Hey all!
What a whirlwind of crazy events has happened since my last post! Technically I had one more post to the Happy Marriage series, which had to do with Money, but I'll save that for a rainy day so I can catch you up on our lives as of late!
Starting with my hubster: He just turned 28 this year! Wow! Only 2 more years to thirty...scary? I think so! But life just keeps on getting better as time passes. : ) The United States Army is currently doing a 60,000+ soldier downsizing and President Obama had recently announced a major cut in military funds. For my husband, this meant a lot of things. Because he was going into the Officer side of the Army (versus the Enlisted side), he had specialty schools to attend and the Army needs a lot more money to pay the college graduates (the Officers). The Army ended up in a huge financial crisis, leaving some 200+ soldiers fighting for 30 or so slots in Officer Candidate School, a school where they were all originally promised a place in the class at a specific time. There were so many soldiers being held over at the center where soldiers get "recycled", that Derek didn't even have a pillow to sleep on and I believe some didn't even have bed sheets. Luckily I lived in Columbus and I just tooted on over to Ft. Benning and gave him what he needed. Our visits were basically supervised and 1-2 minutes at a time if we were lucky. (It was kind of like being in a maximum security prison honestly!). But I was able to see him once a week at church which made our time apart so much more bearable. A perfect score for the PT test is a 300. The cutoff for Rangers, the most elite group of soldiers in the Army is a 240. The Special Forces are required to get a 260. The cutoff for Officer Candidate School due to the downsizing was upped to 290! Derek scored a 287 the first time, causing him to be held at the recycle center for 3 entire weeks before even getting a second chance at the class. The second chance he got, his PT score-keeper docked him 23 points on his pushups because he wasn't going low enough. Have any of you seen my husband?! He's buff and awesome and a STUD! At this point, Derek felt like Heavenly Father didn't want him in the Army. His PT score, had the score-keeper not been on a "short changing" high, would have been a 302 putting him above the curve by many points. He prayed and thought and decided it was best to take the new No Fault discharge the Army was now offering due to the downsizing. As he waited to be discharged, he thought about what it might be like to try a third time. Then he sprained his ankle. Further confirmation that he wasn't supposed to be there any longer. He was finally released on October 29th and we blew out of town like it was nothing! We rented a truck and trailer and left our little place in Columbus, Georgia. We drove 13 hours, pulling into Marshall, Texas at 1:45 AM. We left again the next morning and drove another 13 hours to El Paso, Texas where we spent a day with family. The next day we drove to Phoenix, AZ to drop our things off at a storage unit then we drove up to Snowflake directly after. I must say, it was a romantic way to spend our 3 year anniversary- 6 months pregnant and juggling unloading a 16' moving truck, watching an almost two year old zip all around the asphalt and organizing all the junk you just hauled across the country into two 5x10 units. We celebrated by eating out at our favorite place: Filiberto's Mexican food. Trashy, dirty, cheap and DELICIOUS.
Little T-man: He's been such a champ. His vocabulary has expanded and I love hearing his sweet little voice. He's smart as a whip and I love watching him grow. Those newborn stages really suck the life out of me and I don't actually enjoy little tiny babies. Like, at all. But this little man is so much fun that I can't get enough of him.
As for me, I'm finally in my 8th month of pregnancy already. How wild. Did it go by fast for anyone besides me? I'm still feeling quite unprepared! I haven't hit the nesting stage at all- maybe because moving across the country and back in the last few months has made me not want to sift through another box for as long as I live. But who knows. I've gained 21 pounds and it's strangely nice to be half the size I was when I was pregnant with Titan.
Well now that you've got the scoop on us as of late, I'm going to end this post! I'll be around more often now that life has finally began to slow down. But that will all change again in 7 weeks!
