Friday, August 19, 2011

I'm back!

I went home for a whole week!
It was a good week! I had a good time hanging out with my family. Having someone to eat dinner with every night. Not going to sleep in an empty house.

Charlie had a lot of fun too...sometimes I think he likes it there better. But then I realize he is probably just as lonely as I am when we are at our own house! He wasn't happy to be home today, he decided he would take himself on a walk down the street and not come back when I called, but he did keep looking over his shoulder, he definitely knew he was being bad. I had to chase him down and sneak up on him and grab him, by the tail.

I finally got the car registered! That was a fun trip to the MVD (that is the DMV in Arizona, I think the people who made the acronym are slightly lysdexic...I mean dyslexic) No more South Carolina plates for us...the car and the truck officially match now!

Eeeww I came home to some lovely smells in the house today. The trash in the kitchen I forgot to take out was not as bad as the smell that hit me in the garage! It smelled (still smells!) like something died. Then I open the truck which hasn't been driven in 3 weeks and find...a taco.

Yep. A Taco.

Leave a Taco Bell taco in a vehicle with the windows rolled up for 3 weeks and you have a great science experiment. Let's just hope the smell goes away before Ronnie gets home...or I will be driving his smelly truck!

He is coming home very soon...I think. So tomorrow I am going to clean the house, and make it look like it did before he packed to go on this underway!

I know I've said this before, but I have big plans for the design of my blog! I just need to get going on them, and maybe actually post something a little more often? I have a plan to fix that too! It's coming...eventually!
-Kristin

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Silence



It's a pretty big deal.

For a word that means absence of sound, it can be pretty loud. It can be relaxing, or it can be terrifying. I am starting to fully understand why they call the submarine force "The Silent Service". Yes, I know the one of the main reasons is OPSEC, and another is because most of the time, they don't even know where they are going or what they are going to do. Also, silence is a big deal when an enemy is near. I'm getting my first taste of the silence as a submariner's wife, and it is good preparation for what's coming next. I have not heard Ronnie's voice in well over a week, and it will be much longer than that until I get the phone call from him saying they are home. I have not opened my inbox and had a new email from him since Sunday, but with the delay in the service, it could have been written days before that.

Silence has a whole new meaning to me now. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining, I'm just reflecting. I'm remembering the days when I freaked out if I didn't get to have a 5 minute phone conversation with him. This is taking some getting used to, and I know I am going to have to go even longer amounts of time without hearing from him. So far, the longest we have gone without speaking was bootcamp. The longest I went without a letter from him was maybe a week and a half, and that was also during bootcamp. But this is SO much different! It's a different silence.

This underway has been pretty eventful, but not at all! I went, by myself for the first time, to the baby appointment.  I came home from that to find the garage door, which I made sure I watched it close before I pulled away, standing wide open. That was interesting! Now that I think about it, what I did was probably stupid. I went in with my pepper spray ready to spray, got the gun we keep down stairs and went through every room AND closet in the house. Nobody was there (probably good, if I was a burglar, a pregnant lady with a 45 pointed at me would make me poop my pants and never want to even steal the covers) and nothing was missing, but it was so creepy! I literally just wanted to sit down and cry, but I didn't because that would have solved nothing. It would have been so different if Ronnie would have been coming home from work in a few hours, that first night was rough.

I have been hanging out with our friends, and swimming laps! I went to the FRG meeting last night too, I was pretty hesitant about getting involved, but I have met some really amazing women and I'm glad I have them to go through this with. There are so many young children and new babies on our boat too, so now I have that source of support also! Last night the power went out, again, more silence. I have never been alone during a power outage before, it happens pretty often in out neighborhood, so I'm sure it wont be the last. The last time it went out Ronnie and I went to bed early and listened to the radio and just talked. I was really missing him last night! Tomorrow I'm heading home for a few days, I am so happy I can do that! I get to register the car while I'm there, yay Arizona MVD. Hopefully, it helps the days pass a little faster.

Right now I'm going to enjoy the silence...and get some sleep.
-Kristin

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Another Day.

Yep! Two posts in Two days! I must have a lot of time on my hands...

It's amazing what you can accomplish (or in my case NOT accomplish) while you are alone. I did load the dishwasher and clean the kitchen up tonight! Tomorrow I'm going to think about cleaning up the mess Ronnie made while we were packing his sea bag the other night, and going through and unpacking my last box of art supplies that I made sure he carried in from the garage before he left!
This morning I woke up to an email from Ronnie (and not his alarm clock, which I finally figured out how to shut off!) which was great! It was short, but it was so good to hear from him! I'm pretty sure he told me the day they will be home, AND that he LOVED the surprise I snuck into his sea bag after he was finished packing. I spritzed some of my perfume onto a plain white pillow case and sealed it up in a ziplock baggie. His last underway he had such a hard time sleeping, which is understandable since they are floating around under the ocean and he was in a new environment. I figured it would be nice to smell home when he laid his head down instead of boat smell, and he said it works! I'm so happy it helped! :]

Hello Baby!!!

Last Thursday we found out what kind of baby we are having...
I was VERY happy to see that it is most definitely the human kind, and not the fluffy yellow feathered kind I saw in the last ultrasound!


But even more importantly, we found out that this beautiful baby is a GIRL!!!! And she is definitely looking like her daddy! If you were to hold up a baby picture of him next to this one, they have the same profile!

We are both so excited! As much as Ronnie joked about "putting it back until it was a boy" if baby turned out to be a girl, he is very excited about having a little girl!

Now for the hard part...finding a name! We have a couple in mind that we are trying out right now, but I don't really want to share them, I don't really want everyone to know her name until she is born actually! I've had people ask me early on, and I gave them names that I was considering, but Ronnie and I hadn't talked about it yet, and it was like they got attached to the names I'd mentioned! OR I had people telling me how much they hated the names! SO I've decided I just don't really want to tell people her name until she is here and it's on her birth certificate, then they REALLY can't complain or try to get me to change it to what they think would be better!

It's hard enough to pick a name without other people weighing in. There are so many things to think about, like will the name we choose fit her? Your name is so much of your identity, it just seems weird to me that I have that much authority that I can choose another person's identity. I'm just glad we have the freedom to choose to name her what we want, and I guess that's okay because parents have been naming their children for just about forever.

Speaking of parents...my mom came and stayed last week! It was a lot of fun having her here, we went to the beach, and she helped me unpack the last few boxes and organize the house a little better! We also hung my curtains in the living room! I'm happy to say that our house now looks like people live in it instead of looking like storage! Unfortunately she had to go home, because she needed to go to back to school meetings since school is about to start up again, and she is a teacher.

Now it's just the Charlie and I for a few weeks, yep, another underway. Back to checking my email on my phone every time I go to see the time, cooking for myself, and sleeping alone in the middle of the bed at night! This time I think Charlie misses Ronnie A LOT! He acts very depressed, and just wants to sleep all day, I have to wake him up to go on walks! I've been staying semi-busy though. Today I started swimming again with my friend Nicole, and tomorrow I go in for the next baby appointment/pregnant people group. I'm not looking forward to going without Ronnie, but it's one of those things I knew was going to happen eventually! I hope he will be able to make the next couple of appointments before the deployment, and I'm so happy he was here for the ultrasound last week!

Well I have been up pretty late...it's time to sleep!
-Kristin