Veteran Navy Wife

November 2011

Looking back at my old posts, I realized that I have come a long way since I started this blog as a newlywed whose husband was on his first deployment. After three years, and spending plenty of time away from my husband and dealing with military bs, I feel like I can call my self an 'experienced navy wife' and fully capable of giving insight into this rollercoaster life.
Since starting this journey, I have experienced:

• A 3 month deployment with 2 days notice
• Moving across states while my husband was underway not once, but three times
• Too many short underways (1 week to 1 month) to count
• Not being afraid of being home alone after many duty nights
• Having my husband deployed for 7 months of my pregnancy
• Loss of communication for days on end
• My hubby getting to take part in a hall swap.. which included almost no way of communicating while he was in Japan for a couple weeks
• The strains of deployment on a marriage.. especially when pregnancy hormones are involved
• Worrying about whether we are going to get paid because congress can't agree on anything
• Wondering how this crazy thing called sequestration is going to affect our family
• Discovering how 'wonderful' navy medicine is
• Learning about my hubby's job and the annoying way a chain of command works
• The uncertainty of reenlisting
• TWO yard periods

I can now understand most of the things that my hubby says about work, mostly understand what his job is, and fully understand that nothing is certain in military life.
Right now, Chris's ship is getting ready to enter a yard period, where the ship gets repaired. The USS Essex was stationed in Japan for the past 10 years, so there are alot of repairs that are scheduled to take a year and a half. So far, there is no news that sequestration will affect the ship, but with all the changes we have been hearing about lately, I wouldn't be surprised. Chris is up for orders at the end of the year, and while he has an awesome eval, anything is possible, so we are preparing for all of our options. It is crazy to think that we could be somewhere completely new a year from now!

November 2012