It's been awhile....

It's been awhile since I've visited this space.  Frankly, I was a little depressed, then a little cranky, then super vacation busy, and now crazed from our move. I was pretty sure that if I blogged, cranky posts would have ruled. So I just avoided it.

The month of depression was January. The combination of freezing temperatures and dark dark days slapped me upside the head after the holidays. Seriously, having about five hours of lackluster sunlight per a day messes with my mind. While I love Alaska, I will not miss the month of January! The event that catupulted me into the depression was finding out that if we sold our house, we would be paying for all of the realtor fees and selling costs out of pocket. That was not in my master plan.

After I finally dug myself out of my dark hole and started looking for property managers to rent out my house, we were already into February. The estimates of what we could rent our house out for and the terrible terms of most of the property managers made me incredibly cranky. At the same time, I was looking for weeks to see if I could get a Space-A* flight out of Alaska to somewhere in California. While usually flight would run every week, there was a dry spell where nothing was going to the right side of the country. I was miserable and desperately hoping to get home for a little love from my family.

Finally a flight to SoCal hit the rotation and I was elated. I packed my bags, loaded E up, made it on the flight, and settled onto the C-17 only to have my son scream bloody murder for the hour we were delayed on the runway. We got off before it departed. The lesson I learned? Practice using earplugs before the trip or invest in some heavy duty noise canceling headphones. :D

With Space-A firmly relegated to something we should do when E is older, I bit the bullet and booked two tickets to spend three weeks in California.

By then it was March. While I was eagerly waiting for my trip, I got a call that my mom fell while substituting and broke her hip. Although she's 65, my mom is NOT old enough for something like that to happen! Thankfully, she's a trooper and dealt with her surgery, subsequent infection and jumped right into her PT.

The same night that I found out about my mom, E made his own trip to the ER when he tumbled out of a shopping cart. When it happened, I was horribly upset with myself. However, now that I know he's fine, it's simmered down to out-right mortification.

Finally in late March, we flew to California where we played in the sun, hit lots of parks, got together with old friends, hit Disneyland and spent lots n' lots of time soaking up time with the fam. I can't even tell you how much the trip just rejuvenated me. At the same time, the time with my family and friends made me miss being around people with whom I have deep connections.

When we got home in April, we immediately started getting ready for our big move to Kansas. Since the snow stuck around so long this year, we've been really busting through the outdoor maintenance we needed to do before our new tenants move in. Time has passed so quickly and now the movers are coming tomorrow. I can't believe it's already here!

Anyway, thanks for hanging around and being patient with my lack of posts.

xoxo

*For those not familiar with military-speak, Space-A is one of the privileged perks to military families where we hop on the extra space of flights that the Air Force is running a mission on. It's not super easy or comfy, but it can get you places for almost nothing!