Pack It Up; We Are Movin' out

*June 23rd, 2018, 6:00am, Infantry Officer Course graduation* (You can probably tell that it is 6:00am by our faces. Why 6:00am you may ask? Your guess of logic is as good as mine).

Well, it has been 12 excessively elongated weeks, but we made it, with flying colors. Blessings from above! Clay returned from California early morning on June 20th, & I was never happier to be woken up to his exhausted, yet overjoyed, adorable face. IOC is a course that cannot be discussed publicly to any extent, so all I can say is that it is officially OVER. Clay will now be on to the next brief 3-week Scout Sniper Unit Leaders Course that begins in a few days. Once Sniper school is complete at the end of July, Clay and I are off to O'ahu, Hawaii!

Our lives are in full chaotic/send-in-all-the-paperwork-by-yesterday mode, as we are doing an OCONUS move with extremely short notice. An OCONUS move is Outside the Continental United States. We were informed just last week that we are moving over to O'ahu approximately 4 months earlier than "planned." With an OCONUS move, there are 78x more moving parts that accompany the change of location than one that is inside the continental US. For starters, our possessions & how they arrive on the island are broken up into different shipments. Some belongings are sent over over via boat; this method of transportation will take 6-8 weeks (once the movers come pick up our possessions) for the shipment to arrive on the island. Some belongings are sent over via plane; this method of transportation will (should) arrive very shortly after we do, if not at the same time.

We are waiting for the military movers to load certain belongings from our home here in Virginia for the boat, but have not received our scheduled date for that yet. Some belongings in our house have been boxed up & moved to storage (fall/winter clothes & extra household non-essentials), other belongings are waiting to be disassembled & loaded onto the ship (bed/dresser/couches), while others are waiting to be boxed up & taken with us when we personally fly out (small kitchen appliances/bathroom essentials). Note: Even though we do not have the set date yet of when the movers come for our belongings, we still have our hard & set-in-stone report date to Hawaii, so the movers being backlogged does not give us a benefit or push back our date to leave.

We are allowed 1 vehicle to be shipped over, & will take that to the port in Baltimore, MD as soon as our paperwork goes through. Car shipments are roughly the same timeline as our household items (6-8 weeks). So although we will arrive much sooner than our vehicle, we have the advantage that I work from home & plan to ride my bike on the daily anyhow (I am super stoked for this; I have always wanted the "bike to the market with my basket in the front" vibe). As for Clay, he is a marine, he can make something out of nothing work perfectly, so I don't know if he has an advantage to this :)

Finding a house has went, to our surprise, swimmingly. We know it is because of the help of our friends, Jon & Janine Tillman, who currently live on O'ahu. They have taken us under their seasoned island life wing & shared the in's & out's/do's & do not's with us, down to particular traffic patterns for certain streets so that we have an idea of what life would look like depending on where we choose to live. While in rapid search for homes, I would send them to Janine for her to evaluate the location/surrounding area (bless her kind, helpful soul). Homes come & go over there like the latest fashion trends here, so we had to move faster than a fighter jet if we wanted to make it ours. Thanking God, he gave us the precise ideal home that we (mainly I) wanted & that we both prayed for (in a matter of days). We still don't know how to pronounce our street name yet, as even the street names are in Hawaiian. The Hawaii alphabet only has 13 letters, & everything sounds the same to our brains right now.

We have approximately 4 weeks before we are on the beautiful island of O'ahu, & if you can imagine what a disarrayed, blown up combat zone looks like, or rather, a household with 7 kids, that is exactly what the organized state of our house is & where our brains are at in this very moment. But, we are truly more than ecstatic & know after the dust of the cross-country/ocean move settles, paradise awaits (yes, more for me than Clay, considering, YES, he still is in the Marine Corps over there just like here, but on his off hours, the honeymoon setting for the both of us together will forever anticipate).

There are many parts of the ocean & its habitants to be seen, waves to be surfed, water to be snorkeled, paths to be climbed & hiked, Luau's to attend, & culture to learn. And most importantly, we know that money can surely be made again; time cannot.