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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!)
No comments:
Post a Comment