Are you listening?

I made my first big-ish ham today, for the Easter holiday.

We both agreed that we wished we were by our families for the holidays... this was the first big holiday where we didn't see mine or his. And the first one where Auralia might have had fun getting Easter baskets and hunting eggs with family. She had to live with one Easter basket, a package from Oma and Opa, and such...shared with Tuck.

I thought about painting...but just can't find the mood to do it.

We've thought about re-enlisting for Colorado... How many of you will say, "That's just because you want to be by your family." ?

How many of you would rather us not re-enlist and just go back to Colorado and try to find jobs, try to find babysitters and such?

We want his degree and we'd rather the military pay for it. We want to be by the companies that he might want to work for once he has his degree. We want sun and snow and rain. And just in case he is deployed again in the next couple years..yes, I'd rather be by our family.. ..Because I know that if I was away, and he was deployed, they'd just come and pack me up and bring me back to them anyway.

It's who we are.

A Military Home has been published, it was written in about half an hour, the night before it was due to ENG 101. And in A Military Home there are a lot of things I wrote that are true, completely true. But now that I've lived here.. I know that there's a lot of things I didn't, and really..couldn't have..known then.

A military home...changes. Adapts. It doesn't just wait because it is too fluid to wait. It waits with hope, and love, and tolerance.

How many families have lived in the house I live in now? Who tried to bang pictures into the walls just as I have?..it's damn near impossible. Who tried to grow flowers in the yard, and who would ever install a towel hook right by the toilet? Who brought new babies here, who went through deployments and redepoyments here?

How many people hoped for better?

We don't wait. We plan. We think and re-think every option, every plan, every thing that might be an opportunity. We're not naive, and both of us are fairly smart...we're thinking ten, twenty, thirty years down the road, not one or three.

Sometimes I feel like you're not really listening.