Here we go again…

Moving stickers keep popping up!!

It's been a year since our last PCS and I am still finding stickers from the moving company on random things! As my daughter’s second birthday is coming up I realized that she will have lived in six different houses in four different states in just the first two years of her life (that's not including the two we lived in while she was in utero)!   This past week I met my husband on base and we took the cat and dog to get registered with Animal Control.  We were joking about our first drive with the cat and how he totally freaked out and cried the entire 14 hour trip… now he just walks right in the cat carrier and lays down all relaxed!  It does make me a little sad that we are not stationary, like right now when I can’t decorate the baby’s nursery because there would be no point since we could move a week after the birth.  I have a pinned a ton of photos on Pinterest for my dream house and always ask my husband, “Someday when we have a real house can you build this for me?!” He smiles and says “Sure”, both of us having no clue when that will ever be.

Let me just start out with, NO we are NOT changing duty stations again (Hallelujah!).  We have decided to move onto base housing.  I honestly wish I had done more research and put in a pre-application while my husband was TDY. Since we couldn't officially be on the ‘active’ waitlist until he physically checked into this duty station I was apprehensive and after three months of living out of a suitcase bouncing from house to house with a one year old, dog, and cat I was SO ready to just move in anywhere ASAP!  Now that our lease is almost up, we have decided to get on the waitlist.  It will just make things easier for the entire family.  My husband’s commute will be cut down from about 2 hours (those around Camp Lejeune know how horrible the traffic is!) to five minutes, the kids and I will have endless activities to keep us busy during deployment, we will be minutes away from the hospital (hey, you never know with kids!), and we will just be closer to everything in general.   The current waitlist is 2 to 4 months (which is short compared to most military housing wait lists!) so that may mean I will have to do this move on my own, which I am not too concerned about since it will keep me busy during that lonely first month and I have pretty much done every PCS on my own since my husband always had to leave earlier than I did (sometimes by choice, like when I stayed behind a few months so I could FINALLY finish college).  After having lived in horrible, old, moldy and falling apart military housing I was glad to hear that Camp Lejeune is working on renovating the houses. We are on the waitlist for a newer developed neighborhood. I am also in love with the fact that we will have sidewalks, parks, pools, and community activities all in walking distance! 

Anyway, I feel really relaxed about this move. Even with the baby coming any week now, I feel good with our tough decision to move again.  It’s not a big move like going cross country and being without our entire house for three or more months, but just to the next town over and TMO *should* move our household goods in one or two days. I say should because it’s what the housing office has told us, but you never know with the military let alone the housing office. I will definitely start to stress if they don’t, but it will work out.  Moving so often also helps me keep my house super organized.  With every move I become more and more organized being forced to sort things and get rid of things we no longer need or use.  Plastic bins are your best friend when you move a lot.  All my closets, kids toys, garage, even my kitchen utensils are all stored in plastic bins. It makes things so much easier to unpack after the movers drop your boxes off.  You just open the box and unload each bin onto a closet shelf and you’re done! Now as we ‘live’ in the house, things become misplaced and end up not in their correct bins.  So while we are on the wait list, I will attempt to to go around and put everything back where it belongs.  I am also working on going through my daughter’s things she has outgrown and we have two bins of random wires, electronics and chargers that I need to sort and get rid of. My motto is, "if you haven't used it in a year, why keep it?"  It’s just another thing to unpack and find a new place for.

Here's one of our closets- craft supplies to batteries to light bulbs,

everything in its own bin.

With this move since we will be taking all our food and pantry items, I figured now would be a good time to better organize our pantry.  While searching on Pinterest one day, I found Oxo’s POP Containers!  Vertical pantry storage that was airtight and looked nice?!  Yes please!  The only problem was that they were expensive.  My mom surprised me this week with two sets of ten and I immediately got to work dumping, sorting, and throwing things in my pantry away!  The amazing thing is that everything I had bought in bulk couponing fit inside the containers!  I was ecstatic when all five boxes of spaghetti fit into the spaghetti Oxo. I will do another blog post once I finish our new and improved, super organized pantry.   I am still working on collecting a ton more Oxo POP Containers.  My goal is to have everything in my pantry in a container by June first.  It will definitely help this move go more smoothly since the items in my stock pile will be consolidated to one container.  

Before and After pics of our snack cabinet with the Oxo POP Containers!