He'd gotten orders. To the Azores. For a year long unaccompanied tour.
The Report No Later Than Date (RNLTD) would be cutting it close with his return from his deployment. Thanks Air Force! That means the pretty much immediately after coming home and taking his R&R he'd have to start prepping to leave again. So now we had to regroup and figure out what we were going to do. We had planned on the kids and I staying here while he was deployed. I was mentally prepared for the deployment. We'd been through them before, three were his and one was mine. I knew what to expect from a simple deployment. Now we had to decide what the next two years were going to look like. Would the kids and I move to Ohio to stay with his parents? There's a good school up there that Monkey could go to. There's also winter. Long hard, snowy, icy, lake-front cold winter. I haven't driven in snow in over 12 years! The thought of driving in snow and dealing with winters was not a pleasant one. However, up there I would have his family's help. We'd lived up there before when Monkey was Squish's age...DH's last deployment. It would be nice to have all that help. In the end we decided the kids and I would stay put. I have a lot of friends here that I know I could turn to for help if, God forbid, something were to happen, or if I simply need a little break. I love the school Monkey is in and staying here would mean that he has some kind of stability, which is something most military brats don't have. We've been lucky that we've been able to stay at our bases for as long as we have. We stayed at Eglin AFB (me)/ Tyndall AFB (him) for three years, we were at Luke AFB for 5 years, and we've been here for almost 4 years. Staying here for the next two means we won't have to uproot the kids any more than we absolutely have to considering DH still has 7 more years before he's eligible for retirement. Besides there are worse places to spend the next two years, Florida is a vacation spot that we get to live in!
