I distinctly remember the first time my dad chose to use a moment as a teachable moment.
I’m sure there were others, but I vividly remember when I was 6 or 7 years old and had a piece of gum or a lollipop in the car. I took the wrapper, cranked down the window (it was all hand power in the old days) and flippantly tossed the wrapper out onto the street. I’m sure I didn’t know any better (it was the early ’80s after all), but my dad caught me.
I don’t know about you, but the weeks leading to the upcoming school year were stressful.
Somewhere between the mad dash of shopping for supplies with nothing but empty shelves at the stores, because “oh, school is actually happening,” and trying to prepare my 7-year-old for his new normal for school, it was a nightmare.
The whole house felt it—even the toddlers were oddly on edge, constantly fighting with each other and not getting along. When the madness within the house reached an all-time high, I soon realized that I can love my children with every single ounce of my being, but I do not have to like them.
Not even a little bit at that moment.
He told me we were just going on a “little” walk. It wouldn’t take that long. We’d be back in plenty of time for the sit-down dinner at the cute, little Italian restaurant in Aspen, Colorado that we had reservations for. But at the look of how things were going, that didn’t seem likely. I was halfway up a huge mountain, so exhausted, and just wanted to be done.
My husband and I were enjoying a much-needed weekend in Aspen thanks to an Army-sponsored Strong Bonds retreat. (If you’ve never attended a Strong Bonds weekend, I highly suggest going!) We were in between sessions, and my adventurous, pilot husband decided it would fun to do a “little hike” before the dinner session started.
Needless to say, the last few months have been full of a lot of crazy unknowns about school and how it’s all going to go down..
Some states are going full time in-person, some states are opting for all distance learning, and some states are doing a hybrid of the two. Heck, some states (like mine) are still having 4-hour parent/teacher conferences trying to figure out what the heck they’re going to do! I’m hoping this blog post might offer a tiny bit of hope and information in what might seem like a hopeless situation.
Hey, I’m Dakota. As y’all might be able to tell, I’m new to Army Wife Network. I’d like to tell you a bit about my journey into the United States Army.
Joining the military wasn’t something I planned on doing—actually, it was the last thing on Earth I thought I would ever do. No one in my family is associated with the military, and up until I joined I knew next to nothing about the Army. Serving in the military had never even crossed my mind until one day, during the last few months of my senior year of high school, I was talking to a friend who was joining the Army, and they said, “Have you ever thought about joining?”
If you were to tell me five years ago that I would be a mother to not only four children, but that my last pregnancy would include triplets, I would have laughed in your face.
The truth is, I struggled to conceive with both pregnancies.
My oldest son, Aaron, was a total surprise. We had tried for nearly four years while I had gone through a variety of treatments for precancerous cells on my cervix, and we found out shortly after moving to Texas and closing on our first home.
SURPRISE!
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