This year we moved AGAIN. Did I mention that already? Maybe I’ve brought it up too much. Sorry about that., but moving is everything. Where you live and who you’re surrounded by, that’s your life setting.

I was at the eye doctor this week because I’d run completely out of contacts and haven’t been to the eye doctor since 3 states ago. The eye doc asked me many of the usual questions, including this one:

Of all those places you’ve lived, what did you think? Which one did you like best?

It’s funny how when people ask me this, all of a sudden I AM the old Rose in Titanic, at the end of the movie, looking back like “It’s been 80 years.”

I cannot fairly choose one of our duty stations and say, “This one was the best,” because so much of my memories of each place are colored by what was going on in my life at the time.

My best life experience was always Virginia. Always. I had this wonderful support network of friends there, 4 seasons of weather, and an active neighborhood. It was the best, and yet it was still too far from family, and the traffic was atrocious.

But when I see a photo like this:

I know where my favorite place is. It’s wherever the ocean is. The shore is my favorite place to be. So many of my best memories were there.

The first time I saw the ocean was on a truck driving trip I took with my dad. For a short while, he had his own trailer moving business. He drove the big rigs you see hauling mobile homes on the interstate with those signs that say “Wide Load”, and they have those escort trucks. My dad’s cousin Dale drove one of the escort trucks.

By the way, Dale’s escort truck was one of my favorite childhood things too. This truck had a 10 foot antenna on it. 10 or 20! I got in big serious trouble one time for climbing up and swinging on it until it broke off…

But going back to that trip with my dad, I was around 5 years old, maybe 6, and I got my first glimpses of the deep blue crashing on the shores, and I loved it already.

Beach with the Grands

My next life-changing memory at the beach was the year my grandparents took us to Panama City Beach and rented this little beach house that was only a block away from the shore. I was with my grandparents, my Aunt Linda, and my cousin Amber. My excitement was off the charts.

You see, it was hard for us to take vacations like that where you go to a place and stay there for days on end because we had my sister, who is severely disabled; plus traveling is very expensive.

I grew up sharing a room with my sister, Amanda. We shared a bed even, until 4th grade. Amanda is only 15 months my elder. Caring for her was a full time job, which Mom did pretty much by herself. I had to keep my room tidy, or Amanda would chew up my things. She is blind and unable to walk, but also her brain never developed past that of a sixteen-month-old.

Sometimes at night she’d freak me out pretty good by suddenly smacking her hand over my face when I was trying to sleep. I kind of get a chuckle about it now, but it wasn’t always funny at the time. I understood though, and I loved Amanda. We all loved her, cherished her, and protected her, not that I recall anyone ever trying to bother her when we were around.

Have you seen the movie Wonder?

I related to that movie on a level I haven’t been able to relate to any other movie, although trust me, the book is WAY better. Read the book! In the book, Auggie has an extremely deformed face, which causes the family to have to do things differently and subjects them to lots of staring, and Auggie requires special attention.

Auggie has an older sister, named Via. She’s the one I could relate to in the book. When a family has a member who needs an extraordinary amount of extra care, I think the other members try to make up for it. I always had zero desire to take any more from my family than was necessary because Mom and Dad’s hands were already full. So you do your homework without being told, you plan ahead and study for tests, you make sure you can send yourself to college, and you just try to do the right thing and not cause any problems.

Okay, I know that was a long tangent, but I had to tell where I was coming from to fully explain my deep connection with the ocean by age 14.

Here was a place where I could leave all my usual cares behind me. Amanda, who as I said, we did love her, but she didn’t come with us to the beach. She was at home with Mom, the one who truly needed a vacation.

The beach was glorious, and I could never go without getting soaking wet from tip to toe. We had floats, friends, and Coca-Cola in the refrigerator. Who needed Disney World? Not us. This was amazing.

And that line where the water meets the sky on the horizon points to God.

It just does. You can’t look at that expanse and not see its Creator. Every time I go, it puts me in my place, and there I stand, staring in awe at the vastness of it all. It’s the perfect place to pray.

On the shore, against the never-ending enormous sky and sparkling water, all that land stuff seems smaller. The problems are there, but they don’t feel so close by with the waves crashing at your feet. It’s a spiritual thing. God feels closer and life seems clearer. At least, that’s how it has always been for me.

Even with the loudness of the waves, there’s a calm that I feel there. God is there, steadying my anxiety and reminding me that He is in heaven, and here am I on earth, and I let my words be few while I soak it in.

The sea shore is definitely my favorite place of everywhere that I have been. Just talking about it has made me want to hop in my car and go!

Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, or free, but Christ is all and is in all.
12Therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with hearts of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. 13Bear with each other and forgive any complaint you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. 14And over all these virtues put on love, which is the bond of perfect unity. 15Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, for to this you were called as members of one body. And be thankful.

Colossians 3:11-15

The post Of all the places, which one did you like best? appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

One of my favorite parts of this strange life we lead is choosing my next house. With each one, I say, “Such and such a thing is killing me. Our next house will DEFINITELY have….

-sidewalks

-a bigger master bedroom closet

-4 bedrooms

-more kitchen cabinets!!

It’s always something.

I love getting to see new places and try new set-ups. I don’t even mind redecorating, though it takes so long to get a house looking the way I want it to look that it’s always time to move before I finish.

My mother-in-law is wanting to do a project, which she probably saw on Pinterest. She asked me to dig out a photo of all the houses we’ve lived in for this project.

This is no easy task, but it got me thinking. It’d be fun to do a blog post about all the different houses we’ve occupied. Some of them weren’t “houses” exactly, but they were our homes, for a little while.

2002 Alabama

We got married in 2002, but Alan was away at training for most of that time. I was the weird-o married Resident Assistant for my very last semester of college.

This dear old dormitory is now slated for ye olde wrecking ball. A new Tutwiler Hall is being built “adjacent” to the current building.

2003 Texas

Our first house together!

There is no excitement like moving into your very first home together as a married couple. The sad cloud that hung over us was that on our drive into town, they announced on the radio that Alan’s unit was headed straight for Iraq. This was 2002. We weren’t even in Iraq yet. I was devastated.

Thankfully, we were able to squeeze in 3 blissful months together in this house before Alan was shipped out.

My crowning achievement was that flower bed. It was no longer puny under my watch. When we moved out only 18 months later, it was a glorious bed of petunias surrounding the bushes. The move-out inspector was so impressed, he didn’t charge me a dime for the giant bleach stain on the hallway carpet. I was never good at carpet.

2004 Texas

Alan came home a year later and wanted to move onto the military base, so off we went, from our beautiful civilian 3 bed, 2 bath duplex, across the street from my best buddy, over to this old, ugly 2 bed/1 bath duplex on the base. As you can probably tell, I wasn’t thrilled about it, and I never felt like I truly belonged in it, but whatever. Another year, another rental.

2005 Arizona

We were ecstatic to receive orders to move out west in 2005 because if Alan had stayed where we were, he would’ve gone straight back to Iraq in 2005/2006.

This house holds a special place in our hearts, largely because Joshua was born there, but also because it was a fun place to live. It had shag carpet, no air-conditioning, a pebble yard, and a pool in the backyard. I’m telling you, I’d still want to live there. I can’t even explain it.

2006-2008 Back to Alabama

Oh, 2006, what a year! You couldn’t pay me to repeat it, but that’s another story. We had summer orders again, so we bought a house in Texas. Alan called me on my plane trip to the new house to tell me, “I have new orders. We’re headed back to the South instead. Not Texas.”

We flipped house A, crashed at Alan’s parents’ house for a month, and then rented a house in location B, a lovely split foyer that came with a swing set in back. This lovely split-foyer felt humongous, just the two of us and our baby.

Then along came baby #2, so this house has a special place in our hearts as well. It was a terrible job, though. Alan was never home. Then we went from that job to another Iraq deployment. This time Alan would be gone for 15 months! I decided to move closer to my parents. Parenting 2 babies by myself was more than I could handle, and I knew it.

Off we went again…

2008-2009 South Alabama

Living near my parents for the deployment was a dream. Dad cut my grass, Mom and Dad babysat all the time, plus I had somewhere to go hang out–my parents’ house! But at the end of the day, we still had our pretty “deployment house” to come home to.

2009-2011 Washington, D.C.

The year of two delightful snow blizzards: 2009 and 2010, we lived in D.C. Actually, we lived in this little town house until 2011. I felt crammed, and I was longing for a single family home, so we relocated to the suburbs of north Virginia.

D.C. was such an adventure for us. As a family of four, we were fairly portable and enjoyed traveling the city together. We also hosted dozens of friends and family members who wanted to see the capitol city without spending $400/night for a hotel room, and we loved hosting everyone. I’d do that all over again in a heart beat. Our D.C. years are full of fond memories.

I can explain about that chair. It was just the four of us during those years. Alan and I had put Joshua and Caleb to bed in the respective bedrooms, and we thought they were asleep. We were downstairs playing Ticket to Ride, I believe. When the game was over, Alan went upstairs first and found this marker mayhem chair mess in the office. It was quickly discovered that Caleb, age 2, was obviously not asleep at all, and during his insomnia he had tiger striped the chair, himself, the floor, the wall, and popped all the keys off my laptop keyboard. Yep. All in one night. Back then, we weren’t sure how we would ever survive that little boy, but now it all makes for smiley memories.

What did he have to say for himself that night? He said, “I a tiger!! Rawrrrrr!”

2011-14 Virginia

Living in North Virginia, we continued to host friends and family who came to visit. Plus, we entered the world of being elementary school parents. Also, Alan went to Afghanistan for a while.

We loved our Virginia neighborhood and lived there longer than any house we’ve ever lived in. The house and yard were both spacious, and we fell in love with the community.

2014-16 California

I cannot find a picture of what the front of the house looked like. I’m officially starting a new tradition of photographing our houses, but if you look across the street in this photo you will see another house with an upstairs balcony. That was what our house looked like too.

This was our 3rd military housing experience, and our best one by far. This privatized Navy house is the biggest home we’ve ever lived in. The neighborhood was gorgeous, and our master bedroom had a balcony on it! Not only that, but if you looked through the bushes at just the right angle, you could catch a glimpse of the Pacific Ocean. Such a dreamy place to live for our two home school years!

2016-18 Georgia

Desperate to be done home schooling, we drastically down-sized in Georgia so that we could afford good private school tuition. Still, I loved that house. It had only 3 bedrooms, yes, but the rooms were large, all of the rooms in this house were huge, the master bath was amazing, and it had a fun backyard with a massive hill in it.

2018-19 Back to Virginia

Now that we’ve left the Virginia house I am convinced that the split foyer house is the BEST house for us. I know many of you think I am crazy and that we need a bigger home, but we do not. We needed more closet space and more kitchen cabinets, but that could be done if you own the home.

Why it was perfect: All of the main living space is on one floor. It makes getting kids ready for school in the morning a billion times easier than our current situation. The boys will also tell you that they loved that house. All split foyers have a massive downstairs room, which our kids used for video games, and yet they never felt far away. I still knew what was going on down there.

We’ve lived in split foyers twice, once in Alabama and then this Virginia one, and I gotta say, I think they are surprisingly functional.

2019 Maryland

I appreciate our house here. We actually bought this one because we expect to stay a while, but I miss how compact our last two houses were. Now I’m back to trying to figure out where everyone is. You hear people say often in our house, “Where are you???” Ugh.

How I miss our 3 bedroom in Georgia and our split foyer. I don’t think we will be one of those families who retires to a mini mansion. Give me a nice ranch with a screened in porch and a neighborhood with sidewalks. Oh, and of course, tons of kitchen cabinets.

Now just for fun, here’s a bonus question for long time blog readers and family. Can you tell which state the house in this next photo was in?

The post Tour of Homes from 17 Years of Army Life appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

Our measly month together in Oklahoma was kind of a blur, but there were a few things that happened that I have not been able to live down.

Three incidents to be exact, okay maybe 4 or 5…geesh I was full of mishaps that first month, but there are three I’d like to share!

….We’ll just skip the story of our first huge fight when Alan was following me, and I missed the correct exit, my cell phone battery was dead, and Alan breezed right past on to the next exit. Let’s just say I threw the mother of all fits. Alan had quite a firecracker on his hands.

The first misadventure happened on our loooooooong car trip from Alabama to Oklahoma after Christmas.

Alan was driving his car, and I was driving mine. I left my car with my parents when I had flown out to Oklahoma to attend that military ball with Alan the day I graduated, so now we were taking it home with us.

We stayed up late each night in Alabama that Christmas, talking to family, and by the time we began our 15-or-so-hour-road trip, we were already tired.

By the time we reached Vicksburg, Mississippi, I didn’t know if I was going to make it 2 more seconds, much less 3 more states!!

Vicksburg, Mississippi, 2002

Alan was all kinds of jazzed up to see the Vicksburg battle grounds! His ancestor had fought there, probably more than one ancestor, and he’d learned about this battle in great detail. Alan couldn’t wait to see Vicksburg in person.

Well, y’all, this battle ground might have been a sight to see in 1864, or whenever, but it was nothing but a bunch of rolling green hills with historic markers in December, 2002.

“Is it okay if I just ride in the passenger seat of your car and sleep?” I asked.

Alan was probably shocked at my apathy, but I do recall parking my car, sliding in with Alan, and getting a good nap in Vicksburg.

I also remember that it wasn’t enough to recover, and we had to spend the night in Shreveport or some other Louisiana city that night because there was no way I was going to stay awake all the way across Texas.

This is humorous to me now because I would LOVE to see Vicksburg!! What has military life done to me???

Maybe it was my genealogical research that turned up my own Vicksburg veterans, or maybe it was the Lincoln book I read that taught me so much about the importance of that place, but 15 years later, I actually get why those rolling green fields were exciting!

Me in my kitchenette in our little Temporary Duty Apartment, which is like a nice extended stay hotel suite on military posts.

Unfortunate Incident #2: The Not-So-Fun Family Fun Run

So there was this “Family Fun Run” the last week of Alan’s Officer Basic Course training. It was a 1 mile formation jog. They invited the wives, not that many of the students were even married at that point. Supposedly, this was a fun, easy thing to do.

That morning I was surprised to see a Lieutenant in a Spongebob costume, and everyone seemed all giggly and happy, as they did push-ups on asphalt and all sorts of active, difficult things.

I felt like death frozen over. What was this fresh new form of torture?

I’d just finished 21 hours of senior level courses at Alabama to come here, only to be forced out of my bed in the dark, put on 2 layers of clothing, and EXERCISE in line!?

“It’s only a mile. Too easy,” were Alan’s words of wisdom. He probably said a lot more than that, but who could listen that early?

As we started to jog, and jog, and jog, I started to panic, and panic, and panic.

All I could think was, “I can’t feel my toes. My fingers are purple. I’m all out breath. This is never going to end. Ever. A mile is equivalent to 9 laps around the University of Alabama rec center gym, and I haven’t run in about 7 months.”

You might call me the little engine that couldn’t, maybe just wouldn’t, but it sure felt like couldn’t to me.

I tend to do drastic things if you push me too far. 20 degrees at 5 am, doing something I despise (running) definitely qualified.

I jumped out of formation. Alan, ever the dutiful husband, followed me with his mouth and eyes wide open.

“What are you doing!?”

“Not this!!!”

“April, are you okay? You can’t jump out of a formation run.” Alan has always excelled at PT. To bring along his brand new little wife, only to discover that she is in fact a fun run drop-out was alien to him.

I felt all sassy and rebellious. “No, *gasp for air* maybe you can’t, *more gasping for air* but I just did.”

(And this is why I will never be in the military.)

Alan sighed, “They’re going to make this loop and end up back where they started from, so let’s just stand behind this bush and then jump back in when they come back around. Maybe no one will notice,” Alan reasoned, trying to make it look like he didn’t actually have a rebellious and un-physically fit wife.

“Why!? I don’t care if they know. I don’t care. Running is stupid. Especially at 5 am in the freezing butt cold.”

Somehow he convinced me to jump back in at the end, but from that point on, I didn’t have to worry about ever being encouraged to participate in any unit sports days again. Thank goodness!!!

Alan at work

Story #3 The Red Leg War

The last week before graduation, which was the beginning of January, they took the Lieutenants out to “the field.” In the military “the field” just means they are going out to train and make pre-tend war in the wilderness.

Alan was an artillery officer, so that meant it was a week of constant BOOMS.

Meanwhile, I had nothing to do whatsoever. I went into it thinking I would do a ton of Bible study.  Yeah. I was 21, and I had never had a week with no chores, no job, and no responsibilities before.

What did I actually do? I stayed up late playing video games on the computer, and I tried to sleep late.

I TRIED to sleep late, but there was this maid. Every morning without fail, this woman would arrive at 9AM!! 9 am!! All I wanted to do was sleep until 12 pm, but this tiny Korean lady, who spoke little English, was relentless. She’d knock and knock, and then she’d let herself in. Remember, we were living in a hotel.

I tried being nice.

“No, no. No cleaning today. It’s not dirty.”

That’s my nice way of saying go away, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

So everyday she’d come. Everyday I’d try to think of a way to make her stop coming so early, and everyday I’d fail.

Thankfully, it was only a week.

Then Alan returned, smelling like I’d never smelled a person smell before. Apparently, Army guys don’t shower in the field.

We attended his big graduation ceremony, and I felt a tiny twinge of sadness that I’d missed my own college graduation, but I brushed that aside. It was a tiny sacrifice in the big scheme of things. We were off on a great adventure, and we were packing up and heading to Texas.

In only a matter of DAYS, we’d FINALLY have our first true home together.

Click here to read last week’s chapter in this series of the Real Army Wives.

For the NEXT chapter in this series, check back next Monday, or sign up below to receive each new chapter in your inbox!

Want to start at the beginning of this series? Click here for my September 11, 2001 story.

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The post Rookie Army Wife: 3 Misadventures in Oklahoma appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.