Rent Vs Own...

We're settled in living in our new state. I can't help but start to wish we could buy a house...that it were a feasible option for us. It's just not. We move so frequently that I cannot imagine a) having to sell one house and buy another every time, especially when there is no guarantee that it would sell or b) becoming a landlord...no thanks!

So, we rent (or, in our case now, live in on-post housing because it's pretty much the only option). In the meantime, I dream about painting, replacing flooring, remodeling entire bathrooms and kitchens, and hiring decorators to help when I just can't get it quite right. And I thought about building a pro & con list of renting/owning. Here we go...

Thinking about a change...

I'm thinking about switching my blog over to WordPress. Not that I don't like blogger, I just think it's not as user-friendly as WordPress. Who knows. Maybe I just need a different venue...or to delete this blog altogether. I'm also not super sure what to blog about on my "personal" blog anymore. I don't do as much crafting as I used to, mainly because there isn't a craft store within an hour's drive of where we now live. That and I still don't have a job to financially support my crafting addiction. And, let's be honest, I'm not that good at it. I look at examples of other people's crafts online and I just don't think I'm up to par. Maybe I'm not cut out for blogging at all...I'm constantly trying to think of what to write about, so there's no concise theme. I don't do anything exceptionally well, so nothing ever looks all that great. I'm constantly second-guessing myself, from the title of the blog, to the title of the post, to whether or not my rants and raves are even interesting to anyone else. Maybe I'm just annoying and need to stop.

Then again...I have to release it all somehow. There are things that just feel better when you write them out, and I don't particularly want to "write" them out (my handwriting tends to get messy). I read blogs written by my friends and my first reaction is always "How great! They did an awesome job! I bet I could do that!" And then I realize that they took the idea and ran with it, and it would just be redundant for me to write about the same thing.

Ugh.

My Kid Sleeps Through the Night, Why Can't I?

For the past few weeks there had been at least one night a week that I max out at a whopping 2 hours of sleep. I try everything I know...go to the bathroom, get something to drink, read...nothing that has worked in the past works to get me to drift back off. So here I am, 5am, and I've been up since 1am.

It usually starts by hearing Monkey cry out in his sleep...but he goes right back down, I don't even have to check on him. Then I start thinking of things that HAVE to get done...put the car seat back in my car if it was in Ben's, take Monkey to daycare so that I can go to the gym (and pray that he finally has a good day while he's there), plan out dinner, groom the dogs, etc. Then my brain is on, and no amount of coercion will convince it to turn off again and let me sleep.

The good news? Middle of the night is a great time to catch up on my DVR'd shows that Ben doesn't want to watch and that Monkey won't let me watch because I have to, you know, be an involved parent (or something like that). But now all of my DVR'd shows are over, other shows aren't on demand yet, and if I go to sleep now I'll be even more tired in 2 hours when Monkey wakes up. That would lead to me taking him to daycare and (instead of going to pilates) coming home and crashing...setting an alarm for when I have to go pick him up again.

So, aside from the gym, I'm thinking that today will not be all that productive. Just a hunch.

Update Time

New Year, New Look! I don't know about all of you, but after about a year (sometimes more, sometimes less) I start to get stir crazy with the look of my blogs and have to do something different. Hence the new background.

Anyway, on to life. I'm convinced Monkey has hit a growth spurt. He went from flat out refusing at least 2 meals and/or snacks per day to eating ALL DAMN DAY LONG! I'm happy that he seems to be more interested in food than in his bottle (or sippy cup, since the only actual bottle he gets now is at bed time), but it's really pushing me to think creatively. Especially because he tends to be a little bit of a picky eater. He likes veggies, but only when they're off of an adult's plate. He flat out refuses fruit unless it comes in pouch form.

These are buddy fruits. Monkey would not get fruit in him if it weren't for these.

Plus, I want him to have a well-rounded diet. Meat is a whole different animal. half the time it needs to be in a sauce, and even then he will suck the sauce off of the meat and then spit the meat out. Try try again, wash, rinse, repeat.

I'm starting to feel the boredom pull at me. I love being home with Monkey, I do...but I want to feel productive again. I haven't had a chance to really set up my sewing station yet, there's really nowhere to do it that I can leave it set up. Plus I need to get out of the house, and Monkey needs go get socialized and get used to not being with me all the time. I don't need the 4-year-old who has never left Mommy and then freaks out at school. Not fun.

New House, New Place...New Kid?

Ben went back to work today. Well, not real work, but inprocessing. Inprocessing is much akin to going to the DMV, only you have to do it a bazillion times in one day. The lines, the rude people, the taking a million years to get any one thing done because, as the Ben puts it, "the enslave the elderly program is alive and well."

He says this for a reason...many of the people working for the places where inprocessing takes place are senior citizens. In my experience, most of the time they are incredibly pleasant, hardworking people. The problem is that, with how quickly modern technology changes AND the fact that rules/regulations/people's common sense changes all the time, it takes them a little while to get tasks accomplished. Benwas at one "checkpoint" as we call them for 2 hours today. He needed 1 piece of paperwork signed, to pick up about 4 pieces of gear, and there were only 2 people in front of him.

We get aggravated with this on several levels. 1: it just shouldn't take that long. Period. End of story. 2: while we understand that everyone has to make a living somehow, there are jobs on a post like this that should be going to military spouses who want to work (like myself) but can't get a job because all of the positions are taken by people who live an hour away. How on earth does that make sense? It doesn't.

So the Ben was in and out all day. That makes it hard on Monkey. He's become very attached to his daddy in the past 2 months, since Ben has been home most of the time. Now Monkey has to adjust not only to being in a new place, new house, slightly new routine, and a change in his eating (we're currently switching him off of formula to milk and more solid foods), but he also has to deal with daddy coming and going all the time. The  Ben's new job will mean that he is home periodically throughout the day, but then has to go back to work.

At our old duty station, if Monkey saw Benin the morning, but then  Ben went to work, Monkey had a bad day. If Monkey didn't see the Ben until he was home from work for the day, then all was well and everything was sunshine and rainbows. Now Monkey has to adjust to "daddy's here right now but he's leaving for a couple of hours and then he'll be back again" blah blah blah.

So, this morning, Monkey woke up,  Ben  was gone, and we had the meltdown of all meltdowns. Screaming, arching the back, pick me up no put me down punch you punch myself eat not hungry I'M NOT HAPPYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY kind of meltdown. For an hour. Just as I got him calm, Ben came home. Then he left. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

I fully expect this to last for at least a week. Because he's cutting 2 more teeth. And apparently hates me now. Loves daddy, hates me.

Settling in

Well, we're here. It feels SO good to have everything unpacked and *pretty much* in place. You have to realize, with every move comes an adjustment...different number of bathrooms, different layout, different square footage. Did you know that, on a military move, the packers are not allowed to pack things like plungers? I get it, sanitary issues, blah blah blah...but when you're moving somewhere that the closest Wal-Mart is 30 minutes away and it's a GHETTO WM...well, it's something you notice.

Maybe we're picky. We don't like our plungers naked, out there for the world to see. We like them to come in a little house that is all their own, coming out only when they have a purpose. Somehow the thought of toilet water pooling onto the floor just isn't all that appealing to us...go figure.

Then there's the issue of dealing with other people packing our stuff...it seems that these people lack any sort of common sense. Otherwise the kitchen stuff would not be in the same box as oh, say, stuff that was in the garage or the baby's room...or all three rooms in one box. Yeah, 'cause that's so much fun to unpack. You know what else? You can totally tell when the packing crew (who is different from the moving crew) was starting to get tired. Barely anything is wrapped carefully near the end. It's all just a jumble. Which accounts for my missing snow globe that I LOVED that was a gift from my mother in law our first Christmas.

Wait, let me clarify...the entire snow globe was not missing. Just the globe part. The mechanical bottom? That's still there. As in, the very bottom plate with a few gears attached. I can't replace it, it's just gone. They tell you to file a claim for things that went missing and/or are damaged. How do you file a claim for PART of a $20 snow globe that had immense sentimental value? The answer is you don't. Now, the $100 shelving that the movers lost the bolts to? I'm still working on Ben to claim that. I want my garage in organized chaos, thank you.

And now we're 30 miles from the middle of nowhere. Our goal is to go to the middle of nowhere at least once every 2 weeks or so. Since we have Monkey, going the fun "overnight" places nearby (read, ADULTS ONLY nearby places) is kind of out of the question unless family offers to fly here and babysit. That's OK. As long as we're not stranded on our military island for too long without contact from the outside world. Plus, there are some "family friendly" things to do in the area for a long weekend...we'll focus on those for the time being

And getting new plungers...because who really wants to have that kind of emergency and not have a plunger on hand. Even worse...who wants to have that emergency and have a plunger, but not have a house to put it in when the situation is taken care of? Not us.

The Move is ON!

Well, it's happening. The packers and pickup are scheduled, utilities are going to be turned off, keys turned in...and we're driving across the country with an almost 1 year old. I always get comments about how hard it's going to be now that we have Monkey. My response? It's going to be different, not difficult. We already have the 2 dogs that we had to stop every 2 hours for so that they could stretch and do their business. The biggest alterations with this trip are that a) there will be another being in my car making noise, b) we'll have to stop a bit more frequently, and c) we'll be able to cover less ground in a day than we have on previous moves.

We did a test run this past weekend, to a town about 2 hours away that has a decent zoo. Monkey loves the zoo. Plus he rocked his new "newsie" hat and big boy sunglasses! He did great. No major meltdowns except when we were getting him in and out of the car too frequently, and when he was tired. The good news is that when he's tired he turns into the Tasmanian devil for about 10 minutes and then sleeps for an hour, so it's not that bad. Other than that, he was very well behaved.

On this move we're going to rig up Ben's iPad or my Kindle Fire to let Monkey watch cartoons in the car. Plus we'll be stopping at almost every rest stop for him to run around and get some air. I'm excited; new place, new experiences, new friends (and old friends, we already know people there, and they are being kind enough to let us stay with them until we get housing!)

Best of all, we'll be closer to family, and there is a ton to do in the general area (within 2-4 hours) so we'll be doing some great weekend getaways!