I aim to please!

Thing 1 walks in from school and says "it smells great, mom" and proceeds to peek into the crock pot...

"too much celery"

Thing 2 takes a look and says...

"yuck, too many beans"

Glad everyone is happy, then.  

I've never frozen my bean & ham soup before but I'm going to try it.  Anyone know if freezing will ruin the texture of the beans?  Besides chili, what are your favorite soups to make big batches of and freeze?

I'm ready to get my feet wet again...

There is no graceful way to make a comeback, is there?

Somehow, I lost my muse.  One week turned into a month, which turned into many more.   To be honest, since the Big Military Move I felt lost about subject matter.  I had gotten way too comfortable living multiple military tours in the same home in Virginia, other than the deployments it didn't even feel like a military life because we had roots planted for so many years.

Proof of Life!

In retrospect, I think I boxed myself in by focusing too much on blogging mainly about gardening.  So much so, that when we moved and I found myself in government quarters living on base with a concrete pad for a backyard - I thought that anyone who was following me would no longer have any interest in what little ol' me was up to.

Yes, I was able to score a community garden plot on base, but that came with a host of issues that I touched on a bit in some previous posts.  The bottom line, though, is that my life completely changed. like the rug was pulled right out from under me!

New schools to deal with, little kids quickly became teenagers, new sports to travel to, higher cost of living to adjust to, and not the least of my wrenches thrown in was deciding that, after 12 years of being a stay at home mom, I would return to work.  After a few weeks of the initial shock of 50+ hour workweeks as a Navy certified childcare provider, the blog was a luxury item at the very end of a long list of "must do's".

Many things have happened, some very stressful,  some exciting.  Don't worry, I'm okay, the man is ok and the kids are great - but we are in for an eventful 2017 as well.  I will recap some of these events in future posts, but gardening in anything other than my wee raised bed in my tiny yard is a pipe dream for this year, anyway.

I still get dirty, just not as often as I'd like!

I have been wanting to post for about 2 weeks now, and really thinking about how much I miss blogging and how fulfilling it is to be able to write and connect with others in this way.  Facebook is no substitute for real journaling of what goes on in my life.  My focus will change somewhat, I expect that I will write about everything from kids to military life, paying down debt to cooking, gardening, sewing and the other things that I love to do.  Lots of photos and posts about what has transpired during my absence so these experiences can be looked back upon by my family.  I would love to document the process we go through as we deal with looming military retirement and that transition from military life to civilian life in hopes of connecting with others that may be in the same situation.  Life in general, really.  I even debated on changing the name of the blog, except that it's a nightmare to do that, and I have every intention of having my dream garden again, sooner rather than later.  We are getting very close to military retirement, which means... a "Forever Home" and all the things that come with actually being able to CHOOSE our home for once!

So, the name stays.  I hope you do, too - if any of my friends are still out there!  Even if it's just my mom reading though, I am back on the wagon!

A parting shot.... it's COLD here, 2º last night!

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