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Prelude to this post. Throughout this post you will see photos from our move to Illinois, travels and random things I thought was pretty. I hope you enjoy the photos!

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It is hard to believe that it has been a few YEARS since my last blog post. I am always amazed how fast the years go now that I am an adult with 3 kids.  There are times when I wish we could just slow time down. Here is it, almost Easter already and Christmas seems like it was months ago. A lot has happened in these past few years. Army deployments, retirement from the Army and the big move back home to Illinois.  No more deployments!

We put our Florida house on the market the beginning of February 2017 and we moved from Florida at the beginning of May to Illinois. The sale of our house ended up taking almost 7 months, which was very frustrating. All the things we did to the house (besides putting in a pool) didn’t help with the sale of the house. Everyone wanted a pool! The family who ended up buying our beautiful home, loved all that we did to it and will be putting in a pool! Glad we found a family who will love the house as much as we did!

The kids had the hardest time with this move. They had really good friends, whom they played with or hung out with almost everyday. We had a great church there, with lots of activities and was growing so much that they had to add a new building.  Our middle daughter and son had a group of kids that they played with everyday. One set of boys are red heads and the other set of boys are blondies, I called them my red head sons and blondie sons! To be honest, I miss them a lot. All of them are very good kids! Our middle daughter had a few girl friends up the road where they would have a great time baking and having bake sales at the club house.  Our oldest had great friends from our homeschool group and church, whom she was always spending time with.

We lived in an area that had a grocery store, Walgreens, Taco Bell, Burger King within a 2 minute drive from the house. The last year we lived there, I allowed our girls to ride their bikes or roller blade, in a group a friends, up to Walgreens or the other places. They really loved doing this because it gave them a sense of freedom.  It was really cool for them!

For my husband and me, we were excited for the next chapter of our lives. Since we got married in 1995, my husband has been on active duty and we have been on the Army’s timeframe.  Now that he was retiring, we are able make plans farther out into the year and not have to worry about a surprise deployment or field exercise.

Knowing that we could plan vacations, we decided to take a few to celebrate our new found freedom!  We took a week and went to the Wisconsin Dells.  While we were there, my husband and son took an overnight canoe trip on the same river that we took our honeymoon on.  The next trip was up to Minnesota.  The girls were accepted into a military kids camp and since it was 9 hours away from our home, we decided to go camping close to the girls’ camp.  This was the first time our son got to go camping. The last trip was our biggest one. We drove out to Utah, spent a few days with our friends there. They took us to their cabin in Idaho and we had a great time.  My husband and I left our kids with our friends in Utah and then flew to Vancouver, B.C.!  There we met up with my parents and 2 other couple and we loaded on a boat that was headed for Alaska! I think I will make a whole blog post about that trip… so much to talk about.  It was an amazing trip and a great way to celebrate retirement!

In Florida, we lived in a very large homeschool friendly area and we knew it was going to be hard to leave our groups. I started researching for groups in Illinois but they were hard to find. Finally, I did find a couple and one with competitive sports, but that one is about 30-40 minutes away (because they are 30-40 miles away). In the end, we finally found a local group that we are using for elective classes and meeting people. We have really enjoyed this co-op but miss having sports to go along with it! Since our co-op doesn’t have sports, our two younger kids decided to play softball and baseball this fall. That was a fun experience. They had a good time.

This year, our oldest started high school. We had a lot of hard discussions and prayers about what we were going to do. Do we continue homeschooling where she fought me  to do work or do we put her back in public school or the local Lutheran high school? We decided, after lots of prayers, that she would go to the Lutheran high school and we couldn’t have made a better decision! She is thriving there and has enjoyed sports and other aspects of high school! She played volleyball in the fall, club volleyball from December through the 8th of April (the last day of the last tournament) and for spring. she is doing track and field. With everything that she is doing, we are please to say that she has all A’s!

I love seeing how resilient our kids are… from moving multiple times, making friends, moving away from friends, friends moving away, Daddy deploying over and over again, leaving homes they loved, and so much more! Our military life had so many ups and downs but we wouldn’t have traded it for anything. These experiences have only made all of us stronger and more resilient to all aspects of life. I believe that God has made us a path and is protecting us while we are traveling down life’s path.

Enjoy your path!

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Thank you for reading about our adventures! I would love to hear from you. Comment below and tell me some your favorite adventures. Remember this is a family site so keep it clean! 🙂 Thanks!

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