I have had a long break from my blog. We have been living with my parents for a few months and just moved into our new home last weekend. (This is not a picture of our new home!) We finally got our internet hooked up on Monday. This is the home we hope to never move from. This is the home we hope to grow old in and raise our children in. All of this feels so final to me from having been a military spouse for 11 years. I am having a hard time understanding we may never move again. In our 11 years in the military we moved 8 times. We moved from Arizona to Germany for 4 years and within Germany once, then to Arizona for 6 months then to Korea for 2 years back to Arizona for 6 months and then to Virginia for 4 years back to Arizona with my parents for 4 months and then into our new home. I am counting the times we moved for just a few months because that is still moving. The hard part about those moves was that I was usually alone because my husband had to go to training.
So all this has got me reminiscing. This picture is of my husband and I when we first moved to Germany. We were so young! We were only 23! We got married at 22 and then 2 weeks later he went to Basic Training for 6 months while I moved in with my parents. Then from Basic he went to Germany without me. I had to wait until the army recognized we were married and he found housing for us. I then had to get all of our belongings into a storage and schedule a shipping date, get passports and the dogs ready for a long trip to Germany. This wasn't a vacation trip this was a trip to live there. It feels much different saying goodbye to everyone, your mom and dad, when you don't know when you will be back. I was so excited to start my new life with my husband in a foreign country, but it was still very hard to say goodbye to my parents. I did feel prepared to move to Germany though. I had taken German in high school for 4 years and had been there as a foreign exchange student twice and once for vacation. So that made it all a little less scary.
I really feel like writing all of this down right now so I wont forget and so my children will know and understand all we went through in our early years. It was a challenging time, but also amazing and I never want to forget.
This is the little village we called home for the first 2 years of our time in Germany. I loved it there. I would go for 3 hour walks with our dogs and not see a person or a home. It was way out in the country. It was beautiful, but it was lonely. We also did not have T.V. or a radio. I definitely went a little crazy at first trying to adjust to this new way of life. I was reading a couple books a week and my house was too clean. I felt alone and started to hate it.
Then I met our German neighbors who spoke very good English! They adopted us into their family and we had tea, coffee or wine quite often with them. I began to not feel so alone in my little German village.
Here is a view of my village while on one of my walks with my mom.
Walking back to our home.
My view from our living room window.
Our bathroom. You could barely stand up in this room!
Our kitchen. No dishwasher and a tiny stove and oven.
Our eating area.
Our living room. That little T.V. was given to us by our landlord. We loved watching American cartoons in German. We could almost understand what was being said.
This is Bamberg, the main city where we were stationed. It was beautiful there!
Every day I would like to write a little bit of my memories. I hope I never forget these experiences and I hope I am able to make new great ones here in our new forever home and life.
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