. Maybe part of it was that this is our eighth move in eight years (two of those were not military). Maybe part of it was that I wasn't so excited about the possibility of living separate from my husband. We do enough of that because he's floating around in a tin can somewhere without doing it to ourselves. I couldn't make plans to find a preschool for Little Monster this fall, or think about where he'd go to school. I couldn't look for houses in San Diego or plan for our cross country trip to drop Daddy off at his new ship.

A little over two weeks ago we got word that we were being given the option of changing our orders. The funny thing is that we had pretty much assumed that his orders were no-change orders. NO one (and I mean NO ONE) really wants to take the crap that he'd taken voluntarily. The other funny thing about the military giving us an "option" was that they really wanted to see how big of a stink Daddy was going to make. If he'd raised a big fuss over the change, they might have bothered themselves to figure something else out. and by "might" I mean we had a 20 percent chance. In our case "option" was really synonymous with "ordered."

So now we've got orders to somewhere we'd never thought we'd get to go. I immediately got the 'rush' I'd been missing about the other places we were going to live. This must be the real thing. I'm excited about going to an island paradise to live for a while. Even if it means wading through pages of paperwork to avoid quarantine for our dog, Little Monster starting preschool late (if at all), and living in a teeny tiny house just like the one we're in now.

Everything is set. We have orders to a beautiful WARM place that we've never been to. We know what we need to do to get there, and there's a ton of work to be done to make it all happen. But for now, until we get a little bit closer to our move, I'm still only planning things in pencil.