PCS Updates

 Wow I can't believe it's been almost 3 months!

SO much has happened and I honestly feel like I've barely had a chance to breath.  Everyone kept asking how I was staying so calm and keeping it together but really I just kept doing the next thing on my to do list, and wow was it a long list.

But we are here, and settled into our home sweet hotel.  

Luckily the housing market has been amazing, so our house sold quickly in Norfolk.  Little Dude got a spot in the CDC that we wanted and has been there about 3 weeks now.  He is starting to make friends and get settled into a routine. 

Hubby has about a 30 minute commute from the hotel and is having to do both drop off and pickup at daycare since we only have one car and are on the other side of Waikiki from the base but we should have housing soon.   Once we do then I will be able to walk to the CDC for pickup.  

My work hours are a bit untraditional but I think once I have a real office set up they are going to work really well.  Right now I'm working 6AM - 2/3PM which gives me time in the afternoons to get household stuff done.

K9 is here with us.  Getting him here was a bit of a fiasco, but that's a whole other story!

Until next time - Cheers!

Hurry Up...and Wait...

 I've heard about it for years, I've joked about it for years, the mantra of the military is hurry up and wait...But OMG is the hurry up and wait getting to me this time.

We know what the orders are

We know the dates

We can't actually do anything because the actual orders themselves haven't dropped.   I need to get little dude on the CDC wait list, we need to find out if military housing is a viable option or if we need to secure civilian housing, we need to schedule movers and ship hubbys car...so many things to do and none of them can be done yet.  So many different pieces that all rely on each other.  

So I'm doing my best to channel my stress into productive actions.  We know regardless of all the other stuff that we will be selling our house, so I've moved into full scale get this place ready to list mode.  We have gone through our entire bedroom and purged our wardrobes down to what could probably be considered minimalist capsule wardrobes at this point.  I have thrown out/donated pretty much anything that doesn't bring me joy in every room except our master bathroom and office, and now we are preparing to move on to minor painting and landscaping work.  

Today we have a sitter for little dude so I'm hoping we can finish our master bathroom (I don't even want to think about the expired/old makeup I'm about to throw out), office, and hopefully go through the 2 giant totes of hand me downs for little dude that I haven't looked at yet (They all start at size 3T so he isn't ready for them but I honestly have no clue what people have given us) today.  It's an ambitious goal but one I'm willing to work towards.

One of the sailors at Hubby's command tested positive for the plague last week, he was technically exposed but they were both masked and more than 6 feet apart plus hubby is vaccinated so we aren't overly concerned about it being brought into the house, however out of an abundance of caution he will be staying home Monday so I'm hoping he can scoot our china cabinet and bar out from the wall in our dining room and tape around the edges for me so that I can get the trim work in there painted this week.  Things are starting to move into a bit slower season for me at work so I should be able to sneak in a few longer lunches this week to knock out some stuff.  Once we finish purging stuff really all that is left to do is paint the trim in our dining room and living room and put mulch in the flower beds.  I would also like to paint the master bathroom but at the same time I don't necessarily think that it will be a make or break item for selling the house. 

My real drop dead goal is to have my personal to-do list done by May 2 so that our realtor can come the first week of May and hopefully start helping me properly stage the house and take pictures to get things listed or at the very least give us her list of things we have missed.  

Wish me luck!

It only took 10 years

 After 10 years stationed in Norfolk, VA we are finally headed to another base.  We are waiting on hard copies of our orders so I don't want to jinx us by telling the entire interwebz where we are going just yet but I feel confident enough to say we are leaving Hampton Roads in a just a couple of short months.

The reality hasn't hit yet.  I am feeling extremely overwhelmed and stressed and anxious all at once.  I realized Friday that we have lived here longer than I lived in Louisville - yet I still call Louisville home.  In fact, we have lived here longer than I have lived anywhere else in my life.

I am going to attempt to properly document our adventure via this blog, Twitter, and Instagram but I am horrible at all of those things so no promises :) 

Here is a sneak peak of how I started this weekend - overwhelmed by the prospect of purging all of the excess crap we have accumulated over the years and trying to figure out what we need to do.  

I took forever to fall asleep Friday night, then Saturday morning I woke up a full hour before anyone else in the house.   I laid in bed for over 45 minutes then my bladder won and I rolled out of bed to get a start on the day.   We had work to do after all.  I needed all of the healthy things and caffeine to motivate me.   

After taking my vitamins and downing a Spark I snuck downstairs for a few minutes of quiet time before the baby (ok he's over 1.5 but he's still MY baby) woke up and wanted breakfast.   After I made breakfast for Little Dude Adam and I put together a basic gameplan for what we think we need to do.  I'm sure we will find out this week once we get hard copy orders and talk to the Navy movers etc. that we are doing it all wrong but at least I feel better having a checklist to work from until we are told otherwise. 

Saturday afternoon we went through our living room and cleared out all of Little Dudes toys and books, our DVD's and other entertainment type stuff, knick knacks, junk that had accumulated in the coat closet and other miscellaneous junk and took our first load of donations to the thrift store.  

Sunday morning I once again woke up before everyone else.  My anxiety was much more in check but I still felt the overwhelming need to get busy.  So much to do and so little time! I took care of our regular weekend kitchen cleaning while I waited on Adam and Little Dude to wake up and went out to our storage shed to get pictures of my bike and a garden tiller that we knew we weren't taking with us and posted them for sale on Facebook marketplace (both sold today by the way!) Once Adam and Little Dude were up we made breakfast then our favorite baby sitter Miss F came to help with Little Dude for the day. 

Little Dude loves Miss F so much, he might love her more than he does me!  When she left he just stood at the front door crying for a few minutes then had to have cuddles to calm down.  

Adam and I spent the day in our bedroom pulling out all of our clothes and starting to purge the items we won't need/don't want etc.  In addition to moving to a different local since I have already spent over a year working remotely thanks to COVID we believe I will be able to keep my job and work from our new location (My boss has given his OK but he is getting approval from the powers above him) which means my more casual wardrobe will be more permanent so I was able to get rid of easily 1/2 of my closet. In the end we took another 5 bags of clothes to the Thrift Store Sunday evening when we were done.  

This week should be my last super hellish - why did I decide to become an accountant weeks of the "busy" season.  I may have left public accounting but any accountant who works for a large company and tells you they don't have a "busy season" is lying.  Some businesses it's a couple of weeks quarterly others it's a couple of months annually but everyone has it.   

I'm hoping I'll be able to get through a few things in Little Dudes room this week and finish up the loose ends in our room but with wrapping up things for work I'm not sure if that is really going to happen. 

Next weekend we want to be able to do the minor household repairs that need to be made before we list our house for sale.  Specifically we need to paint some trim work, put mulch in the flower beds, and paint the master bathroom.  I would also really like it if we could get our bedroom 100% finished/purged and get Little Dudes room done but I may be a little overzealous in that goal.

Wish me luck!

Daylight Savings Time is Stupid

 OMG I am so exhausted.  Today has been rough.  Normally the Fall time change is in my favor and I do a good job of leveraging the extra hour of energy in the morning to start working out or do other productive things but this year, not so much.  

First my appetite has been way out of wack.  I ate breakfast like normal but was hungry for lunch before 10:30 AM...So I ate a snack.  Then I was hungry again at noonish, so I ate lunch.  Then I was hungry again around 2, so I ate another snack, and again at 3:30, and again at 5:15 ...

Basically I was a caterpillar getting ready to go into a chrysalis...I wonder if I'll wake up a beautiful butterfly in the morning? 

Also Little Dude decided to have a huge party waking up every 2 hours (and staying up from 1:45 am until 4 am) on All Hallows Eve followed by waking up at his normal wake up time (or an hour before depending on who you ask) meant today was the most Mondayest Monday I've had in a while.

How about you? are you having an ok Monday post time change? 

Cloth Diapers, especially at Daycare

 Do you use cloth diapers?  We do...I love them, they have saved us so much money and are not that much extra work.  An extra load or two of laundry a week but luckily for me we have fancy indoor plumbing so I just throw them in the washer at night, hang them up in the morning, and have clean dry diapers for the next day.   

As far as sizing and type goes I started out with about 20 Best Bottom snap in diapers that I bought used from a friend and 6 Baby Goal pocket diapers that I got from my baby registry.  It was perfect, maybe 4 or 5 more diapers than I needed but that wasn't a bad thing...until Little Dude decided to grow super fast and be in the 99th + percentile for height and weight for his entire life...now he has effectively outgrown the Best Bottom diapers so I had to make a decision...buy more of the bigger size cloth diapers or make the switch to primarily using disposable diapers.   

I decided that since we would be using diapers for at least another year to look into more bigger cloth diapers and decided on Alva Baby pocket diapers and just a couple of weeks into using them I am in love...I bought 11 Alva Baby diapers taking our total count of diapers that fit to 17, which is perfect for where we are right now.  I am washing diapers every 3 days, and the Alva Baby diapers fit great with room for growth.   

As far as daycare goes, I've found cloth diapers to be even easier than disposable ones.   When we were at my mom's we had to use disposable and I had a hard time keeping track of how many they had at daycare/when I needed to buy more.  But having cloth means that I just send enough for a day every day and don't have to worry about it.  It's easy for my daycare provider because they just throw them in the wet bag and send them home.   When I get them home I throw the pee diapers in the washer and dump the solids out of the diaper into the trash, do a quick rinse in my toilet if the solids don't dump out but I use a bamboo liner that is flushable so usually all of the solids dump straight out.   

Do you use cloth diapers?  Have you considered using them?   I think the most important thing is finding a wash routine that works for you.  

Weaning...ish...during COVID

 Little Dude is over 1 now which means that food is now supposed to be his primary form of nutrition with breastmilk simply being a supplement.   Since we have had so many issues with Little Dude not drinking his milk at daycare we decided to stop sending milk to daycare and to wean off of the pump.  

I think doing this during the crazy COVID environment made me a little nervous, what if one of us was exposed to COVID and Little Dude needed the extra immunities from me to keep himself healthy? But in the end I decided that since he is still breastfeeding directly that it was the best option for us.  I hope that Little Dude continues to breastfeed through the next 10ish months until at least his 2nd birthday and possibly extended beyond that in accordance with the WHO recommendations but I am so glad that we were able to make it this far so I'm just going to do my best to provide him with the best nutrition available.  

Sippy Cups

 How do you pick a sippy cup for your child?    At his 1 year doctor appointment Little Dude's doctor suggested that we cut him off of bottles sooner rather than later but keep breast feeding as long as we wanted because Little Dude already has so many teeth.  

So I went shopping for sippy cups...

We already had 1 straw cup, 1 silicone spout sippy cup, and 2 360 cups that we were using for water but I didn't know what to get for milk.   

I stood in the isle of the store for a solid 20 minutes googling my options and trying to figure out what to get.   In the end I decided to get 4 360 style cups for milk and 2 straw cups for water to send to daycare and that we could have 2 sippy cups per day of milk and rotate day by day...

Now we are down to 1 sippy of milk and 1 of water per day and I am in the process of weaning off of pumping because Little Dude isn't really drinking his milk and I can't help but wonder if I should switch his milk to a straw cup ... 

So what do you think?  How do you choose a sippy cup?