In Limbo

I am no going o write about the graduation events or surprises until I have all of the pictures from everyone else who was there. My camera wasn't out to capture everything, so i am missing some important pictures! So, I will post it when I get them.

Until then, you should know that we are doing great! The whole weekend went really great and it was way more successful than I could have planned. Asa, Marley, and I are still in Missouri and staying in a hotel waiting for the next plan. After his graduation on Friday, we went house hunting and found a great house. It is in the price range we want and it is in good enough shape on the inside that we will not have to do anything to it. Which is great, since we may be moving in 6 months if Asa deploys. So, we filled out an application at the realtor's office, but we will not find out until tomorrow whether or not it went through. If it does not for some reason, we will just have to move on to the next option I guess. There isn't really one set up yet, but hopefully we will discover it.

We were staying in our hotel in Rolla up until tonight. Asa has his first day of work tomorrow, so we needed to be closer to base. We moved in to the Baymont Inn in Saint Robert today, and since this hotel room has a refrigerator, we were able to buy some good food to go in it. My stomach is very done with eating out all the time. Hopefully in the next few days we can all recuperate from all the rich food we have been eating.

We spent Saturday (yesterday) in Springfield. It was going to be a pretty nasty day, so we drove to Bass Pro Shop and spent the afternoon wandering around there with Bill, Mary, and Emily. All of our other family members had to leave on Friday after graduation, but the three of them stayed until Saturday afternoon. I was so great to feel like a normal family again, just going shopping together. It still hits me as a little weird when we realize that something is different that we both will have to get used to, but everything is working itself out. Marley slept all the way there and back, so it was nice to have that time to actually talk to each other!

Speaking of Marley, she is SO happy to have her daddy back! She is actually jealous when he wants to hug someone else, and puts herself in the middle of it! We were laughing about the fact that she was kind of blocking people with her arm if Asa was holding her and someone else tried to hug him! She checks for him constantly, and starts crying if he ever leaves the room without her. I am so relieved that she still remembers him and has a bond with him that obviously can't be taken away. And she makes him light up and turn into a mushy man, even in front of his friends. I am so so happy they have each other.

She has not been sleeping well at all, which is really exhausting. But I can't blame her... she has a whole lot of stuff going on and it has got to be hard for her right now. Her schedule is all messed up, were are living in a hotel, she doesn't have her normal people around, she's getting two new teeth, she doesn't have her favorite toys, and she can tell that I am stressed about our situation. I hope that we can make things as normal as possible for her. She had a lot of fun tonight: we spent the whole evening just hanging out in the hotel room. She got to run around barefoot and crawl all over the bed and dance to music. I could tell how much happier she was to not be running all over town and to just be able to act like a kid. She went to sleep so much easier and will hopefully sleep well tonight.

Tomorrow is Asa's first day of work, and we have to get him to the office by 7:15 am. My best hour! Since we only have one car, Marley and I will have to drop him off and pick him up. And hopefully we will hear from the realty office tomorrow about our house. Once Asa gets to his unit and talks to his Commander, he can figure out when we will be moving. They are usually given 10 days to go home and move their belongings. We are trying to get that to start later this week so that we can move over Easter weekend. That would be ideal for us and for our helpers (my mom and Joel). I'm just so ready to have a plan. Even if it is not exactly perfect, at least its a plan that we can act on and make arrangements for. This living in a hotel business is getting old, and not having our stuff is even older. I haven't been good at taking pictures the past two days, but I definitely will tomorrow! I need pictures of Asa on his first day of Army work! Everyone be thinking about him!