Update...It's Been a While

It's hard to believe that our days keep passing so quickly. For some reason, I keep expecting to have life slow down a bit. I make an effort to limit our daily activities so that we have time to stop and breathe. But with three young children, I am starting to realize that this is a busy season in our lives, and it most likely won't slow down until our children are grown. So I will continue attempting to document our lives...and I'll probably continue not doing so well at it!

So for now: Jay is deployed yet again. He has been in Kuwait and Qatar for the past eight months, and he is due home any day now. We are so ready to have him home! It has been so difficult to be apart, and I know it has deeply affected our girls, but we also get these big moments in our lives that many people don't get. The homecomings...oh, the homecomings. It's better than Christmas, birthdays, and anniversaries combined. It takes heartache and loneliness to get to the homecoming, but once it's here, all of the months of struggling melt away in that one embrace.

Due to Jay's deployment, I have no longer been able to work with a midwife. Attending births at all hours of the day (usually night!) became increasingly difficult due to the childcare situation. I continued for another semester with midwifery school, but then the school significantly changed policies and tuition rates, so I had to discontinue my studies. As sad as I was to have to put my dreams on hold again, it was also a massive relief. Going back to "work", even work I love, helped me realize that I'm not quite ready to move onto that stage in my life. Since then, I have been loving my stay-at-home-mom days more than I have ever before. Even though life is still busy, it is work I love, and I feel blessed to be home to raise my children. I do plan to continue midwifery in the future, once the girls have grown to a point where childcare concerns aren't so much of an issue.

That being said...big news! We're moving to Monterey, CA in April! Jay will hopefully become a language instructor at the Defense Language Institute, which also means something big: no more deployments! We are so very ready for three years of no deployments!

As far as the girls, Mae started kindergarten this fall, and she is absolutely loving it. I moved the girls to a new school. It is a Waldorf-inspired charter school that just opened this school year. I have been very, very impressed. Zee went from struggling with school to absolutely loving school. She wakes up in the mornings, ready to go...no more morning fights. She had been struggling with reading, and now all of a sudden, she is reading chapter books with joy. On weekends, she counts the days until school starts again. It makes my heart so happy to see how she is learning to love learning! I am hoping to enroll the girls in the Waldorf charter school in Monterey, but I believe it's done by lottery. If they don't win a slot, I will most likely homeschool them until they can start there. I love how child-centered Waldorf schools are...I can actually see the difference.

And the baby? She's not a baby anymore but a toddler! She is growing and learning and loving life. She is such a spitfire...she keeps me on my toes! She is speaking more and more (with the help of speech therapy), and with her increasing vocabulary comes increasing independence. I'm not sure I'm ready to give up my baby to childhood, but I guess I can't put that off!

And that is where we are right now. Hopefully I'll be able to update this blog more often, now that I'm not working or going to school! But I won't make any promises about that just yet!