Once in August, we said, “I do.”

Weddings and marriages are funny. How often do you see a celebrity lavishly pour out a million dollars on a wedding, and everyone is oohing and aaahing over it, KNOWING that marriage probably won’t even last.

Our wedding was beautiful.

Well, I thought so anyway. It was no celebrity affair, but it fit me, with a touch of Alan. Everything was simple and pretty and stuffed to the brim with guests.

Before Alan proposed, I had never stopped to think about what kind of wedding I wanted– not for two seconds. I never dreamed about my wedding. It just wasn’t something I ever thought about. I DID think about the groom, that part I was day dreaming about practically from birth. “Who will I marry?” must have been one of my earliest questions.

I even dreamed about my dream house, drawing out house plan after house plan. My plans were never for one or two or even four people, either. They always included rooms for extended family, like in Full House. I always wanted a house chock full of people, which is exactly what I have.

Alan proposed to me at Callaway Gardens over spring break his senior year and my junior year of college.

We mooned over our new engagement all the way home. This was before social media was invented. We emailed all of our friends to let them know the news that week from Alan’s parents’ living room desktop computer.

The minute we got back, Nonna (Alan’s mom) was excited to start talking about wedding plans. Uhhhh…ummmm… My family had never even discussed weddings or anything of the sort because I had never brought it up. I did not know anything about weddings. The only weddings I could even remember were ones I attended as a child.

I was the flower girl in one, and I was Amber’s maid of honor just the year before. Those were two very different weddings. One was a big church wedding, and that is all I remember about it. I was eight. Then Amber’s wedding was a small one of family and closest friends.

But I was very new to Alan’s family, and I was not about to admit that I was completely ignorant of the world of tulle and centerpieces. I did my best to nod along. Sure, who cares, whatever, I am getting married to Alan! So happy!!!

Suddenly, there I was with stacks of Bride magazines and a book on wedding etiquette, on loan from Nonna’s personal library.

It was fun and exciting, but I was like a deer in the headlights. “I don’t think my parents can afford a big wedding. Maybe we can get friends to do some of these things, and just have the wedding and reception at my church. I really have no idea how my parents will want to do all of this.”

My parents were not taken by surprise by the proposal. Alan asked Dad before he asked me. They set me a reasonable budget to stick to for the wedding, and we did our best. Looking back, I think the wedding turned out beautifully. I admittedly should have thought through the reception better. The room was a little small for 150 guests, but it was never meant to be a sit-down dinner. This was a casual reception in the fellowship hall of the church, and that was how I wanted it to be. Fussy and frilly and going all out was not my thing back then, nor did I have the money for that.

After our wedding, it seemed like the flood gates opened, and suddenly we were constantly going to weddings.

At the time I remember thinking, “If only these could have happened before mine! I could have copied so many ideas…”

But you know what? It is best that it did not happen that way. The way things actually happen is usually what is best. Our wedding was a reflection of just us, Alan and me. Well, truly, it was a reflection of me and my mom and Alan and his mom because when you get married at twenty-one and twenty-three, the mothers are heavily involved. It is a good thing too. Without our mothers’ input, you all could have been eating Guthries chicken fingers and drinking soda. Ha!!

One of my funniest memories is trimming Nonna’s guest list with Alan. We had to take a list of about three hundred down to one hundred for him and one hundred for me, or something like that, and that was pretty hilarious. It was reminiscent of that Father of the Bride movie. Alan was such a great sport about it all too. He knew I had my heart set on getting married in the church I grew up in, and he just trimmed away.

Before I knew I would be getting married that summer, I also had lined up a summer job as a camp counselor in Texas for myself, at a place called Pine Cove, or something like that. In May, I mentioned the camp to my mom, and she said I absolutely could not run off to camp and leave her to plan that whole wedding by herself, and I was like, “Ohhh… right. Okay, yes, that is fair.”

Ha! Mom had her hands full with me. I was so young and clueless, but it was never about the actual wedding day for me.

It was about the actual marriage. Alan and I agreed that when we said “forever” we meant “forever”. There was no pre-nup. We could not wait to start our life story together.

Someone once asked Ruth Graham if she ever considered divorcing Reverend Billy Graham, with how often he was gone. She had the best answer: “Divorce? No. Never. Murder, yes.”

I thought that was a squarely perfect and honest answer. Everyone wants to be that sweet old couple, but you have to cross through all the years of immaturity, growing, battles, and facing life together to get to those golden years.

We are in this for more than a beautiful wedding day. Our finish line is still too far away to even see. Even still, I enjoy day dreaming about it.

I may have day dreamed out loud one too many times because the boys are starting to ask, “When are we moving to Mom’s farm in Alabama??”

Oops…It is not a farm exactly I want, it is the peace and landscape, and yes, Alabama. Most importantly, stability is what I long for. My someday house does not pick up and move every two years to the next undisclosed location. It sits peacefully, at one with its surroundings. The people in this house always know who to list as their emergency contacts.

There is room for Alan to teach the boys to shoot and maybe even fish. It has ample outdoor space and a district zone for a few chickens and a small kitchen garden. In my imagination, I can magically not kill the plants, you see.

The church is not far away, and I can drive to my parents’ house in much less than a day. There is a school for each boy there that is just perfect for them. It is hot down there, but that is okay because we have one of those quick set pools. Alan won’t fuss about the pool killing the grass either because we are not going to need to sell the house in two years. We are there to stay for as long as we or the good Lord sees fit.

‘Til death do us part. I could not have done this adventure with anyone else.

The fun of it all was a big deal to me then, and it still is. At twenty-one, I did not want to buy my rural house in Alabama yet and settle down. What I wanted was to run away with this guy, and we did just that.

We honeymooned in Jamaica, and then I rode with him to his officer training in Oklahoma. Everything we saw was new and fun, from climbing Dunn’s River Falls to New York City. It has been one expedition after another, and I loved it.

I know I mentioned in my last post how many of the hardships really caught up with me this year. That is true. Alan went to Iraq for twelve months early on, then fifteen months a few years later, and then Afghanistan in 2011. We have moved far more than is sane, but with any journey, there are obstacles.

Life is a battle, but ours has been a thrilling one. It is true that I am so ready to be done with the moving, but I would not trade our road for any other. I love what God has blessed us with and what we have built together. It is such an honor and a joy to be a part of it.

Here’s to decades and decades more. I love you. We are greatly blessed.

“Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow.”

James 1:17

I’m linking up with Finding Ninee today for Finish the Sentence Friday here. This week’s prompt is “Once in August”.

The post Once in August We Said “I Do” appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

Jeopardy World Tour App: The Good, The Addictive, & the Ugly Privilege

This summer Alan and I found an app we actually both enjoy. Jeopardy World Tour app. We love this thing. Truth be told, Alan keeps saying he’s getting tired of it, but I super hope that’s not true because I just now finally made Tier 8 and have enough tokens to play some bigger cities.

We’ve already pulled so many of our friends and family in to this app.

***When you purchase items through links on my site, I do collect advertising fees.***

The funny and sometimes frustrating thing about this game is that it does not let you waste an entire day playing it, not unless you are truly a trivia genius or you’re feeding it a bunch of money.

Yes, you can play the Jeopardy World Tour app for free.

We try not ever spend any real money on it, and the sad thing is that if you spend all your Jeopardy app money on one expensive city game and lose…no more Jeopardy for your for four more hours. Yep. They pay you more “dollars” every 4 hours. There’s a countdown until your next pay.

Just now I had $160,000 Jeopardy dollars. I spent it all on one game in Paris, and I lost. Now I have to wait four more hours before I can even play again.

Sadness.

When I first started playing, I always played the cheap cities, so this didn’t happen so much. The only thing about that is that when you do it that way, you level up like 100 times  more slowly than you do playing the expensive cities.

But here’s the good news when you’re out of Jeopardy money.

There’s another part of the app where you can play your friends. Don’t have any friends? You can have it match you to opponents. That works just as well. The app gives you 3 hearts every 4 hours, and you use your hearts to play games.

You won’t level up from friend challenges, but you will gain experience knowledge which you can use in your other games. Plus, you can meet the daily challenges, which will give you more money to play the city games.

Gems, Gems, Gems!

You collect gems according to what category you’ve answered correctly. This part is neat because you can click on your profile and learn which category you are best at. For example, I keep around an 80% accuracy level in the vocabulary category, but I’m only around 55% accurate in my literature/arts category.

The gems enable you to level up to different “tiers.” Each tier higher you go, the more money you get every 4 hours.

So you want to hear a funny and ridiculous April and Alan playing Jeopardy story?

All Jeopardy accounts are not created equal. There is some serious UGLY privilege going on here.

Alan was whipping through the level and gem tiers faster than I was, and I was feeling jealous and miffed. See, the thing was that it was completely unequal. His Tier 2 would get like $50,000. My Tier 2 got more like $10,000. What the heck!? And each time Alan would graduate to the next tier, they’d double the money he got! Meanwhile, my amount would go up some paltry amount in comparison.

As we compared our games, I began to feel an extreme sense of injustice. I decided to write the app a letter and demand answers to this privilege situation that we had here. Horribly unfair!

The app people sent me back a message saying that my husband has a “test version” of the app, and that there will be many great changes in store.

Only there were never any changes that created equality amongst the app versions. He continues to get over $300,000 every 4 hours now at Tier 9, and I get $60,000 at Tier 8.

Alan’s mom signed up for an account, and her app version is even worse than mine. She gets paid the same, I think, but her cities will never pay her any more than she pays in. Alan and I get paid extra every time we win with a higher score than some set number.

I did notice that Alan and I are on totally different leader boards though. For example, we could both be #500 at the same time and not see each other on the leader board because we aren’t competing against each other. That is some consolation.

Just know if you download this game, you may get the amazing version that lets you play tons of games, like Alan, OR you could end up with the more limited regular version like me.

When addiction to the app goes too far:

One night Alan was going on an on about all the money he was rolling in and games he’d won, and I reminded him that he had all this privilege though because I don’t even have a chance to play all the games the way he does with the tiny amount of money they were giving me, but still charging me the same amount to play the game.

It all made me truly empathize with every underprivileged person ever. I mean it seems ridiculous, but I got it.

I told Alan he should apologize for bragging or at least admit that he had an unfair advantage. He did not wish to admit his advantage, and I got all kinds of upset!

And that’s how you know that you’ve taken your app obsession too far…. Haa!!! That was months ago, and Alan has since admitted that I and his parents do have the short end of the stick.

So I wholeheartedly do recommend this game because it will keep you sharp, sometimes make you feel stupid, and make you realize just how not-well-read you are. Yet at the same time it is awesome sauce, and it will suck you in and leave you wanting to play more.

For another fun app review, see this one I wrote about Township.

The post Jeopardy World Tour App Review: The Good & The Ugly appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

I love Christmas break. Time off from spelling tests, chauffeur duties, graded papers, packing lunches, and best of all I’m not desperately rushing everyone to not be late…..oh how I love time off.

We always spend a few days at my parent’s house and a few days at Alan’s parents’ house, and it’s such a blessing to spend time with them and soak up the rest and good conversation.

With people you see on a daily basis, it can be easy to fall prey to simply talking about your shared problems and the annoying people you have to deal with. Ha! We all have them.

But when we get together with family at Christmas, we can re-focus on what matters and gain wisdom from others. We can always do that during the everyday too, of course, but I get the best ideas when I have some time and space to read and think!

Daniel and his favorite cousin at Christmas. They were born only a month apart.

I am reading 2 books and taking 1 online course that I’m gaining immensely from. One is on grocery budgeting and the other is on marriage. The course is about planning.

Alan even found an app for us to use for grocery shopping that has also been hugely helpful. I wanted to pass those along to y’all.

The Books

1.) How to Win the Grocery Game

I’m including an eBay link above for that one, which I do not make any money from. I just found the eBay price to be slightly better than Amazon.

This is an extremely practical book about saving money on grocery shopping. However, it was written in the 1970s and is extremely outdated. I’ve had to look for more modern ways to implement some of the strategies in this book, but it’s the strategies and the meal planning tips that make the book worth while…..if you can look past the insane price amounts on everything. You have to ignore those since this book is from the 70s!!

I’ll share with you a modern app I’ve used to help me do one thing from the book later in this post.

2.) Created to Be His Helpmeet

The above link is to the Amazon Kindle edition, but it is available in paperback on Amazon and other sellers as well. I do earn a small percentage when you buy through this link.

This book doesn’t even attempt political correctness with words like “hillbilly ugly” and “submit”. Ha! You have been warned.

But I’ve found it to be practical and helpful, a solid reminder. It has also helped me understand my husband better, as she divides men up into three groups: command types, visionaries, and steady men.

The book is about becoming a kinder, more helpful wife, and by doing that, you can’t help but improve your marriage, even if you’re married to the Grinch himself. I’m only 1/3 the way through it, but so far it has helped me to straight up be a nicer person at home with my husband.

I also love that it’s written by an older woman. She has walked through all the phases of life, and she’s sharing what she has learned.

Us with Alan’s side of the fam. Greg was MIA this year due to food poisoning. You were missed, Greg!

The App

As I mentioned above, I’ve found a more modern way to implement the grocery strategy, but it isn’t foolproof. I’m not sure if the database is leaving out all the goods from stores like Aldi and the Pig because they came up less frequently than I expected. Some work may still need to be done there.

But if you want an easy way to compare everyday prices at one store with sale prices from the circulars, this is an awesome app.

It’s called Basket.

You type in your grocery list. It gives you options for brands and lines them up by price. Try it out. You may end up spending hours on it like Alan and I have.

We put in our entire grocery list, and then we hit “compare prices”. It showed us that the cheapest way to get all our groceries at one store was to go to Walmart. However, the real issue was that Walmart was the only store that carried every item on our list.

To get the best savings, you can tell it to break it up into 2 stores. That gave us Walmart and Food Depot. In the list, it breaks down which items we should buy at Food Depot and which ones we should purchase at Walmart.

Wow, huh?

It was funny how it would switch stores as we put more groceries in!

However, Alan found that not all of the prices and sizes were available at Walmart, so checking your weekly circulars is still important.

I think this is a good tool, but it doesn’t truly replace searching through the weekly grocery ads.

Christmas morning

Chore Looping

Another exciting tip I got this Christmas is “chore looping,” which my sister-in-law, Amy, told me about.

For those of us who have trouble with other methods of keeping up with house cleaning schedules, chore looping is the way to go.

You make a list of tasks, like this:

• Scrub hall bathroom.
• Clean the kitchen.
• Sweep and mop the floors.
• Scrub master bath.

etc., etc. Add whatever rooms you have.

Then you work through it until you reach the end and start over, and it doesn’t have to be all in one day, all in one week, or even all in one month. You just work through the list as you are able.

Some tasks you have to write on your list more than once, like scrubbing that bathroom that all 4 boys use…bleh…

For Example:

• Scrub hall bathroom.
• Clean the kitchen.
• Sweep and mop the floors.
• Scrub master bath.
• Vacuum.
• Scrub hall bathroom.
• Tidy up dining room.
• Clean the kitchen.
• Tidy up living room.
• Dust the house.
• Scrub hall bathroom….lol…again and again and again…

…And the list goes on until you’ve covered all the tasks you can think of.

Some days you do 3 or 4 of them. Other days you do 1 or none at all. It just depends on when you have the time!

If you do marathon clean, then you skip the repeats. I almost never marathon clean. Why? Because it’s exhausting, and I was always hoping I’d be affording a maid by now….lol

Daniel helping with the Men’s Pancake Breakfast at church

I’ll save my excitement of my new Brilliant Life Planner and accompanying online planning course for another day. I can’t wait to show it to you. In fact, I’m definitely going to do a Facebook Live all about this planner this week, on my Stories of Our Boys Facebook page.

I hope you all had an absolutely fabulous Christmas and are as excited about the new year as I am! Actually, I’m pretty nervous about 2018. Moving…deep breaths…deep breaths…I’m going to need all the organization I can accomplish!

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”    Jeremiah 29:11

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The post My 4 Favorite Homemaking Hacks for 2018 appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

****This post is part of the series Real Army Wives on storiesofourboys.com. This series chronicles the story of our first deployment, back in 2003.****

Once Alan had been gone for 6 months, and we were finally able to communicate regularly, we found that we began to bicker–even from continents away. We were having newlywed problems, whether we were together or not.

Alan was anxious to move us forward towards our goals in the U.S., yet he was stuck in a combat zone, feeling powerless to affect change. He wanted me to go out and buy a $70,000 house. Plus, he thought I should move us in there by myself so we could start building equity……I was like, “Heck no, I won’t go..”

I wanted him to call more. He gave me the actual reasons he couldn’t.

I was disappointed that he hadn’t had a family member send me an anniversary gift.

Granted, my expectations were HIGH, and he was never one to sugar-coat a single thing…..so we had issues….

an Iraqi flag Alan sent me in a package

On October, 1, 2003, I wrote him out this list, half-joking, half-serious, to lay out all of my expectations and avoid further arguments…

So here’s a guide for you– to save your marriage and prevent further fights.

{Alan may not have enjoyed reading this, but at least he knew how to not upset me going forward, which made for a better marriage relationship.}

Keep this in mind if your spouse deploys! It may help you! And you may even be able to say it with less sass than I did, and it would sound downright sweet…

#1. Call me every chance you get, BUT if you decide not to because….

a.) You think it’s not a good time.

b.) You don’t want to wait in line.

c.) You’re cheap.

OR

d.) You want to let other people call their families…

Fine, but you NEVER should tell me these excuses. Keep them to yourself. Don’t tell me you purposefully didn’t call! Especially for the above excuses which DO NOT help.

#2. Mid-Tour Leave– Yes, of course you want to take it.

ALL you care about is seeing your wife ASAP. You would do anything to get to see her. It doesn’t matter that you have to go back to Iraq. Even for a day with me, you’d do anything.

#3.) Pictures: Never return pictures I send to you.

How would you feel if you mailed me a picture of yourself that you thought was good-looking, and I just mailed it right back to you? HELLLOOOO!

#4.) Please record all tapes to me when your roommate is not in the room.

….This was very much a 2003 problem. We recorded each other cassette tapes. Nowadays this advice would apply more to phone calls.

For at least half of the tape, please be alone. Otherwise, you are way too official and business like, and there’s nothing mushy on the whole tape. Yuck. I hate getting business tapes about money, etc.  I just want you to be absorbed in me the person, not me the dependent.

#5.) All holiday and special occasions should be accompanied by a gift OR flowers.

Being apart does not take away your responsibility to make me feel special. For example, everyone else’s husbands arranged for them to get flowers on their anniversaries and/or birthdays. Don’t give me that crap about you can’t because you can.

Here’s how:

1- You arrange it when you have internet access.

2- Otherwise, you write a family member (i.e. parents) and ask them to send me something specific and reimburse them with a check. You have checks.

#6.) What qualifies as a holiday?

Anniversary, Birthday, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day

~~~~~~~~~~~

That’s all I can think of right now….I know you probably feel a little offended that I made you this list, but I’m just sparing us future fights by alerting you to my expectations of you as my husband.

I hope this doesn’t sound harsh. I’m not trying to sound harsh. I just don’t want to have to cry all the way to Sea World like I did the other weekend because there are some things you simply don’t understand.

Now I do realize that I’ve been guilty of the same thing, so see, I’m working on it.

My tapes have since been VERY sweet and the last one was even rated R. {Note to self, destroy all tapes.} Plus, I have increased your packages and refrained from reacting quickly to things that you say that I hope you don’t mean.

*********

No long deployment is going to happen without some disagreements. We all just have to do our best to be understanding and give each other the benefit of the doubt. Meanwhile, I think this list was a big help, especially since it was the FIRST year of our marriage!

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We left Oklahoma full of excitement over finally being together as a married couple. We were ON OUR WAY! Things were looking up for us. Alan and I were finally picking out our first house. Okay, so we were only 21 and 23. Maybe we’d settle for an apartment or a nice townhouse, but either way, it was going to be OURS, TOGETHER!

Eeeeee!!!! Happy, happy! Joy, joy!

But there was this one problem holding back our complete happiness. Dark, foreboding figures loomed in the corners of my mind. They looked like naysayers to me.

“I hear 4th Infantry Division is deploying to Turkey. Going in from the North,” Alan’s buddies at Officer Basic Course, back in Oklahoma, said.

Thankfully, everything was all “probably”, “maybe”, and “talk of the possibility.” There were no actual set-in-stone facts yet. (You see, at that point, America had not set foot in Iraq as part of the War on Terrorism yet. We were still only fighting in Afghanistan.)

“Ah, no one knows anything for sure, ” I comforted myself. “I’m not believing any of these rumors until I hear them from Alan’s soon to be unit in Texas.”

I always held out hope. This was my turn to finally begin my happily ever after, and all these gloom and doom storm clouds hovering all around me were ignored to the best of my ability.

Gray skies were everywhere, but the sun could come out at any moment. Not a drop of rain had fallen yet. Not a single lightning bolt had actually flashed. They just threatened.

With that mindset, we packed up Alan’s white Blazer and my bright royal blue Grand Am, arguing about the best way to make it all fit, and headed south.

I don’t remember where we were. It was somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Texas. But neither Alan nor I have ever forgotten that day. I’ve never forgotten that punch-in-the-gut from out of nowhere feeling.

Since we were driving two separate cars, Alan didn’t even know what happened, but when he saw me pull over, he pulled over too.

Just like on 9/11, I heard it from my radio. It was somewhere around January 15, 2003. I was all singing at the top of my lungs, until the news came on.

That’s when the news man announced that it was officially released, just that day, that 4th ID did indeed have orders to deploy their division to the northern border of Iraq in preparation for invasion.

Just like that, I was Chicken Little, and my thunder clouds had all just dropped their rain at once. The lightning was everywhere. The thunder was louder than the news on my radio. The rain was so thick I couldn’t see in front of me.

My heart was broken. I was bawling my eyes out. How could this happen? Why did this have to be? Our happily ever after just kept slipping further and further away.

I’d finally gotten to spend a week with my husband, and even that week we’d traveled to all our family’s houses and then come back for him to go out to the field, so really we’d been married 5 MONTHS and still had not spent one regular week together in a home of our own.

There was nothing to say, and not a thing in the world anyone could do to help us.

So in that moment, I did the only sensible thing.

I pulled my car over, laid my head on my steering wheel, and I cried. Alan came over to my car, and I had to explain to him what I’d heard on the radio.

Alan probably wasn’t surprised. He was more connected to the military community, so he understood better that this was coming. Of course, he was not feeling the same way I was. Alan is an Army officer. This was his dream. He was only too willing to go over there and fight some war.

If I said one prayer of lamentation, I said a 1,000. Many petitions were made for Alan’s safety, for direction with my life, for guidance with my next step.

But that first day, I just cried. Bravery was for later. Alan hugged me and apologized and held me while I blubbered.

Reality had reached out and smacked me in the face, so it was time I looked her in the eye. I buckled under the weight of it all, with hours left to drive.

Alan and I dried up my face, hugged, and we drove on.

For last week’s chapter, click here. To start at the beginning of this series, go here.

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The post Real Army Wives: When Reality Smacks You in the Face appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

Home Sweet Tutwiler. My freshman year I lived on the 13th floor, aka the 14th floor. My junior and senior years I lived on the 6th floor.

For previous posts on our young military marriage, click here. This is part of the series I’m writing called The Real Army Wives.

As I mentioned before, Alan was away at training the first 4 months of our marriage, while I finished up my degree at the University of Alabama.

I lived in Tutwiler Hall. The funny thing about Tutwiler Hall, which is the freshman girls’ dormitory, is that there were actually 2 different buildings in the state of Alabama named Tutwiler.  The other Tutwiler is the women’s prison.

As you can imagine, everyone had jokes about that, especially Alan. He prided himself, once we got married, on coming to town to stay with me for my “conjugal visit.” Ha!

Tutwiler Hall still stands today, right across the street from the University of Alabama’s famous football stadium.

Even though we lived apart, we took turns visiting one another.

I loved it when Alan would visit and handle all of my Excel homework. 15 years later, I wish I had taken the time to learn how to use Excel. It’s probably the only computer system that is still mostly the same, and I’m still clueless as to how to use it.

When Alan came to town, we slept on an air bed in the floor of my living room at Tutwiler. As the 6th floor Resident Assistant, I had my own living room, bedroom, and bathroom.

It wasn’t much better when I’d go to visit Alan in Oklahoma. I only visited for one extended weekend. It was Thanksgiving. Alan was training to be a field artillery officer. In layman’s terms, that’s the Army’s big guns (cannons), which Alan insists I call “howitzers.”

We had Thanksgiving dinner at Golden Corral that year because Alan called every place in town to see where we could get the most affordable steak.

I will never forget that Thanksgiving because of the crazy person who stole from me. I was staying at the Batchelor Officers’ Quarters with Alan, sharing a bed that could only be described as a 3/4 bed. It wasn’t even quite as big as a full size bed.

Down the hall from our room was the community laundry room. No big deal. I was used to that. We had community laundry at Tutwiler. I wasn’t the kind to sit with my clothes either. I left my clothes in the dryer and returned to my room. On the way out of the laundry room, Alan introduced me to a guy who seemed a little strange in a creepy way, but whatever. I didn’t think too much of it.

You can imagine my dismay when I took my clothes out of the dryer and discovered that all 5 pairs of my panties were missing from the load!!! The rest of my clothes were all there.

Only my underwear was missing!

I’d been stolen from before, but this was weird weird weird. Icky.

I looked at every man in the building with a healthy dose of skepticism after that.

Beautiful bluffs near where Alan lived in Lawton, Oklahoma. Geronimo is buried near there. We visited his grave once.

Strange incidents aside, it was a semester of sacrifices. So much separation is hard on a marriage.

We worked hard. Alan was steadily training to lead soldiers to war, and I was squeezing my senior year of college into one semester.

That’s why we decided to do something way exciting and outside the box for fun that October. Remember how we had that free plane ticket left over from the mishap where we missed the military ball? We decided to cash in that ticket and have a 2nd honeymoon in a place neither of us had ever been before but where we’d always wanted to go.

We are both frugal people, but when it comes to relationships, we always fork over the money.

That’s why we fly in to visit our families every summer and Christmas, no matter how many tickets that costs us.

And that’s why we spared no expense going to see each other when we were living separately for a while.

People regret many things, but people never regret spending time with loved ones. No one on their death-bed ever said, “Man, I wish I hadn’t spent so much time with my family.” Nope. Doesn’t happen.

Relationships are always worth the money.

We decided to meet somewhere new and exciting. Alan would fly out from Oklahoma, and I’d fly up from Alabama.

So do you want to know where we went?  I’ll tell ya all about it on the next post.

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The post Our Young Military Marriage: Training, Tutwiler, and Thievery appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last Real Army Wives series post, so where were we?

Oh, yes, Alan and I were engaged. The Army was starting to encroach on my plans and change my life. Hahahahahaha Oh boy, did I have no idea what was ahead or what!

Behind? You can catch up here with part 1, part 2,and the others weren’t exactly part of the story, per se, so we are really only on part 3 here.

Probably 99% of military couples plan their wedding date around a deployment, a move, a temporary duty assignment, or training.

For us, it was Officer Basic Course and my own college graduation. We could plan it for December or January, which was unstable because we were brand new to the military and didn’t know if that would work out…

Or we could plan the big day for August, exactly when Alan had about 10 days of leave between assignments.

So we went with the August plan.

Picture of a picture….Yes, we got married before digital photography was big…Funny story….A guest that we didn’t know caught the bouquet. She said, “Wow! I don’t even know her!” So Alyson, Alan’s cousin, snatched it up. That makes me smile.

The first good-bye

I said good-bye to Alan around May 30 that year. He was off to Ft. Lewis, Washington, and I was headed down to my parents’ house to spend the summer working, planning the wedding, and taking Genetics via distance learning.

This was our first ever attempt at a long distance relationship. Two whole months–which sounds laughable NOW.

But, oh! The drama!

You would have thought it was World War II, rather than…..Tacoma. We hugged and kissed, and made speeches, and it actually makes me roll my eyes and shake my head now to even think about it. Gracious.

Two months of separation between Alan’s commissioning and the wedding.

But that was nothing.

Once we got married, in August, we celebrated with a honeymoon to Jamaica, and then we drove from Alabama to Oklahoma to settle him into his BOQ. (Batchelor Officer’s Quarters)

I rode out there with him, spent a day there, and then I flew back to Alabama to finish my own degree, at the University of Alabama.

Yep. That was another 4 months of separation.

I don’t even think it’s that uncommon for military couples to spend the first months of their marriage apart. This has been a common theme throughout millenia of military couples.

As a newlywed 21-year-old young woman, it was agonizing.

How many times did I contemplate throwing it all out the window and moving to Oklahoma with my lieutenant? So many times! I could finish my degree anywhere, any time, why bother with all this? Ugh.

But my husband truly loved me, and was always looking out not only for his best interest, but for mine as well. Alan would not hear of me throwing away my degree only 4 months from completion.

Transferring to another college would have put all those credits at risk. I’d worked hard on this degree, and we both decided it would be best for me to stick it out and finish that last semester at UA.

…Even if I felt like I was the only married lady on campus. Actually, I wasn’t the only one, but I WAS the only married gal still working as a Resident Assistant, living alone, in the freshman girls’ residence hall, Tutwiler.

My 3 closest friends junior and senior year: That’s me, Jennings, Leigh, and Chrisynda

But I was with my friends, and that made it doable. How many times have my friends kept me sane over all these years? Two things, y’all, there were two things that always got me through these obstacles.

1. My faith in my heavenly Father. He’s seen me through too much for me to ever doubt Him.
2. The support of my friends and family.

Around that time, speculation began to circulate about the possibility of war with Iraq.

It was the fall of 2002. We had troops in Afghanistan, not in Iraq, but the news kept building. I remember the day Chrisynda came to my room to tell me to turn on my t.v.

Chrisynda and me, 2002

Chrisynda was one of my best friends, a tallish, slender brunette with straight shoulder-length hair, and a positive attitude. She was the Alan of my friends: super responsible, practical, level-headed, beautiful, kind, caring, and fun, but always well-balanced.

She’s just one of those people who seems to know things. She was the friend who would keep my favorite snack in her room. She’d come to my room with a Walmart bag containing batteries because she knew that if she wanted to watch t.v. in my room, someone would need to put batteries in my remote control. April did not have money to spare for batteries. For Guthrie’s fried chicken tenders? Yes, I had money for that. For batteries? Never.

I remember Chrisynda came into my room, and she probably brought food with her too, and she turned on the news. It is permanently lodged in my brain how she asked me about the Iraq news.

“Did you see this Iraq stuff?”

I muttered something about avoiding all that news and hoping it wouldn’t happen. I like to live happily in denial.

“Ehh…I’m pretty sure we’re going, April. It’s happening. Do you think Alan will go?” She was so polite, but she leveled the facts with me that I don’t think anyone else wanted to talk about.

Time stood still. Wait. What? I gotta start watching the news? The news….the news…

The news was suddenly intruding into my life. It was more than a channel to flip past. What we were seeing on t.v. was affecting me directly. It had always affected me, whether I realized it or not, but now I was in the front of the line of dominoes!!

Ever since, I’ve never been able to form a non-partial opinion on anything politically related. I always think, “Wait. How will this affect me? Or this friend, or my parents, or my children?”

Some people remain objective much better than I do, but I cannot do it.

So there we were…..young newlyweds…we’d been apart for 6 months, with short breaks in between, and now there was talk of war with Iraq.

The questions swirled around me, but what could I do? How could I know anything?

All a person can do in any situation at all is to put one foot in front of the other. Do the next thing. What needs to be done today? Do that. How do I stay spiritually and physically fit to handle all this? Do that too.

Pray. Hope. Love. Cling to the good. Always hope for the best but prepare for the worst, and life went on.

Come back next Monday for the next installment!

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