Category Archives: Military

The move has officially begun! While we won’t be leaving paradise until July, we have already packed out because of the amount of time it takes for the household goods to get to the East Coast (53 days!). So, this means my lovely huge monitor that I love to edit my photos on is gone as well. (enter big sigh here). As a result, my blog posts and ability to edit photos will be diminished a bit.  My eyes do not like working on my laptop screen!

We anticipated the pack out to begin last Wednesday.  However, at 10 a.m. that day, we got a call telling us that we were not going to have the movers who had originally been scheduled for us and would have a new team the next day.  As a result, I had to pull out my handy dandy movers guide to make a few phone calls.  Apparently there was a contract that expired, and we had to be assigned a new moving company.  In the end, it all worked out fine, and we had a great team who took great care in packing our things.

On day two, the new company showed up on time with an empty truck!  This truck has made a few trips around the island in it’s lifetime!

I will admit I wasn’t ready for the emotions I was feeling as they started to pack us up and load our things on the truck.  Even though I grew up moving every three years as a child, our adult military life was spent mostly in North Carolina for 13 years.  We’ve been here just two and a half, and while I’m looking forward to our new adventures, I’m still sad about leaving this beautiful place.  I know that we will never again have the blessing of living in a home with a view of the ocean, of hearing the surf crash, watching whales from the lanai.  Our island experience has been a wonderful one.

As the day went on, the crates filled up.  I think we had about ten crates total over the course of two days.  Before we moved here, we got rid of quite a few things and put basically a rooms worth of furniture in storage.  Luckily, we will be able to keep those items in storage for another year and not get them back until we move on the the next duty station in 2012.

The boys really have been troopers through it all.  They have experienced a lot of change in the last few months between daddy coming home, company coming and going, stopping school, having daddy home on leave, and having all their things packed up.  You can tell, however, that this little guy was zonked out on move day!  It’s tough work being four!  He literally fell asleep sitting up.

One thing I love about living in Hawaii is that my boys can go outside pretty much every single day.  They love the outdoors.  I love watching them play.  I love their messy hair and boyish imperfections.  I love watching them play together.  They love playing outside.  Riding bikes.  Riding scooters.  Playing in the jungle in the front yard.  Whale watching.  Going for a walk.  I find that on days they don’t get to go outside that their personalities are a little “off.”  I truly believe that children need the opportunity to go outside and simply play with no distraction, no noise, no tv.  Just their imaginations and a few good friends.  Lately, the boys have been playing any variation of good guys vs. bad guys.  And, while we don’t let them have play guns, they simply improvise and make their own guns out of plastic blocks.   While I may not like it, I do appreciate the fact that they use their imaginations and creativity.  Today, they pretended they were Marines going to Afghanistan.  While this might seem heady stuff for four year olds, I think that it is simply their way of processing life as a military brat.  Their dad just returned from seven months away.  Their best friend next door has a dad over there now.  Their other best friend has a dad who is leaving in under two weeks.  This is their reality, and playing this way helps them work through their feelings of what it means to have people you care about off doing the business of war.