| Update Page #4 |
| Friday November 30th (cont.) City of Chesapeake Christmas Tree Lighting and Parade last night. There were clowns, marching bands, firetrucks, and horses, something for everyone. I've been getting lots of emails from people asking where to send our Christmas cards this year. We will be in Chesapeake up to, and a couple of days after Christmas. If you want to send us Christmas cards you can just send them to the same address as last year. We don't have an address for us in Holland yet but I'll be sure to send it out as soon as we get one. The best way to get in touch with us after Christmas will be by checking in here at www.reckamp.com or by going to any one of our personal pages and clicking on the email link for whoever you want to email. We look forward to hearing from everyone! Happy Holidays! |
| Wednesday December 12th It's been a while since my last update. I've had more appointments than I can remember and I've filled out so much paperwork that there must be a small forest missing in the rainforest somewhere! Doug is of course at sea (as he always seems to be when it's time to move) so I'm doing this on my own again (consider this your official invitation to my pity party!). We did take a break last weekend before Doug left and he and I went to the annual Tidewater Submarine Officers Christmas party at the Nauticus museum in Norfolk. This was our third time attending and it was great to see so many of our friends. It's kind of a cliche how the submarine community is such a "small world" but it seems like the longer we do this the more people we keep bumping into everywhere we go. You may have noticed that Katie's birthday December 7th has passed and that there were no pictures up. Because of scheduling conflicts we're throwing her party this Saturday (The 15th). Look for birthday pictures and updates soon! We've started receiving lots of your Christmas cards and we thank everyone who has sent us one. It's always cool to see how big your children have gotten or where you went on vacation but this year the cards have a special meaning. Since our movers start on December 20th and we will be spending Christmas eve and Christmas day at my parents house, we are not getting out or putting up any Christmas decorations this year. I have a Christmas table cloth on the dining room table and a pointsettia in the hall that was a gift from Daniel's teacher (I'm a room-Mom for Daniel's class). The only other decorations are the Christmas cards we've received that are hanging and setting all around the living room. It makes the house look so very much more Christmas-y! If you have already sent us a card, Thanks! If yours is in the mail, we're eagerly awaiting it! If you haven't gotten around to it yet, there's a very sad empty spot on our end table waiting for you! |
| Thursday December 27th As you know December has been a very busy month for us. Doug was at sea for most of December so I spent most of the time getting ready for our move to Europe, setting up doctors appointments, filing out forms, and sorting things for the four moves (Storage, small express shipment for overseas, slower bigger shipment for overseas, and stuff for our suitcases) helping to organize the kids school Christmas parties and all the other things that come up around the holiday season. The paperwork that had to be filled out for our move was what I spent most of my time wading through. Because we were given our orders so late I had to squish eight months of work into about three weeks. Every office I went to kept asking "Why isn't your husband doing this" or "Why didn't you come in sooner?". It seemed like everytime I got one thing finished there was one more thing that someone had forgotten to mention and everytime it was something that if it didn't get done it was a deal breaker. I literally did not have one day that I did not have at least two appointments in two different places! From reading the previous paragraph you might think that my opinion of the Navy was not very high right then. You couldn't be more wrong. All along the way every time I ran into a brick wall there were Navy personnel who bent over backwards to help me out. The kids pediatrician and his superiors at the Naval Hospital were great and the staff at the overseas screening office really worked fast to get our paperwork done. One of them even came in off of leave to help out! The Squadron called me almost every day to tell me about something else they had accomplished or to see what else they could do. My submarine wife friends (and even some who were just aquaintences) really came through for me with some great advice and information as well as being great listeners when I needed to vent or cry! I even got some help from our former CO who happened to still be in the area on shore duty. The thing that finally kicked my butt was not the paperwork or the constant changes in our orders. It was my health. A couple of days before Doug was supposed to come home I had been having fainting spells which I wrote off as just being stress and not eating right. Unfortunatly they went from fainting spells to passing out and giving myself a couple of nice bumps on the head as well as a few bruises other places. After several trips to the ER I was diagnosed with Vertigo. It's something that I will just have to live with until it goes away (anywhere from 1 week to 3-4 months). The doctors say it is not something brought on by stress, that it just happened to show up now. Luckily it didn't show up a few weeks later. I would have been passing out in Holland with no friends or family around to help. Because of my illness Doug will be a geo-bachelor and the kids and I will be staying with my family. It's not the situation any of us wanted but I am glad I have family to count on. Hopefully by the time the kids are out of school I'll be well enough that we'll be able to fly over and see Doug and have a family vacation before we move on to our next duty station. The Christmas part of this update will be a little late this year as it's hard to type while the keyboard is spinning around in front of me. You don't even want to know how long it took me to type in this update! I'll have to wait until there's someone I can dictate it to! Happy New Year! |