Waiting to Find Out Our Next Duty Station

This morning I’ve got the military on my mind!

Jamie and I got to talking last night on our walk about possible next duty stations, and needless to say we ended up walking twice the distance we’d planned! We are three incredibly long days away from getting our list of 20ish places that we can possibly head to next, and I need that list in my hands before I go crazy (we all know that I am trying, but failing, to work on my patience)! One really cool aspect of my husband’s branch is that his job is needed everywhere in every unit, so even air force and navy bases are not totally out of the question (which is exciting because they typically are located in way cooler cities than the army offers). Almost everybody that we’ve talked to who’s already received their next post has gotten one of his/her top three choices, so we are just plain excited to see what our list has to offer.

One conversation topic that’s frequent among military families is the idea of going overseas or to Hawaii. I literally have not talked to one military family that did not love their experience overseas. When I went to Germany a few years ago to visit Jamie for his surgery, my hotel was actually just on-post housing, and every day the housekeepers would leave flyers in the room with details about upcoming weekend trips to France, England, Italy, etc. My 23 year old self was immediately filled with dreams of coming back one day to live for a few years and soaking up every opportunity.

 

 

Fast forward three years, and we are 99% sure that we don’t want to go overseas for a number of reasons, but my adventurous heart has a really hard time with giving up that once in a lifetime opportunity! The idea of taking three years to run around a foreign country on the military’s dime is crazy exciting, but the idea of taking Hadley away from our families for three+ years is really hard to swallow. We both enjoy few things more than spending max time with our families, so it’s a tough one. There are so many pros and cons that it gives me a headache.

We ended our conversation of different post options on a positive and hopeful note. Neither of us has our heart set on anywhere in particular, and we are so glad because we don’t even know what’s going to be available to us yet. We have set the expectation bar very low. I am just prayerful that when we do sit down to do our rankings this weekend that we see eye-to-eye on every single decision that’s made and that we both feel content and excited about living in any of our top five places. Based on our conversations of potential places so far, we see eye to eye exactly.

This military thing is kind of wild. Sometimes I see pictures of friends my age who are already buying their forever homes, fixing them up to perfection, living close to their families, enjoying Sunday dinners with their parents, and I really feel so envious of how settled they are. I grew up in an incredible city with, in my opinion, the absolute best school system in the state, so my dreams of my children attending school there are frequent.

But then I think back to this adventurous heart of mine who undoubtedly  would want a little bit of a adventure before really settling down. It’s such a mixed bag, really.

The grass is always greener on the other side, of course.

As I’m typing this I can actually physically feel this excited anxiousness from my fingers to my toes. Give me that list! I want to know where to search for our next home, where we’ll be celebrating Hadley’s first birthday, where we’ll hopefully be hosting Christmas with my family (I called dibs a few months ago hehe), where we can grow roots in a church, where I’ll be searching for a new set of friends, where our next baby will call his/her birth state.

Here’s to Friday afternoon getting here asap! Military wives, validate my points of view! Can you empathize with this crazy roller coaster of emotions?

Enjoy your Tuesday, friends!