Tag: Air Force

Our Life Together

The beginning…

This is the first steps in our parenting journey.

It was the year 2000
We couldn’t get pregnant.  I needed pills and pills and tests and tests, and the whole time I kept saying, “we can adopt… I want to adopt too, so we could just do that now instead of waiting…”  Ron was in agreement, but he was also busy moving us.  We had a new assignment at a new church and we were moving back down closer to our hometowns and our parents.  We decided to wait until we were settled in the new house and then begin the process of adoption. (We were so naive about how all of that would work).

Year 2003
We move back near home and get settled into our new house.  I start to notice that I feel weird and that I’m cranky… well, more cranky than normal 🙂  I’m actually being super moody and freaking out for no real reason.  My mother suggests that I take a pregnancy test… I guess she’s had enough of my attitude. Ron was gone to camp to be a counselor during this time, so it’s good that he wasn’t around me during this time.

I bought a test but decided to wait until he came home from camp so he could be there when I took the test.  It was positive!! I was so excited.  We were busy getting everything ready for the baby, and then busy taking care of the baby.  That first year Ron graduated seminary and entered the Air Force as a reservist.  He was technically an IMA Chaplain, but that’s not what this post is about.  So let’s just say he continued to preach for the UM Church and do his regular monthly reserve duty at Little Rock Air Base.  I kept assuming we would adopt, but we would start it all when the baby was a little older.

Year 2005
Once again… I started taking all the pills… and running all the tests… this time we added in a fertility monitor someone sold us and bought our first pack of testing sticks… y’all… those things are expensive!!

Year 2006
One month using the fertility monitor and it told me exactly when I ovulated… I got pregnant.  This was 2 years after Price was born, so don’t think this happened right away.

Another baby on the way, getting everything ready for that, and Ron telling me he wants to go into the Air Force on active duty… meaning, full-time.  I was completely good with following him wherever he thought God was leading, so we started getting all of that ready and all of that training done.

We had the second baby, Wesley, and I settled in as best as I could with being a stay-at-home-mom with two kiddos, and Ron was still preaching and doing his reserve duties.

Year 2007
When Wesley was only 2 months old or so, we found out our first assignment with the Air Force on active duty… Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado Springs, Colorado.

We’ll start the next part at Peterson…  July 2007…

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Who am I?? – Teacher

I teach, therefore I…

So that English degree that I told you about in another post is used still today (although I joke that I don’t use it at all!).  I use it especially when I read Facebook posts where the grammar is horrific!! And especially memes… I don’t care what the point of the meme is, if they can’t use the correct form of your/you’re and their/there/they’re, I can’t focus on what it’s saying!  I just can’t.  I realize that sometimes people make an accidental mistake and they actually know the difference, and I can overlook it in a text or something else that is quickly written and maybe being read by one person, but if you are making a meme there are two rules you should follow:  1. Is everything spelled correctly?  2. Is my grammar correct?  That’s it… if those two things are good, then I’ll check out your meme and laugh about it… otherwise, I’ll scroll on past while I shake my head and the lack of thought that went into it… and please don’t share memes that don’t have those two rules either.

Okay… all of that sounded snobbish, and while it is actually what I think, I never say anything about it.  I just don’t tell people when they’ve made grammatical errors.  One of my favorite English professors in college said this about correcting people’s grammar.  She said, “I don’t correct grammar unless the person is my child or a student in class.  You shouldn’t do it either because it really is none of your business.  No one will talk to you after you correct them either for fear that they will say something to bring about your wrath.  So just mind your own business and don’t do it!”  I’ve followed that rule since she said it.  I hadn’t thought that maybe my friends and family members didn’t like it when I told them they should say that “the bike is BROKEN” instead of “the bike is broke”.  So now I only correct my children, and since they’ve grown up listening to me MOSTLY use correct grammar, then it isn’t as much of an issue.  I do still think it, but I can’t really help that part, and I do a great job of keeping my mouth shut about it! 🙂

One more thing about grammar, and then I promise to get on to the “teacher” part of this post! 🙂  If you think someone (usually someone online) is being stupid or acting like an idiot… please, please, please… just don’t say anything! 🙂  We all know that’s the correct response.  Just be nice to them or don’t respond to them at all.  HOWEVER, if you just HAVE to say something and tell them how dumb you think they are… don’t say “your an idiot!”  The “idiot” might not get the mistake, but the majority of the people who read this will likely think that maybe you are the idiot… BUT… just don’t say mean things period… this also applies if someone is amazing!!  “your amazing” is still incorrect… 🙂  So don’t do that either!

Okay… I graduated from college and became a stay at home wife.  I thought I’d be great at this job because I’d have all day to decide what we would eat for dinner and to clean the house and have everything perfect.  That’s when I discovered a few things about me…

  1. I don’t enjoy cooking.
  2. I HATE to clean.
  3. I like to watch movies.
  4. I like to do crafty things.

None of these things are good qualities listed in whatever job description we all hear about when talking about being  a housewife (don’t like that term!), so I sucked at this.  (I still do actually, and it’s been 16 years!)

I wanted to cross-stitch and watch movies while I did it.  I didn’t want to clean this gigantic house that I was having problems living in because all the bedrooms made me realize that I wanted babies in them and that wasn’t happening.  I just didn’t know what to do.

My husband (who is a MUCH better housewife than me!) suggested I see about substitute teaching at the local high school.  This will have to be a whole other blog series because this school was CRAZY!!! I did teach, for one year.  That’s all I could take… in that one year, I was subpoenaed to court to testify against the principal who was arrested TWO different times during that school year.  I saw children doing things that I had only just started doing since I had just gotten married.  It was just out of control, and I’ve just decided to make this my first blog series after Who am I??

After that job, we moved and I got pregnant.  Price was born and we were living so close to Hamburg (where I grew up), and my old principal when I went to school there was now the superintendent of schools and he told me there was good chance I would get a job at my old high school, if I wanted it.

I tried to do the stay-at-home-mom thing, now that I was officially a mom, but I stunk at that too.  It still involved all the same “requirements” as a housewife, only now I had a baby to deal with on top of it.  The “baby” was now 18 months old and I decided teaching again seemed like a good idea.

I LOVED being back at my old high school.  I was in the teacher’s lounge hanging out with my old teachers.  It was awesome… and surreal!  That school year was weird though because I didn’t actually have a classroom, I had a cart! 🙂  I’ll post more about that later too… I got pregnant again while I was teaching there and decided that with a toddler and now a baby on the way, I really wanted to stay home with them.  I loved being a mommy and didn’t like that I didn’t get to see Price all day while I was teaching.

We moved to Colorado Springs when Price was 3 and Wesley was 8 months old.  Ron was officially on active duty in the Air Force, and I was staying home with my babies.  I loved it.  I decided that homeschooling was going to be the best way for us to be able to do all the things we wanted to do.  I wanted to travel and we wanted to be able to go home and visit whenever we wanted to.  These things would be made easier by homeschooling, and i figured if I could teach 25-30 high schoolers, then I could teach one on one with my own kids.

I’ve been teaching them for 8 years, and it’s looked different from time to time.  I’ll write more about the ways in which we’ve home-schooled throughout the years and how it looks for us as an ever-evolving entity.  It’s the best decision for our family, but I know it’s not the best for everyone.  This is another area where I try to keep my mouth shut and answer questions when I’m asked, but not butt in when I’m not asked.

I am a teacher, and I love to teach.  Not just my children, but bible studies at our church (I’m about to start a new one), new foster parents about how the “system” works in whatever state we happen to live in.  I love giving information to people and seeing that moment when it clicks in their brains or when they connect it to something else they’ve learned.  It’s a great feeling…

Now go teach someone something… I know you know something that someone needs to know or would love to know!  And for those grammar police out there… see how many run-on sentences you can spot in this post… it’s really the only way I write because it’s the way I speak… run-on sentences and stream of consciousness!!

Welcome to my world… it’s pretty great around here!!

Amanda

 

 

Who am I?? – Traveler

I’ve seen things…

When we go back to my childhood (yes again!!) you might or might not be surprised to know that I didn’t go anywhere for vacations.  Our family all lived near us except for one uncle who still lived in Arkansas.  We did go see him a few times, but not really any other vacations and not anything that I would consider traveling.  My high school youth group for church provided me with more traveling in those few years than any of the years before combined.  We went to church camp at Glorietta, NM and Panama City Beach, FL.  We went on a spring break ski trip to Breckenridge, CO and another spring break trip to Disney World in Orlando, FL.  These trips were awesome, but somehow it didn’t feel like traveling.  I mean… I’m sure I was a normal, self-absorbed teenage girl who was just loving hanging out with her friends on the bus and terrified of the birds that were allowed to fly willy-nilly all over the Disney Theme Parks!! YIKES!! My senior year, our physics class went to Washington DC on a trip and got there on a train from Meridian, MS to Washington DC.  I was a great trip, and one of the ones I remember most easily.  Both of my parents went on this trip, so maybe that’s why I like it so much!  After graduation, I didn’t want to go on a “senior trip” or anything like that (I told you I had no desire to be rebelious).  My parents took me to Branson, MO for a few days.  We had a really good time, and I’m surprised by how much of that I remember too… We went to my first Ripley’s Believe it or Not?!  museum (these museums – or odditoriums – will for some weird reason continue to pop up in my life and travels!)

I went to college in Arkansas, and spent most of that time just trying to get over my freshman year and graduate.  So… no traveling then… I guess that might not be completely true.  We did a spring break mission trip to Kentucky with the MBSF to help them start a youth group.  I then went back there by myself for the summer to be their youth group leader and try to get it going.  I worked for the preacher’s parents at their hardware store, and lived with them while I was there.  It was fun, but weird being on my own… sort of!  The spring break after I met Ron (maybe I never said his name, but that’s my bald-headed man!!)  anyway, we went on an MBSF trip to Washington DC and stopped by the church in Kentucky on our way home.

I wanted to see more of the country.  I didn’t really have a desire to leave the United States, but I knew there were cool places out there that I wanted to see… eventually.  And some places I wanted to see again.

So Ron told me, when I met him, that he thought he was being called to be a United Methodist minister.  I knew some of what the methodist believed, but most of it was just what I had heard other people say.  I needed to find out more about this, and maybe my research will be in another post, but this one is about travel! 🙂

I told him that I was ready to go with him anywhere… then excitedly explained how I couldn’t wait to move all around the country with him and see new and awesome things.  He informed me that he would be in the Arkansas conference and that we would be moving quite a bit, but only around the state of Arkansas.  I pouted… I admit it.  I thought this was my chance to get out and see things.  I got over it and kept reading books so I could graduate! 😉

After we were married for a few years, and in the midst of infertility angst, He comes home from one annual conference and says he’s been approached about joining the Air Force as a chaplain and he was thinking about giving it a try in the Air Reserves.  I followed right along with him.  No griping from me about him following God’s call… Nothing really changed very much except he did have to go to training more often.

We moved churches (inside of Arkansas), I finally got pregnant the first time.  After Price was born, he went away to another training, and before it was even over he was talking about doing this for real.  Joining the Air Force on active duty.

My question “Will we move out of Arkansas?”  His answer “We will get to live all over the world!”  I was IN!!  And it’s been a great adventure…

We spent nearly 3 years in Colorado Springs, Co as our first assignment, then to Ankara, Turkey for nearly 2 years where I was pretty terrified.  Next was Fort Meade, Mayland (directly between DC and Baltimore)… I LOVED it!! And now we are in southern Spain for the next 2 years (it’s actually only about 18 months now… we’ve already been here 1/4 of our time.  It is flying by over here!!  I’ll write more about these individual places and the things we were able to do and see there, so stay tuned for more travel!!

After nearly 10 years on active duty, and now with the number of places I’ve been and places I’ve lived stacking up…. I can honestly say that every single time I drive into Hamburg, Arkansas no matter how long I’ve been gone, it feels like a warm blanket has been draped over my shoulders.  There is truly no place like home, and Arkansas is kind of a wonderful place to call home!!

Welcome to my world… it’s pretty great around here!!

Amanda