Okay, just kidding - it was just the latest info on the ordmod. They're coming, though. It'll be nice to finally start looking for a place to live for real. Only a few months left to go here.

Orders?

We've heard from a little birdie the orders may have arrived. Have to wait until Monday because Bupers doesn't seem to work at home (or we can't seem to get the password right - dunno which), but I believe we're looking at a September date, which means a move in four months. Still unclear where and for how long...but the end is in sight!

What's the Point, Again?

So, there's this guy I see around base sometimes. He wears a helmet when on a bike, as is required. He does not, however, buckle it under his chin -  instead, he wraps the straps around the helmet itself, where it rides precariously on top of his head.

This kind of baffles me. I mean, I know there are plenty of people who choose not to wear a helmet because it isn't "cool", and there are even more who don't seem to know how to fit it properly, but this is an outright worthless way of wearing a helmet. As soon as the guy crashes, the helmet is going to be long gone before his head  hits anything. At least if the straps were hanging loose (like way too many kids around here wear their helmets) there might be some hope of it hanging on and providing a little protection.

As a person whose been in more than one bike crash, one of them being a head collision where a helmet saved my face, literally, I'm unimpressed with the faux headgear that fulfills the rule here, but does nothing to actually fulfill the reason it exists...

Zipping My Lips...For Now

Well, it's been awhile since I last posted. Not that I've been terribly good about it lately or anything! There is a reason for this. We've got a situation brewing that has taken us by complete surprise, and depending on how it turns out, will complicate things much more than expected. I don't want to discuss it more than that, but eventually I will be able to do so. Since it's consuming my thoughts so much, though, I've had to just stay away from here as part of me just really wants to spew my guts.

Sigh.

Instead, I'm going to babble a little bit about Spanish because when I'm not thinking about the aforementioned situation, I'm thinking about Spanish. This week has been spring break for the kids, so I decided it was a good time to string together a more formal language lesson. I was taught using immersion classes in college, and found it to be fairly effective, so that's the way I'd like to teach them. I put together a lesson on colors (they already know at least half of them, so I figured it was a good way to start), and used a free printable book on Easter (¡Felizes Pascuas!) that had pictures of conejos (bunnies) and huevos (eggs) with color descriptions.

It was actually a lot of fun. I started with a color song I found on Itunes that they really loved, then played ¿Donde está ______? with some colored eggs I made out of construction paper. Oscar quickly got bored with that (and even declared, "This is boring!"), but Wyatt seemed to like it. Then we moved to the book I'd printed out. I kept my speaking to Spanish only, and that was okay with them for the most part. The book had only Spanish phrases to figure out what colors to color the pictures, and I was really impressed that Wyatt wasn't even waiting for me to read them, he was figuring out what he had to do all on his own. I really didn't think reading would be a skill he would pick up at first, since I haven't spent any time on alphabet and how each letter sounds.

Anyway, I'd say overall the lesson was a success. My head hurt after speaking only Spanish for a half hour, and I quickly realized I can't depend on myself to put together the main lessons if we're going to do immersion. I'm just not strong enough in the language. I can supplement, though, and get creative with outside resources, plus I know I can read books to them in Spanish and be okay with pronunciation. I need a spine, though, or this isn't going to happen.

Ideally, I'd enroll them in a class, but, sadly, our country has yet to really realize the value of language learning at the elementary level. I've spent a lot of time looking for something in the place we're moving, and am coming up empty.

So, I think I'm going to buy a program I've been looking at for awhile. It's called Calico Spanish, an immersion program used in schools, and they have a homeschool version. It's the most scripted one I've found, and it comes with a lot of hands on things to promote language learning in young kids. It's not cheap, but I think I've resigned myself to having to spend the most on language learning. Hopefully, we'll get lucky and find a friend who speaks Spanish so we can get some free practice in, but I can't count on that.

I think I'll wait to get it until we move, though. Instead, this summer, I'm just going to try to keep informally teaching them. We're gonna label, label, label everything in the house, and I'm using this book, Play and Learn Spanish by Ana Lomba to pick up some new phrases to use with them. It's a pretty great reference book for teaching little kids, as it goes over a lot of the things you'd say to your kids in normal life, all categorized by topic. Oscar is actually responding very well to this; he's even trying to do more than just Spanglish it with a few words here and there and is using verbs.

I don't really know what the end result of all this will be; I hope we all get comfortable using it, although I'm not expecting full fluency or true bilingualism for the boys. I just don't think I speak it well enough to make that happen, and classes are so incredibly difficult to find. My far-out-there hope is that we get stationed in Rota, but, yeah. Probably not gonna happen. So, we'll make do with what we have, and just hope for the best.

Where's the Mail?

We got back from a week long trip to Florida this weekend. As is typical when we go away, we had a pile of boxes waiting for us when I made it over to the post office on Monday. Half of them were full of food, and the other half had homeschooling stuff (mostly books). Everything was fine with all of them.

Today, though, I went to check the mail again and had a first: an envelope that was opened, resealed, and completely empty. The books missing were a couple of used science books I'd bought from someone, so it wasn't a big loss. It's crazy though - we've had three computers shipped here now (two laptops and one desktop), and every single one made it through fine. Of all the things to steal...

Mail here is decent, all things considered. Sometimes, we get packages that are clearly handled poorly. I've had containers of dishwasher powder and laundry soap beat up so badly they were spilling powder everywhere. A few other things have had dings and such, and we've gotten a few boxes that were mashed or partly open. Never had anything stolen outright, though (unless you count two boxes from Amazon that vanished, never to be seen again - no idea what happened there, although the replacements came just fine).

I did notice there was no customs form, so maybe that had something to do with it? This was a package that had been taking far too long to come, so I had already pretty much given up on it. It was weird to find the empty envelope in my mail.

And I just watched a helicopter carrying a torpedo fly by our house.

Thoughts on My Spanish

So, I've been studying my Spanish rather hard the last few weeks. Between podcasts, a grammar book, and reading Spanish language blogs, plus the kid's books I bought to use later with the boys, I'm happy to discover I haven't lost nearly as much as I thought I had. I am, however, completely baffled as to how I managed to pass two college-level Spanish literature courses in college (one of which required me to write analysis papers in Spanish). I either had some very understanding professors, or I've lost more than I thought I have.

Orders Update (Sort of), and Other Stuff

First off, I learned recently that Oliver's orders are being modified, as we expected. I'm biting my fingernails because there's the chance he will lose his boast and get something else. Hopefully, that doesn't happen because I've gotten rather excited about this particular set of orders.

However, since I have, as usual, no control over the outcome, I am not going to worry about it. I'm typically one to obsess over things, so this ability to roll with the punches is fabulous. Much as I wish this time in the Bahamas had been more about being a tourist and getting to experience local culture, I cannot overestimate how much good it has done for me in some very surprising ways.

Still, sometimes you need to escape the island life, and we're burning some leave in a condo in Orlando right now. I find it sort of amusing that Oliver has never been in danger of losing leave before, even back when he was on the submarine and it was extremely hard to find opportunities to do so. It's fairly easy to take leave here, but he doesn't do so unless we have plans to fly off-island. It seems silly to take leave when you live in the middle of everyone you work with and a ten minute walk to your office...

We actually managed to go to church today. First time in a year. It was kind of nice, although my dear, sweet four year old spent the car ride there proclaiming how he "hated church". What he actually means is he hates any situation that is new and requires him to be away from his family (needless to say, this child is thrilled by the idea of homeschooling - not only because he will be learning at home, but because his brother will no longer spend so much time away from him; he really misses Wyatt when he's at school). The last time we regularly attended church, he was not even two years old and still hated being left in the nursery. He's gone maybe three or four times over the last two and a half years, the last time being last summer.

So, I gritted my teeth and hoped for the best. Overall, they both did okay. Wyatt leaned over about twenty minutes into Sacrament Meeting and asked how much longer before it ended. I decided it wasn't a good idea to tell him we still had over forty minutes to go... Oscar went to Primary, and I didn't have to sit with him. He wouldn't sit with his class, though, but was sitting with his brother when I left. About ten minutes later, someone brought him to me in my class because he'd been crying inconsolably. He took one look at me, asked for his little stuffed bear, which I had in my bag, then went back to class when I handed it to him. He had no more issues, other than a bathroom break I helped  him with. Maybe moving back and attending church regularly won't be totally miserable at first. I'm crossing my fingers on that one.

Teaching Spanish

Wyatt has a PE teacher who speaks Spanish, I believe, as his native language. Last year, he'd give the kids a mini vocab lesson before they went out to do whatever was on the schedule that day. Wyatt loved this, and would come home excitedly sharing whatever word he'd picked up that day. Oscar picked up on it, and will now walk around the house proclaiming "doce" whenever he feels like it. Both the boys will often ask me what something means in Spanish, forcing me to search my atrophied Spanish background to try to remember what that is.

Now that I'm working on a study plan for the boys, it struck me that I could probably introduce them to Spanish in a more formal way. I started looking for a program geared toward young kids, and found it far more painful than I had hoped it would be. I have zeroed in on one, though, although I'm going to wait a bit to order it in case I happen across something else. I found a bunch of exceptionally cheap Spanish early readers on Ebay to supplement it. I figure I'll go with that, and see how it is.

The main issue, though, is that I don't think I can really expect them to actually learn the language if we don't use it at home. This means I need to be able to speak to them. So, I bought a book to review my own Spanish, and have been listening to the Notes in Spanish podcasts to help me regain some of my ability (which are an absolutely amazing conversational resource, by the way. They have worksheets, too, and I very much want them, but since they are sold by a couple in Spain, they are going to be far too pricey with the exchange rates between the Euro and dollar right now) . I'm pleasantly surprised at how much I still remember, and I'm hopeful I'll be able to keep us all talking in Spanish at home, even outside of lessons.

I do, though, worry about making sure they can hear the correct accent, which is why I'm going to be using a lot of listening and video activities. My accent was decent when I was learning, so that's a good thing now, but was kind of bad for my confidence when I was studying it because people thought I could speak the language far better than I actually could. They'd start speaking a mile a minute and I'd freak out. The best thing about teaching my own kids is that I don't at all feel the same pressure to speak well that I crippled me before. I'm just going to give it my best and see how it goes.

I was happy to find out there are quite a few websites now where you can hire a tutor to either give you lessons or practive conversational Spanish over Skype. The ones coming out of South America are pretty cheap, only about ten bucks an hour. When we move back to the States and have a decent internet connection again, I think I'm going to sign myself up for tutoring.

Oliver made me rather happy the other day, too, by saying he's thinking about studying Spanish a bit, too, so he can jump in. He speaks Portuguese, and lived in Brazil for a couple years, so it shouldn't be all that difficult. The two languages are VERY close. I can often understand him when he throws a phrase at me and vice versa. Our ultimate goal at this point is to take a family trip to Spain in a couple years.

Going a Little Crazy...

I have not been able to fall asleep the last couple of nights, despite going to bed far too late. As soon as I lie down, my brain starts spinning, turning over a million different things in my head, and it seems to take forever for that to stop long enough for me to fall asleep. On the one hand, not a lot of is going on at the moment, but on the other, I've got a TON of prep to do for this year ahead.

I'm really very excited about homeschooling, and I've got nearly everything decided on, curriculum-wise. Except math, which is by far my weakest subject. Everything else, I'm feeling confident about, and I'm starting to order the materials we'll be working with. Math, though, ugh. Every time I feel good about a program, I read about another one that sounds awesome, and I suddenly don't know anymore which way to go.

I keep telling myself to just pick something and see how it goes, but then I just freak out some more. My background in math is weak because it was neglected by my parents, so I'm determined to give my own kids the grounding I lacked. So, every math program I look at is accompanied by my concern that it isn't thorough enough, or won't be the "best" way to teach them, or that it will end up not preparing them for high school math as well as it should. Plus, some of these programs are exceptionally pricey. Nothing like throwing down a couple hundred bucks for something you end up hating three weeks later... Luckily, I have a  couple months before Wyatt is done with school here before I have to decide. Hopefully, I can get myself to take the plunge and order something before then.

I don't have this problem at all with the other subjects because my background is far stronger. I actually paid a good chunk of my way through college by working as a writing tutor, so it gave me a good look at what kinds of issues there are in kids fresh out of high school. There is no way my kids will not know what a thesis statement is or how to write one by the time they enter college. I feel similarly about things like history and social studies. Science is not a huge thing for me, but it doesn't hold the same mystery and frustration as math does, so I've found that one fairly easy to plan, especially at the elementary levels.

I plan on schooling year-round, with breaks throughout the year as needed or when they coincide with Oliver's leave opportunities. We're going to start some time this summer, after I give Wyatt about a month off, I think.

At least, that is the plan right now. The orders situation is in massive flux. We have hard orders, but his command is most likely not going to release him on time for them. So, he needs new orders but they have yet to be worked out. This stresses me out because we're fast approaching the window of time that the actual move will have to be arranged if he is actually leaving on the orders he has. I am trying not to worry about this, but it has made it impossible to really make any concrete plans.

Mostly, though, I'm ignoring the date issue, planning on getting all our school stuff ready anyway, purging our household goods for the two moves ahead of us this year, and all playing it by ear. I have clearly finally learned how to do this military-life thing because, for once, I'm not actually all that worked up about the uncertainty. I'm just going with what I have, and trying to make sure we can change mid-stream if we have to.

But, I still am having trouble sleeping. I guess that's how the stress is finding an outlet right now.

Girl Scout Cookie Switcheroo

It's been Girl Scout cookie time here. We put in an order a few weeks ago, and the cookies finally arrived this week. Except, they aren't quite what we thought we'd ordered...

We always, always, always buy Thin Mints and Samoas. Always. I was a Girl Scout, and got hooked that way, and those are just the two cookies we get when we have a chance. I never realized there are actually two bakers making cookies, and they don't all have the same names. Or the exactly the same recipes.

So, instead of getting our dark chocolate flavored cookies, we got some made with milk chocolate. I don't know who thinks this somehow makes them the same, but as someone who is extremely picky about chocolate, it's NOT. And at $3.50 a puny box, I'm pretty disappointed I won't be eating any of them (luckily, my family is not as picky about the chocolate as I am, although Oliver definitely noticed the difference, too).

I guess it's time I learned to make them myself. And I don't think I'll order them again - but I will buy them directly so I can for sure what I'm getting. Poor marketing on the part of the Girl Scouts, imo.

Homage to the Grocery Store

I never realized before what an amazing place a grocery store is. I sort of took for granted there would always be some place fully stocked with foods of all kinds some easy distance from my house. In fact, there would probably be two or three of them to choose from. I spent a fair amount of time complaining about the lack of something or other there, or criticized how one was far better than another at certain things. I'd still probably complain today about that, but I don't think I'll ever take such an amazing place for granted again.

The first thing I'm going to do when we move back to the States is head to the grocery store armed with a list of all the basic and exotic ingredients I can think of. Like apples. And rice paper and mushrooms so I can make these. Everything we can't get now, or can only get after it's spent far too much time being transported various ways. Wilted lettuce and withering green peppers are fairly common fair here.

After two and a half years, I've gotten used to this as much as I can, but I am definitely tired of trying to come up with something for dinner every night. I try very hard to get it in my head what we are having that morning so I am not hit with it at 1600. There is no such thing as meal planning when you don't really know what is going to be for sale that week in our gas station-sized grocery store (which also has about a 1/4 of the space dedicated to non-edible things).

I am a fan of the lowly grocery store. It's awesome. It's amazing how your perspective can change.

Why We Are Going to Homeschool

Warning: Exceptionally long post ahead!

Okay, I feel a need to write this post because I know how frustrating school decisions can be. I also know that I was helped immensely by being able to hear (and read) the experiences of others who have dealt with this before me. I am NOT going to go on and on about how fabulous homeschooling is and how I think it's the ultimate answer to everything. I'll get back to this, but my ideal solution doesn't exist, and that frustrates me like you would not believe.

Anyway, back to homeschooling. I always swore I wouldn't homeschool my kids. I was actually homeschooled. I went to public school through the second grade, then all six of my siblings and I were pulled out of the system.

In some ways, this was a terrible thing. While I think my mother made a decent try at it for awhile, by the time I was in high school, she would register us, pick up some books from the school, and say have at it. And that was pretty much it. Near the end, she didn't even do that. I actually found out when I was a junior in college that when I had turned 16, she'd gone to the school and registered me as a drop out because it was finally legal to do so.

Thankfully, I didn't know this when I was applying for college. Because, you may be surprised to know, I went to college right when I should have graduated from high school. And I graduated cum laude with a B.A. five years later (yep, some trouble picking a major there). I was okay because I'm intensely curious and I love to learn. I also love to read, so I took myself to our library every week and brought home an armful of books. I set myself a rule - I could bring home three books for "fun", but I also had to pick up one nonfiction and one book from the "classic" shelf. I'm very much a visual learner, so this worked for me. I did struggle a bit with math because I was also left on my own for that, and so I ended up having to take a remedial course before I could sign up for Math 101. That was my only real bump in the road academically, however, and I got As in both math classes.

Despite my success in college, however, homeschooling the way my mother had done it left me with a massive feeling of inferiority and as if I had to work double time to catch up. All those horror stories about homeschooled kids never leaving the house were mostly true in my case. My parents had no money for lessons, and the only homeschooled group we were part of, we stopped going to when I was young. I did have a church youth group and Girl Scouts (which I hated), but that was about it. I felt frustrated at having missed so much, and avoided talking about my homeschooled past whenever I was with friends.

So, I figured there was no way I would ever consider not putting my kids in school. I didn't want them to feel left out or feel later that they could have done bigger things with their lives (or at least had more choices) if only they'd gone to school. I really couldn't imagine that homeschooling could ever really be much of an answer for anything.

And then I had kids. Two little boys that I'd give my life for, two boys that I'm very close to and have weathered many storms in our Navy life together. I had a plan for how I'd put Wyatt in school. I wanted to do only one year of preschool two or three days a week. Then I'd avoid the fad of full-day kindergarten and make sure he was in a half-day program. I felt that would give him a good transition to full-day school in first grade.

Then we moved to a place where there was no preschool program period. There was a small day care, but it was just a day care - a place to leave your kids where they can play supervised. That, in my opinion, was not at all worth the money. So, I taught him to read and kept him home all year.

Then I went to register him for kindergarten and found out they only have a full-day program. Despite going in and talking to the school, they were absolutely adamant that they wouldn't work with me and he had to go full time or not at all. I swallowed my anger and enrolled him because they had me there.

And, like I thought he would, he struggled to adjust. When I brought up my concerns again, I was once again thrown up against this attitude of, "We know kids, and we can handle this, so stop worrying". Thankfully, his teacher was awesome, and we worked out something that made it bearable. He adjusted by Christmas and hasn't had trouble since.

That whole experience, though, left me with a very sour taste in my mouth. I think I had thought of sending him to school as a place where THEY worked for ME, but that really isn't the case. Instead, THEY are the professionals who think they know more than you do about what your kid needs. Their rules go, and even if they don't jive with what works with your family or don't even make rational sense (like the rule that you can't bring a younger child on a field trip, even if the only kids you'd be asked to help watch are your own and maybe one other classmate of your child's), you have to suck it up and deal with it.

I do get that they have to deal with a bunch of kids, and it's tough to accommodate an individual situation. The central question I have there, though, is whether or not I just want to swallow that answer and accept it, or if I want to look for a different solution.  Especially since the kinds of issues we've had here are tiny compared to what we'll run into in a large school where we'll be far more a number than a name.

Because we're going to move away from here, and we can't afford a tiny private school. Not for two kids. We're also going to move again a few years from then. Their education is going to be interrupted over and over again. I've had far too many conversations with other military parents about the headache of trying to keep their kids' educations together. The schools don't have a great ability to keep up with requirements and such from state to state (not to mention internationally), nor do they have any real ability to cater to our kids' varying situations. It's just not going to happen. I don't want that for my boys.

I also don't want to have to consider school when we pick orders. Orders picking is stressful enough without having to worry about what the school system is in the various options. Plus, when trying to find a house, often very last minute or from far away, struggling to find one in a "good" school system makes that process infinitely more difficult. So school just doesn't fit our lifestyle in a lot of ways.

So, we're going to homeschool. Ironically, the free-range schooling I had as a kid is going to serve me well. I've seen firsthand that it truly is possible for someone to thrive academically without going to school. I also know to think outside the box when it comes to educating them because I'm not approaching it with the mindset that we need to do everything like it would be in a school. I also know where the weaknesses are in my own experience, and I mean to correct them. The internet is an amazing thing. It's enabled homeschoolers to network in ways that my mother just could not do. There are co-ops with classes and clubs to join, and a wealth of curriculum, books, and other materials (not to mention all the online education delivery options out there now) to access. There's no way their math will be neglected like mine was.

While we may not be able to afford private school, we can afford classes. Wyatt's quite interested in playing soccer when we move back to the States, so I mean to find a league and sign him up for it. I am determined to give them opportunities for these kinds of things as much as I can.

It's taken me a long time to really feel comfortable with this decision. It was overwhelming and scary thinking about striking out on my own. The more I've read, however, and the more I talk to other people who have done this, the more it feels possible and exciting. I did hate handing my son over to someone else for seven hours a day. It felt wrong somehow.

And here is where I have to swing back to my statement above. Despite the length of this post, I know I haven't touched on all the issues or reasons we are going to homeschool. A huge reason we are going to homeschool that I haven't yet addressed is because public school seems to operate on this "one-size-fits-all" method that just doesn't work. It also seems to believe that kids fail because they aren't being drilled enough on the basics, and that we need more hours spent on academics or we will just keep falling behind as a nation.

I don't believe this at all. I think our kids need more time to play, more time outside, and far less time at school. My son's school gives them all of 15 minutes for recess every day. Fifteen minutes. He complains about this, and I am right there with him. They do have a great P.E. teacher who gives them a better time to run, so at least they are getting some physical exercise, but there is something important about unstructured play. Because these kids don't need to spend seven hours a day on academics. In fact, that's not even what happens, anyway.

While I am glad we have homeschooling as an option, I wish it weren't the only one. Far too many people have no choice when it comes to school, and I think that's terrible. I'd like to see more respect given to parents, more cooperativeness between schools and parents, and massive support of the charter school program. Why the charter school program? Because the charters are actually putting new options into the hands of parents who cannot afford anything else.

My ideal school is one that allows me to enroll my kids for straight academic classes, yet does not take up their entire day. It's one where we can then choose extracurricular activities for the afternoon - or choose to not do any of them if the kid needs a break for a semester. This flies in the face of what people think our kids need, so I know we will never see it happen. My kids are only young once, so I have to fight for them in the only way open to us.

So, we are going to homeschool.

Funny Homeschool Video

 So, I ran across this hyperactive video about the seven lies of homeschooling. We're going to be homeschooling next year, and I mean to write an actual post about our reasons, which I don't believe I've really done yet, but for now have a look at this:

Dragging My Heels

Okay, I'm not going to lie, this month has dragged on. And I'm afraid the same will be true of many months ahead. I'm having a tough time waiting out this period of pre-move. Waiting on orders, waiting on a reenlistment, waiting on finding out when we will leave here (which, by the way, may get changed yet again, which means some anxiety about the orders we supposedly have in the bag)...I'm hoping it's not all going to drive me insane.

In truth, I think I've dealt with it far better than the last time I had to go through this. I've stayed calm, not thought a ton about it, and just carried on. The place where it shows up is in the day-to-day tedium where I feel like I'm going through the motions in an interminable wait.

This is a frustrating way to live, however, so I'm trying to find things to keep me going. Oscar and I have been hitting the books hard, and he's making good reading progress. We signed up for a free month of ABCMouse to give it a try, and I signed up for a homeschooler forum that is hopefully going to give me a chance to demo (and review here) a new online reading program for three months.

I've also been taking the boys out to the park a lot more. A couple weekends ago, I convinced Wyatt to get on his bike again after leaving it dormant in the shed for over a year. Oliver ran up and down the street with him, and he finally learned to ride it sans training wheels after about an hour of work. He was insanely proud of himself, and both boys have been doing a lot more riding around outside since then.

The boxes for our LEGO sorting project finally arrived, and that's been an ongoing job. I'm nearly done labeling them all, and they are proving a huge improvement over what we were using. Not perfect, no, and they require more maintenance than the old system, but building is leagues better, so it's a win in my book.

Finally, for myself, I decided to go crazy in the kitchen and bake stuff that I've either never tried or rarely do. Last week, I made Soaked Wheat Bread, which was so good I think I might actually switch to making that all the time instead of the wheat bread recipe I've used for a couple years now (I make all our bread - the stuff we get here really is that bad).

Yesterday, I experimented with an eggless cake recipe, trying to make it vanilla, and it was far too heavy. That hasn't stopped the boys from eating through it, though. Apparently, you can slap frosting on just about anything and they will proclaim it fabulous.

Speaking of frosting, I also decided to make cinnamon rolls, something I haven't made in a long time and have never really gotten the way I'd like them to taste. I was all prepared to try several different recipes in the search of one I could love (I really didn't think my family would mind that!), and ended up finding the perfect one on the first try. They tasted so close to Cinnabon while still warm, and were still really good the next day. I can't say what they would have tasted like after that because they barely lasted that morning. There's also no picture because I was too busy eating them to think about blogging about them. Here's the recipe if you are inclined to give them a try. Fittingly, it is named, "Clone of a Cinnabon".

Next up: Bagels (anyone have a good recipe they'd like to share? This will be my first time ever trying these!)

And It's Official (Sort Of)

Well, the orders are here. The official, hard copy, "they are really yours orders". That is, about as definite as things ever get in the Navy. We're still not absolutely sure he's going to be allowed to leave shore early, so that's a worry, but hopefully all will fall into place.

We got the orders we want, and while I worry we just signed ourselves up for an insanely hectic year, I'm cautiously optimistic that it will all be a grand adventure. Mostly, I just have to survive the next few months here trying not to let the little things (and people) get to me. Had an awesome powwow at the park with a couple friends who completely get what I am talking about, so I feel a little better for some reason.

Although, I did learn from one of them that we are soon going to have to pay for our flights back and forth from here. Supposedly, it will be a "minimal" cost, but when you have to multiply it by four, "minimal" has a way of growing into "painful". How grateful I am this is happening near the very end of our time here and not the beginning.