July Recommendations

+Go Bayside podcast. I binged this whole podcast (80+ episodes that are usually more than 1 hour each) in 3 weeks. It was wildly entertaining. I spent a lot of my elementary years watching Saved By The Bell. I remember specifically 1st grade being a big year for that. My parents weren't terrible, by the way. They would watch with me and roll their eyes and try to tell me that was not what high school was like. I didn't believe them.

+The Cult of Pedagogy. This is a teaching website and I read my way through every article in about a week. It was so informative and real. It's also a podcast and I pretty much made my way through that entire backlog too. 

+Ozark. This is a new show on Netflix. Not only did we live in the Ozarks for a year plus a few months but we spent many weekends at Osage Beach and the lake there. Osage Beach was the nearest Target so I spent some time driving that 45 minute stretch of woods at least once a month.
This show is so enthralling...it just kept going and going and I kept watching and watching...it plays out like a movie. I just love Jason Bateman.

+Online grocery shopping. I mentioned this on Friday and I cannot recommend enough that you at least try it. I discovered that I can keep my cart open on the app and just add to it as I think of things instead of writing them down and likely losing the list. I'm using Wal-Mart because that's who offers the service near us but, even though I don't love Wal-Mart, I can get over that for two reasons: I'm not randomly buying things I don't need and spending extra money. And I don't even have to go into the store. Yes, please. There's a few things I'll end up getting elsewhere (dog bones, K-Cups, and ice cream/Italian ice is much better priced at the commissary) but that's like an every two or three-week trip.

+Stuff Mom Never Told You and Stuff You Missed in History Class. Since podcasts are my preferred form of daily media entertainment, I'm always looking for new ones. I used to listed to Stuff You Missed in History Class all the time and then it got old (pun not intended), so I unsubscribed. I recently went back to it, pulling all the recent episodes from the last year that seemed interesting. As for Stuff Mom Never Told You, there's so many topics and so many interesting thoughts and research and whatnot...give it a go. The hosts are fun to listen to as well. Their episode on MLM was fascinating and led me to John Oliver's video which was funny and informative. Even though I'm a believer in Rodan and Fields products whole-heartedly, I have many thoughts on multi-level marketing.

+And, lastly, this post on miscarriage and making it to the other side. It's refreshingly real. I didn't have a miscarriage, but I know what it's like to feel weak and achy and so completely unlike myself that I couldn't even sit up or roll over without being in pain. IVF can cause your abdomen to fill with fluid and that definitely happened to me. All of the hormones that I pumped into myself for the cycle of IVF we did in May took such a toll...there's literally nothing natural about it...but it was comforting for me to remember that I was not the first person to go through that and I certainly wouldn't be the last. If you're struggling with something similar, that blog post is a good one.

If you're looking for Pinterest recommendations, I posted what I've Pinned and Done lately last week. 

The Longest 31 Days of My Life

Trust me when I say I went back and forth (and back and forth) on posting this. I'm hesitant and, honestly, feel ill when I think about putting so much of myself out there. (seriously, I'm starting to sweat.) 

However, it just is what it is and, if you're going to read this blog and follow along with my life, I do think it's important that you all know where I'm coming from. This army life has shaped the choices we make and the way we live, so this is just the latest installment of that. 

This blog is full of countless other examples over the last 7 years. 

The trip Scott just came back from was only 31 days but it was definitely classified as a deployment. It wasn't temporary duty (TDY), it wasn't training...it was actually called a deployment. While it was *only* a month, it was, I'm pretty sure, the longest month of my life.

We found out in April that this would be happening. We didn't know if it would be 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, or more. This has never happened before and there was no set timeline. We started prepping for as if he'd be gone all summer (again). There were many tears on my part. The worst part was that he'd just gotten home from Afghanistan a few months before.

There were a lot of moving pieces on my end of this deployment. To make a really long story short, we had decided back in December that we were going to do a cycle of IVF in the spring. Since spring had unexpectedly brought a deployment, and we didn't know if he would be gone for weeks or for months, we immediately got on the doctor's schedule and paid for it and made that May's priority.  Scott left mid-May, which meant I got to take on everything that goes with managing the house, the dogs, my job, and IVF all by myself. This was not for the faint of heart. I gave myself more injections than I could count, drove to more appointments than I care to remember, and I missed an entire week of school. (Okay, I did count: it was more than 40 injections.)

Just as I had started to feel normal again (which takes weeks), I found out that the IVF didn't work.

Then, I was left to shoulder the emotional and mental burden of that by myself.

I won't even pretend to play this off or act like it was no big deal. In fact, I'm aware that people go through much worse and, looking at it through my military wife lens, it was just another roadblock.

When I look at it through lens of the regular person that I am, it was a really big deal. It was almost too much to handle because I couldn't even talk to Scott about it. We only talked twice in 31 days. We were able to text, only because he has a government phone for work. We weren't able to make any decisions or decide what to do next. And I told myself nothing was going to change in a couple of weeks and attempting to have long drawn-out texting conversations would just stress us both out. I just told the doctor that I would call for a follow-up appointment when Scott got back. I'm pretty good at compartmentalizing at this point, apparently. This is just the latest lesson in how to be a military wife, I guess.

We have plans to not be active duty for the next few years. There's a way to earn active duty time while doing other things and that's what Scott will be doing. So hopefully this most recent stint will be the last in that long list of what he has had to do in Colorado.

So anyway. That's the story of the longest month of my life. I had thought that the year I was alone in Alaska had taught me more than I would ever need to know, but these 31 days did ten times that. For that, I'm grateful, even if that seems to make absolutely no sense sometimes.