In the valley

This move has been really tough for me.  Usually I’m excited to move and explore new places and meet new people, and I was this move too.  But this base operates very differently from any other base we’ve been to.  So far I haven’t seen any sort of squadron function except for one afternoon bbq we couldn’t attend.  I haven’t been contacted by any wives and I’m not sure there even is a wives group here, and it wouldn’t really matter anyway since we live 45 mins from base.

I feel really alone here.  Mark is busy with work and is usually gone from 6:45am or before until after 5pm.  Things haven’t changed much for him because he’s just doing a different job but still has adult interaction and the automatic system of friends with the guys he works with and sees every day.  Meanwhile, I’m at home with the kids and dogs in a house that’s an absolute disaster.  This house has pretty much no storage so I don’t know where to put things to get them out of sight.  I just shuffle boxes around and sweep the floor so it’s somewhat presentable.  The kids managed to scratch the new wood floors we put in less than 24 hrs after we took the cardboard off of them.

Mark gets home from work in the middle of the dinner hour chaos and then it’s trying to get the kids fed and bathed and to bed and then Mark wants to just veg for a while, which I don’t blame him since he gets up early and has been working all day.  I just give him his space to do whatever he wants and then we go to bed and start it all over again the next day.  My one job now is to be a mom and I feel like I fail miserably at that most days.  I have no patience with the kids who are constantly making bigger messes than we already have in the house or breaking/ruining things.  I want to be a fun mom who does fun projects with my kids and I find myself just shoeing them away most of the time or telling them to be quiet because the baby is sleeping and there’s no door on his room that’s right in the middle of the house.

I’ve asked my mom to come out and help with the kids and unpacking/organizing, but she said her garden will die if she leaves and doesn’t water it and “It’s not like they sit around doing nothing”.  Mark’s parents were just here because he wouldn’t tell them to wait to come out until after we were moved in like I asked him to do way more than once.  I remember when I was pregnant with Abbie, both my mom and Mark’s mom came out to help us get unpacked and organized.  And now that I have 3 kids and 3 dogs, neither one is available.  I feel like it’s pretty much on me to get the house organized except I don’t really even know how to do that since we’re lacking so much storage.  And the list of things we want to do to the house just keeps getting longer by the day so I see all of our weekends from now until about December being consumed with trying to get this house done.

Hopefully things will be better when Abbie starts school tomorrow.  She is so excited.  I asked Mark last week to get tomorrow morning off so he could be there for her first day, more so to support me than anything else, but they scheduled him to fly and he thinks flying is more important so I’ll fight holding back my tears while dropping her off myself.  I’ve been doing that a lot lately anyway so I guess tomorrow won’t be much different.