Mary Spangler - Mission: Milspouse

Pandemic PCSing

by Mary Spangler | Sep 8, 2020

Sometimes it is hard to believe that we are already this far into a pandemic. I never imagined that’s what 2020 would look like. And frankly, I’m pretty ready for this year to end. Sometimes I find it difficult to imagine how life has to keep moving forward even though it feels like everything must be put on hold.

My husband is currently at recruiting school, and we are planning to move before the year is over. (We were supposed to move in June, but the stop order put that to an end.) He hasn’t been there long, so I am still waiting to find out where we are moving to.

A New Normal

by Mary Spangler | May 16, 2020

If you had asked me at the beginning of the year if I thought this is how 2020 would go, I would probably have thought you were crazy. Near the end of December, I heard about the alarm being sounded by the Chinese doctor in Wuhan who eventually died from COVID-19, but I didn’t understand then what he was trying to warn the rest of the world about. Now that it has migrated to America, it’s quite sad that we weren’t able to understand the full extent of what China was experiencing at the end of 2019.

In Illinois, we have been asked to shelter in place since the middle of March. My son was already home from school that week before the shelter-in-place order went into effect. The weekend before, we didn’t do much. We stopped at Home Depot for our usual kids’ workshop, but it had been canceled. The employee told us that Home Depot had canceled them nationwide to avoid large gatherings of kids, especially in bigger cities. We got our workshop kit and left.

Expecting the Unexpected

by Mary Spangler | Feb 17, 2020

For some time now, my family has been waiting to see where the Army will take us next. As of October of last year, we have been at our current duty station for three years, and we swiftly expected there would be a phone call or email with more information about the next phase of Army life once this threshold was met.

However, we reached the end of October without a peep. And then we went through November and December, still without any word.

I wasn’t complaining, of course, because now that my son was in preschool (snd let me say, a pretty good preschool program), I was dreading the idea of moving or even staying behind while he finished the school year with my husband going to the next place. But then, in January, something unexpected happened.

A New Me in 2019

by Mary Spangler | Jul 23, 2019

If you have been following my blog, you will know that near the end of last year I started to realize that I needed to re-examine some of the choices I was making in my life, and that I needed to really focus on getting healthy. I am working on this part of my life, each and every day. Aside from some rude comments being made to me one day about my size, I was also beginning to experience episodes of apnea during illness. You can read more about that here.

Life Unexpected

by Mary Spangler | May 23, 2019

This year seems to have slowly become more difficult as time goes by. I can say with complete certainty that it will get more difficult before too much longer. The best way to describe what has happened and what will happen is overwhelming, exhausting, and unexpected. The last few months have been wrought with worry, stress, and pain.

My grandmother became ill.

The Struggle of Communication

by Mary Spangler | Apr 23, 2019

When my son was around 18 months old, I started to worry about his ability to communicate. By the age of 2, it became an even larger concern, as most kids by that age are able to say around 50 words and string together a sentence or two. By 2, he had less than 20 words in his vocabulary and struggled to communicate with us. I wondered if I should get an evaluation with a speech therapist, but being that he’s my first child, I wasn’t sure if what was going on was normal.

Pandemic PCSing

A New Normal

Expecting the Unexpected

A New Me in 2019

Life Unexpected

The Struggle of Communication

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