Fun Amid the Uncertaintly

Hey there, did you miss me?

I missed me.

We've had some big changes going on in the family.  And I haven't known how to talk about them on the blog.  So I've put off working on this blog for the past three weeks.

But I think I've processed the changes enough that I'm able to fill you in on them.  At least a little bit.  Thing are still up in the air so I can't tell you everything because, frankly, I don't know what the heck is going on. But I can tell you a little.

Before I do let's put this in perspective.  Here are some things that haven't changed.

Brandon and I are still happily married. Our four children are healthy and happy. I'm not pregnant.  No one close to us has died.

BUT one big thing has changed: Brandon isn't in flight school right now . . . and it's possible he wont ever be back in flight school . . . and it's possible he might be getting out of the Army.

Yeah, big changes.

So what's going on?

Well the quick version of the story is that Brandon has never slept well - even before he was in the Army.  It affected his performance in the Primary part of flight school, but he got through it.  However, when he started the Blackhawk course in the middle of April it quickly became apparent that Brandon couldn't keep up with the class. Basically, the higher ups were close to kicking him out of the course when they looked over his record from Primary flight.  That's when they noticed all the notes mentioning that Brandon was always tired.  So they asked Brandon if he has a sleeping problem and he responded with yes.  So now he's on hold, and waiting for a sleep study.

There's more, but it's a really long story so I'll spare you all the details from the weeks of twists and turns.

So now we are trying to figure out what happens next.  One outcome is that they could correct his sleeping problems and get him back to flying.  Another possibility is that they could say he has a condition that wont allow him to fly. If the condition is serious enough he could get a medical discharge from the Army.  And there are several possibilities between those options.

At this point we don't really know what to expect. For someone like me who likes to try to plan out my life this is all really frustrating.

But there are some silver linings to all of this. One is that we don't have to worry about moving in the next 3 months.  If Brandon was still in training he would graduate in late August/early September and we'd be to our next duty station by October.  Rumor had it that all the Alpha Lima Blackhawk guys were going to Alaska.  I was NOT excited about that because I didn't want to be so far from family if/when Brandon got deployed.

But now we are hanging out at Fort Rucker for the foreseeable future. And I'm happy about that because I really love Fort Rucker.  I love the kids' school, I love all the programs we have Derrick in, I love our dentist, I love our mechanic, I love my eye doctor, I love my friends and neighbors, I love our house, I love the weather, I love how close we are to the beach.  The list goes on. I was seriously telling people that I kind of hoped Brandon would get Honduras as his next duty station because that meant that that kids and I would stay at Rucker while he went to Honduras for a year.  Sure it wouldn't be ideal, but we'd get to stay where we are settled.

Another silver lining is that Brandon isn't training all summer long.  I was not looking forward to having all the kids home from school at the same time Brandon was busy with flight school.  Instead we have him around almost a little too much right now.  '

But its still been a hard change to deal with.  We've had to do a lot of soul searching.  We've questioned why Heavenly Father would bring Brandon this far only to have him stop short of finishing flight school.  We've worried about what we would do and where we would go if Brandon get's out of the Army.

It's been emotional to say the least.

I'm sure you have lots of questions and I would love to answer them. Unfortunately the answer to most of them is probably, "I don't know yet."  So let's just agree to drop this subject for now and move on to looking at pictures of happier things that have been going on during the last three weeks.

First up are some pictures from a lovely picnic that we had under the magnolia tree that is next to our house.  Charlotte and Lydia had a lot of fun running around collecting petals from the giant magnolia blossoms.

We brought the picnic blanket out along with some food.

I laid on it and stared up at the leaves.  Magnolia trees are so pretty.  Let's add them to my list of reasons I'm happy to stay at Fort Rucker for a while longer.

This isn't the greatest picture, but you can see the Magnolia blossom on the left side of the picture.  These giant white flowers smell AMAZING.  Springtime in the south is the stuff dreams are made of.

Here are the girls enjoying their time under the tree.

On another day Lydia found some of her wedding stuff from her Halloween Costume.  She had fun pretending to be a bride.  She is still adamant that she is going to marry the little boy Stetson who she met at Billy's wedding last year.

My garden has really started to provide food.  I haven't had to buy lettuce or green onions in about three weeks.  And I've been able to snack on fresh green beans and peas as much as I want.

One of my friends from church is getting ready to move and she offered up some of her wheat to who ever wanted it. Of course I jumped on that deal. For some reason I thought we were talking about cans, but really we were talking about boxes.  So I ended up with four boxes of wheat.  Yay! 

Brandon and I were able to go on a date to see Captain America: Civil War. We traded babysitting with my friend Becca.  We went our date on Friday and then she went with her husband on Saturday.  Our kids had a lot of fun together during the two nights.  And yes, we LOVED the movie.  It was so much fun. And we really needed fun after all the emotional wringing we'd been going through. 

Here is a lovely picture of my garden after I got to spend a lovely hour weeding it all by myself.  Usually I take the kids with me, but this time I ran (well jogged really) over there early on Saturday and was able to get a lot of work done.  Its funny because I thought I was growing pole beans, but they are really bush beans.  Oh well, they taste just as good.

The Saturday before Mother's Day Brandon took the kids to Lowes and bought me a mother's day present.  On Sunday morning they presented me with potting soil, several flowers, and a big planter.  After church we all planted the flowers.  I was really happy with this gift because I've always been really sad to watch bouquets of flowers die.

Now we get to watch these grow.

The kids were really cute on Mother's Day.  Lydia kept giving me hugs and saying "I love you Mom."  Charlotte had made me several presents such as a papertowel roll with paper wrapped around it.  When I asked her what it was she said, "It's a puppet" and then did a puppet show.

At church Veronica followed Charlotte and Lydia up to the stand to sing with the other Primary kids.  She was so happy to be up there and smiled really big.  Then the kids started singing and she looked around like, "what am I doing up here?" She ran back down to our bench before the song was over.

I think my favorite Mother's Day moment was with Derrick though.  His primary teacher had to work and hadn't been able to make it to church.  I'm her visiting teacher so I grabbed an extra mother's day flower for her.  Derrick and I made her a card thanking her for all she does for Derrick.  (She's been super accommodating.) Then we walked over to her house to drop it off.  The whole way there Derrick kept saying, "Flower!" and smiling really big.  He'd smell the flower and then pretend to sneeze.  It was so funny.

We got to her house and dropped the flower off with her husband.  Then the whole way home Derrick kept saying, "Flower" in a sad voice like he missed the flower and wanted it back.  One of his teachers from school lives on our street and is in our ward.  She has beautiful flowers in her yard and she was outside watering them.  We went over to talk to her and Derrick liked looking at all of her flowers.

Another good part of Mother's Day was eating the Egg Plant Parmesan that Brandon made.  That man spoils me.

Here is a picture that Lydia drew of Brandon coming home.  This is a pretty accurate depiction of how we act when he comes home.

Our neighbor has two boys that are slightly older than Charlotte and Lydia.  She went through their clothes and gave them to us for Derrick.  Charlotte and Lydia claimed the set of matching pajamas.

Brandon is home a lot more these days and he's filling the time by working on some of the projects he's wanted to do for a while.  One of them involves fixing some minor stuff on the jeep.  He ended up finding a whole bunch of wires that didn't really go to anything. He wanted me to call this, "Brandon Illguth and the mysterious wires." Before we owned it, our jeep was involved in border control down in Arizona and we think it had some sort of CB radio or something hooked up to it.  These must have been part of that.

Brandon and Derrick went to our ward's Father's and Sons campout.  They had fun lighting a fire and doing man things like that.

The girls and I had a whole list of stereotypical girls night things that we did.  It was a fun night.

Here we are eating pizza. I meant to take more pictures, but I didn't.

The next day was a huge day.  I took the girls grocery shopping at the Commissary. Then we came home, hurried to put away the groceries and then went to Dothan to pick up our Sam's Club food. I'd already ordered it all online so all we had to do was pick it up.  That was a GAME CHANGER.  Shopping was so easy.  I'm going to do that for the rest of forever.  

Since that was so easy we had still had enough "good kid time" to run into Hancock Fabrics and grab some things I needed to finish a project.  

Then we came home and met up with Brandon and Derrick who were back home.  Brandon and I spent about two hours taking care of food prepping stuff like cooking chicken and putting together about 3 freezer meals.    

I've recently discovered the magic of the crockpot - and cooking in general. I seriously could have a whole instagram account of me successfully trying out recipes from pinterest.  I'm having a lot of fun actually learning how to cook. Cooking has almost become a guilty pleasure lately because it's the one thing I don't feel bad ignoring my kids while I do it.  I'm like, "hey I would love to read you a story, but dinner's not going to make itself."  It's also nice that my kids are old enough they (usually) aren't annoying when they are in the kitchen.  Here is some caramel sauce that I made using a can of sweetened condensed milk and our crock pot.

Then we went to Walmart as a family to buy some anniversary gifts and while we were there Derrick noticed a bubble machine.  I remembered that his Bestemor had sent him some birthday money that we still had so we bought that bubble machine right away.  We came home and had a great time with the bubble machine.

I'd made some ice cream from this recipe to go with our caramel sauce.  So we all had that.

And later that evening we went to the garden to pick more vegetables for the week. What a day!

Tuesday was our ninth anniversary.  Honestly it was kind of a blah day.  It actually was the day for Brandon's first appointment with the sleep study people. That was a little reminder that things are not going the way we thought they would be.  

Another thing that made it kind of blah was that we'd already had fun with our presents.  On Saturday we'd bought food containers at Walmart.  Now that may sound like the most boring anniversary gift ever, but we were really excited about these.  Now we have big containers for our flour, sugar, rice, wheat, and other bulk items.  We had a lot of fun filling them up on Saturday.  But we probably should have waited until our actual anniversary.  

And the final thing that made it blah was that we just didn't have anything planned for the day.  At first we thought Brandon would be in flight school so we hadn't made big plans for the week.  Then when that wasn't happening we still thought he'd have a bigger day with work.  But then that fell apart too.  And even the time of his sleep study changed to earlier in the day.  

At 1:00 Brandon went to check in at work I realized that we didn't have ANYTHING good or bad happening the rest of the day.  The last thing I wanted was to just sit around bored on our anniversary.  So I made up my mind that we'd go on a date. My friend Kelli answered my impromptu request for a babysitter.  (She's awesome!) and I told Brandon that we were going to get dressed up and go out to eat at the Landing which is a restaurant on post. So that is what we did. 

Wednesday was the Water Day at the Pre-K.  Derrick doesn't usually go on Wednesdays, but he was able to go for this.  All the kids were excited to put on their swimming suits under their clothes and get on the bus.  

I dropped Veronica off at my neighbor Jessica's house, and then I headed over to the school.  I helped set up a few things with the other parents and then the kids came out.  Unlike Apple Day and Pumpkin Day the kids didn't have to stay in a group and go to different stations in an orderly fashion. On this day they could run around where ever they wanted.  It actually was really hard to get a picture of my three little pre-k students all together.  But I finally got one.  

Mostly they just ran around and did their own thing.  I stayed with Derrick and helped him.  Here's Charlotte when she first came out.

And here is Lydia when she first came out.

Derrick and Charlotte playing with Shaving Cream.

Charlotte in one of the pools.

Lydia at the sand area..  She said she was a farmer.

All three kids at the "car wash."

And posing in front of the school when it was all over.  We have loved this school.  Pre-K has been so great for all three kids.

Charlotte put together a "pet store" and later Lydia expanded it and turned it into a zoo.  She really wanted me to take a video of it.  I'm not sure why Charlotte wasn't involved in the video, but she should get a lot of the credit for all the little cages.  That girl loves to build things.

Water day was great, but after it was over I was back to feeling kind of lost again.  This is such a crazy thing to be upset about, but its actually kind of hard to have Brandon home so much.  Don't get me wrong, I love Brandon, and I love having him around.  But after so many months of him constantly studying and working it's weird to have him unoccupied.

He's been filling his time by helping me with dishes and laundry and meals and taking care of the kids.  Which has been great!  But it's made me feel a little useless.  If he was doing my jobs what was I supposed to do?

I thought the answer was in my travel blog and I have got a lot of work done on that.  But I still wasn't feeling completely satisfied.  Then two things happened on Wednesday that opened my eyes to what I was missing.

One was that Kelli needed somewhere to have our Relief Society Activity. We were planning a casual "spa night." Many of the women in out ward live on Fort Rucker and so we didn't want to make them all have to drive the 15 minutes to the church for just a little activity.  We'd been hoping to reserve one of the community centers, but they were all booked.  I offered to host the activity at my house.  And suddenly it was like I had a purpose again.  I had a whole list of jobs that needed to be done by the next day. Some of them I'd been putting off because they just didn't seem worth the trouble, but now there was a deadline.  They had to be done.  The bathroom needed to be cleaned, the rug needed to be freshened, pictures needed to be hung.  It wasn't stressful it was invigorating.

The other thing was Brandon looked at the calendar and said, "hey I'm free this summer.  Let's plan some little trips to the beach."  We'd been waiting to plan anything until we knew a little bit more about his schedule.  But by now it was apparent that nothing big was happening all summer.

I perked up as soon as I realized I could start planning some trips. Within 24 hours I had campsites booked for 5 different nights. THIS is what I had been missing.  I didn't realize how much I needed something to look forward to.  But now that I know that we are going to Destin, and Panama City Beach, and Gulf Coast Shores throughout the summer I'm feeling pretty great about life.

Moral of the story: Valerie is happy when she is planning something -especially vacations.

Anyway, the RS activity turned our really well.  We had 6 women come and it was so fun to just sit and talk and do our nails.  I was introduced to the wonderful world of gel nails - it's pretty life changing. My nails are so sparkly and smooth now.

By Saturday Brandon and I were both feeling pretty great about life again.  Which was good because we had a big day planned.  It was Lake Fest out at Lake Tholocco. Everything would be free and would last from 11:00 to 5:00.  We planned to spend the whole day there.  

Right when we arrived the kids saw the bounce houses.  These were the same ones from the Childrens Festival.  The kids went straight for them. 

Then we discovered that there was an inflatable waterslide.  So everyone ran over there.  Derrick went down it once but he didn't like the big pool of cold water at the end.

Charlotte and Lydia loved it though.

They slid over and over again. Derrick and Veronica stood on the side and got splashed every time.

While the kids were sliding Brandon went to check out what kind of boats were available to use.  He came back and said we could try out a canoe. I was a little nervious because I've never been very good at controlling a canoe, but Brandon said, "that's because you haven't done it with me!"  So we bravely went down to the water.  We all got in life preservers and got into the canoe.

I was pretty certain this was going to end in disaster, but Brandon assured me we'd be fine.

It actually turned out AMAZING.  I didn't take the camera with because I was afraid of it getting wet, but I wish I had taken it.  We passed lily pads with flowers growing right out of the water.  We paddled to an island and explored it and found "pirate treasure" (it was really tokens for a snow cone back on land).  And I actually had  canoeing experience where I didn't go in circles the whole time. Brandon sat in the back and steered and I was in the front, and provided some muscle.

The kids were great too. Veronica was a little upset every time we changed course, but she was happy when we were going in a straight line.  I think the rhythm of the boat calmed her. I didn't hear a peep from Derrick the whole time.  And Charlotte and Lydia were so excited about everything. I came away from that canoe looking forward to the day when we can go on a river rafting trip as a family.

Everyone was hungry so we found a picnic bench and had our lunch that I'd packed earlier.  (Food vendors were not free so we came prepared.) It started to rain so we ran under a pavilion and waited out the showers.  When those ended it was time for the family sand castle building contest.

That was really fun.  We were saying that we had a good chance of winning because Charlotte is such a good builder and Lydia is a good artist.  Then it became apparent that Derrick was determined to destroy our competition so I took him and Veronica up to the playground and later down to the water.

This is what our castle looked like by the end.  It was the biggest, but we didn't win.

We went over to the swimming area and the kids and Brandon got in the water.  I was in a swimming suit, but I just sat on the shore - the water was still too cold for me and I was wearing my contacts.

The beach was actually full of people, but we stayed a little to the side because I wasn't sure how Derrick would react to the crowd. 

We swam for a long time, but eventually the kids wanted to do something else.  Brandon took Charlotte and Lydia to redeem the snow cone tokens and I took Derrick and Veronica up to the park. I also took this picture of the sun shining on the lake.  Beautiful.

Veronica surprised me by climbing on the monkey bridge by herself.

The girls came back with the snowcones and we found some shade to sit under while everyone ate the nice cold treat.  

Then Charlotte and Lydia wanted to play on the inflatable water slide so Brandon took them there.  I took Derrick and Veronica to look at the (lame) car show.  Then they found flowers and had fun blowing dandelion seeds everywhere.

We went up to the slides and Derrick spent a lot of time sliding.

Veronica was pretty done so she laid down in the sand.  One of the MWR employees tried to interact with her, but she was pretty done.

Charlotte and Lydia just kept going and going and going.

We went over there and Derrick and Veronica had a lot of fun getting splashed by everyone.

Miraculously I got a picture of all four kids in the same place.

Derrick tried going down the slide one more time, but he was too scared at the top. I climbed into the pool to catch him so he still wouldn't go.  So Brandon climbed up the ladder to help Derrick down.  Instead of helping him back down the water Brandon pushed Derrick down the slide.  I caught him, but Derrick wasn't too happy.  He was ready to go to the car after that.

I took Derrick and Veronica to the car.  Brandon stayed with the twins for another 15 or so minutes.  Those girls spent at least an hour and a half playing on the slide.

We thought the kids would just crash when we got home, but they all stayed up until 7:00.  They fell asleep really fast though.  And they were super ornery all day today.  But even with the inevitable aftereffects that come from 6 hours of fun we have great memories from Lakefest.  I love doing things like this with my family.

So even though things are really uncertain right now I'm still very happy with how things are going.  I have no idea what to expect in the future.  But we'll be okay.

I took this picture of Derrick today.  He calls this shirt his "letters shirt" and he'll proudly point to all the letters.  I like what it says, and reading it today gave me hope for our future.

The best is yet to come

Whatever that may be.