OneMooreMinor: August 2011

We have finally gotten settled here at Fort Polk in Louisiana. We accepted a house on post in order to conserve finances and also due to the nature of the homes in the local community (I will leave it at that). For our first 1.5 weeks, we stayed at the Holiday Inn on Post, which was fine for the first week, but with one vehicle at the time, it became old being stuck in the hotel. The post is 100,000 acres, and many of them are wooded, so walking was not much of an option. Once we settled into the new house, Amy accepted a job as a Youth Development Program Manager at Beaucare in Deridder, Louisiana. Beaucare is a non profit that offers youth development, mentoring, tutoring, physical and recreational activities and summer and day camps for at risk and in need individuals. We are excited about this opportunity. Selena Kate is staying with a newly made friend who is orginally from, and still has family in, Pensacola! SK has taken to the baysitter well and does not cry a bit. In fact, she launched herself into the baysitter's arms on the first day and on the second day, waved bye bye to me for the very first time. This girl was born to socialize and Mama, apparently, has become boring.
Chad has settled into his new job and routine which includes what I term as "war games" where they simulate war time scenarios prior to army deployments. Chad can work long hours due to this so we are all adjusting to the new rotuine but are thankful because he is not scheduled to deploy for several years. This is a welcome change since we were coming up on his sixth deployment!
Selena Kate now crawls, waves bye bye, can almost pull herself up on her own, has two teeth, prefers adult food to baby food, although Mama doesn't give in to this, and is quite the social butterfly. She kisses herself in the mirror and kisses her babydoll if you ask her to. She giggles hysterically when you allow her to fish hook your mouth with her finger.
We have been through some large ups and downs in this past month, that include two ER trips, two trips to the doctor, getting lost in Louisiana in the middle of the night and ultimately leaving ym car in a parking lot because I was so violently sick, driving to and from Pensacola in two days to pick up our Civic, renting our house in Navarre and hopefully (as of today's acceptance of our counter offer) selling our home in Gulf Breeze. We have more hills to climb though. We still have to get the bank's acceptance of their offer, to learn the ins and outs of our new jobs and I am sure much more.
We are looking forward to time with our family in the fall when we baptize SK and hopefully during the holidays as well. All in all, it has been one of the most difficult times but somehow, we are getting through this "wild ride" and are doing so with humility and support of one another.