Struggling

Life has been a bit “blah” these past few weeks in the TLF’s.  The ones at Luke were gross – old and dirty.  We found a few cock roaches and a lizard and the floors are constantly dirty because of the dogs and kids.  It’s stressful.   But at least in Phoenix we had friends and civilization nearby.

This was taken at our house in Phoenix, not here in CA…. 

Since we’ve been in CA, it’s been tough.  Really tough.  Edwards is out in the middle of nowhere.  It’s pretty much a 45 minute drive to any sort of civilization.  We are very close to a grocery store and a bx, but anything else is off base, and this base is so big that it takes 10-15 mins just to get off base in any direction.  We’re still in the middle of a desert – the Mojave desert this time – so it’s usually 100+ outside.  Read that as too hot to be outside much, especially for my 2 month old.  So we basically stay in our little TLF all day long.  I spend pretty much all day telling the big kids to be quiet so Jamison can nap and sweeping up dog hair and dirt.  Literally, that’s what I do all day long.  Our internet here cuts out quite frequently and our phones don’t get reception here so unless we want to pay for a long distance call somewhere, we can’t call out either.  My patience runs thin with the kids because keeping a 3 and 6 year old quiet all day is next to impossible, and the few times I do get the baby to sleep when he’s not on me, they normally wake him up.  If Jamison is on me, he’ll sleep all day, and so will I, in all honesty.  I try to do Abbie’s work books with her in the mornings and let them watch a few shows on PBS, and sometimes they are pretty good about playing together, but usually Ben is screaming about something Abbie is doing.  It’s just been pretty rough and it’s hard to not feel really secluded here.  I’ve thought about driving to town with the kids myself, but last week I ran to the post office by myself with them (3 mins away) and Jamison was crying so hard in his car seat he couldn’t breathe so I got him out right away and tried to calm him down while getting my post office stuff done.  He screamed the whole time we were there and Ben was all over the place and Abbie was annoying Ben so he was screaming at her the majority of the time too.  It was exhausting.  But I actually did manage to take them to the commissary by myself after that and they were good.  I just can’t drive 45 mins by myself with Jamison in the car right now because I can’t reach him when he starts to cry.

Mark’s parents are coming in a few weeks and I’m stressed about that too.  It’s pretty bad timing since we’ll still be in TLF’s and adding 2 more people to this tiny place isn’t ideal.  There isn’t even enough places for everyone to sit in the living room.  They decided to stay up in Tehachapi, which I guess is as good of place as any, but it’s 45 mins from us and we don’t even know if they can get on base without us going to get them at the gate every time they come.  Mark is going to try to take time off, but the day after they leave is when we get into our house and can start doing work on it, so he’s going to need that time off to redo the floors in the house before we get all our junk and then be there to help me when we get our delivery of our stuff too since I can’t handle 3 kids and the movers by myself.  And that’s right about the time he should start flying here as well, so it’s not an ideal time for him to take a lot of time off work, but he’ll make it work.

Mark and I are both anxious to get into our house and get all of our own stuff.  He figured that throughout his Air Force career we’ve been without the majority of our stuff for around 6 months between all of our moves.  It’s just tough living in this stage of “in between”.  You can’t really ever settle and this place will never feel like “home” no matter how hard we try, so it’s just trying to bear it until we can get into our house we bought and start making that a home.  It’s usually 10 degrees cooler up in Tehachapi so that’ll be a welcome change as well.  We are also looking forward to making changes to that house to make it a little more “ours” for however long we might be there.

I just keep trying to remind myself that at least Mark is here with us and not in Korea for a year.  Things could be much worse, and I know that, but this isn’t the easiest situation I’ve ever been in before.  Luckily we’re over halfway through it, I think!

 

***All of these pictures were taken with my new camera and aren’t edited at all.  I might give up editing for a while so I can just get photos on the blog in a timely manor.  And they were all taken in Phoenix, not in CA.