Saturday, April 01, 2017

Military Moments (with Amanda!): Checklists Galore

I am so excited about these weekly Blog post from Amanda -- our chaplain's wife when I lived in Turkey. These"Military Moments" posts allow her to discuss and share ideas and stories from military life. 


This week I was reminded that even though I’m far from my extended family, I’m still surrounded by people who show love to us. A retired military contractor who works here (he’s leaving Spain this week to move back to the states) found out we were moving to South Dakota and contacted Ron to see if we wanted to meet him for lunch one day to answer any questions we might have. I’ve never met this man, and all he knows is that we have kids and we’ll be moving to his home town.  He met with us the day before he was scheduled to fly out to move back to the states. Y’all, he wrote three hand-written pages of things that we should see and do in Rapid City and the surrounding area.  He talked to us for over an hour and went over each one of the 29 points.  It was an incredibly thoughtful thing for him to do for us and I appreciate it so much.  Speaking of checklists…

It’s been a couple of weeks since we found out where our next duty station will be.  We are in the middle of my checklist for the move.
  1. Search Facebook for groups: This turned up more groups than I can keep up with, so now I’m in the process of figuring out which ones I want to be in.
  2. Find out about fostering: I’ve not been able to contact the county offices because Rapid City is on the edge of two counties.  Until we know where we will live, it’s going to be hard to narrow down our county office.  I have written an email to the state-wide foster parenting website, but I’ve not gotten a reply in over a week, so I need to do more follow-up work on this one.
  3. Homeschool Rules: I quickly found a wonderful Facebook group for homeschoolers and they informed me of the South Dakota homeschooling rules.  More lenient that Maryland in some areas, except for mandatory testing for certain grades.  We are all satisfied with the laws except for the one who will have to take standardized tests for the first time in his 13 years of life.  Just another learning experience, right?
  4. Houses to live in: I’ve just stopped looking.  I have found multiple houses that I would love to live in, but I then go down some weird HGTV inspired rabbit hole and realize those houses might not be there in five months when we move in.  So, then I turn it off and sulk. 
  5. History of the area: Our new friend with all the information also provided some of this.  Then a quick google search for a timeline of South Dakota brought up a couple of books that look interesting.  I put in an order for a couple from amazon, so we’ll start reading those as soon as they get here.
  6. Search the house for things to sell: This is the least fun for everyone except Ron.  He loves to throw things away.  We’ve done most of the main parts of the house, but the kids’ rooms haven’t been done at all.  I’m saving that for when my parents visit us in a little over a week!  We have the garage sale date set, so now we’ve got to finish looking through everything so we can be ready.
  7. Jobs and extracurricular activity for children:
    • Our 18-year-old wants a job, but something with animals, or coffee, or books.  It seems she’s open to a lot of jobs, and she has bookmarked nearly every place that has a job opening.  Let’s hope some of them are still hiring in August.
    • The 13-yr. old wants to take Judo with Ron.  He also wants to find a scout troop and find a way to “work with birds” (but only birds of prey… they are the coolest!)!
    • The 10-yr. old wants to “do parkour or gymnastics” and find a cub scout pack for his last year before boy scouts. 
That is only MY checklist for our move.  Things that I’ve been wondering about and wanting to make sure I know all about. 

There are quite a few websites that provide comprehensive checklists for PCSing.  I’m not nearly disciplined enough to go through them, but it is nice to have those lists to look at.  One of my favorites is here.  Military.com has tons of information about the military in general, but this is one of my favorites things on their site.  It has different checklists depending on how long you have left before your PCS.  Since we will be moving sometime in August, we are too early for any of their checklists.  However, we are going to be having all of our stuff packed up at the end of May or the beginning of June.  We want to make sure there are NO issues with getting our stuff to South Dakota before we get there. 

Overseas bases have furniture that you can borrow until your household goods (HHGs) arrive, and you can borrow them again after your stuff is packed out, but that doesn’t happen in the continental US (CONUS).  We don’t want to find a house and have no furniture.  I’m sure I’ll be missing my bed by then.

The earliest checklist they have is for 3 months before you move.  Since we are packing our stuff in June, I still looked through this checklist to see what I can work on. 
It’s safe to say that I’m getting overwhelmed at the number of things on this list.  So, I’ll stick with my small checklist about the things I’m most excited about, and I’ll report back as we get closer to leaving. 

Side Note:  We are going to work our way through every item on his list while we are in South Dakota.  I’ll be documenting our “Checklist Journey” on our family blog if you are interested.

Opinions expressed in guest posts are not necessarily those of the station manager (i.e. Wendi!)

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