luckily my husband works in a field where they dont deploy much. its kind of nice to not have to worry about it. in like 8 years hes not deployed once! i know its coming eventually, but some people are deployed every couple of years. i dont know if i could do that!
i heard somewhere that the average cost of having a baby here is 6-10 thousand dollars, when you include the prenatal appointments and such. so the military health care is amazing! we probably wouldnt have any kids right now if we actually had to pay the outside cost! the military salary isnt that great, but the full health care coverage helps make up for it, for sure!
my stepson and his mom do live here, and we are working out the arrangement for when we leave. she is military too and is on orders here for 1 year after we leave. we are hoping we can end up stationed together with her again, as its much easier to work the visitation that way. luckily though she wants to make sure he knows us and his siblings. typically dads get like half of christmas break, spring break, and half of summer. it amounts to about 6 weeks or so a year. she never got to see her dad much growing up as her mom kept them away from him, and she doesnt want that for my stepson. so we are trying to figure out a good situation that is closer to 50-50 for each family. i hope it works! :-/
my stepsons name is actually legally hyphenated. makes for a super long name- dylan alexander dickson-luciano - phew! but on all non-legal documents our portion of the surname gets left off. he even says his name is just dylan dickson. cant blame the kid, as its a mouthful! but it hurts Dh, i know.
how old are your brothers? maybe they are just not at the point of settling down and starting families yet? i would imagine that with two brothers, at least one will have a kids and pass the name on...at some point! lol. i bet your mom is so excited. i know my mom was excited when my brother had his first. my brother has had a bad past though with drugs and such...he is divorced from the mother of his son, and separated from the girlfriend who is the mother of his daughter. so my mom was so excited for my first baby, because those women sort of snatched the grandkids away to a certain degree and she knows that with my kids that will never happen. its a sad situation with my brothers kids really. but my parents have gone to court and actually gotten court ordered visitation with my nephew - the one day a month is nothing to the fact that they had him 5-6 days a week up until he was nearly 5 though. :-/
wow! you have been with your OH so long! i bet you guys are so excited! i was on BC for about 8 years as well when i went off to start NTNP for Audrey. it took us 5 cycles. it seemed like forever at the time, but now looking back i know we were lucky to have it happen so quickly. i see some women on this forum that have been trying for years and my heart really goes out to them. i know how hard it is to wait for something you want so bad.
family in spain huh? not a bad reason to have a spanish holiday every year!
as i remember from my few european backpacking trips, its pretty cheap to fly around europe isnt it? so hopefully you will be able to see his family some when the LO is growing up
we dont see family too much. i get back to the states about once a year and we do this huge tour of about 4 different states to see all of my family. but luckily my parents are able to come out here a lot - about 4 times a year. so that makes it really nice. they were just here in june and will be coming out again for audreys bday september 19th. i will be glad to be back on the continent though, its just so expensive to get to or from hawaii. we will likely be able to make more trips and have more people come visit us in texas
plus my mum is taking a job where she works 3 weeks in alaska and then has 3 weeks off to do whatever she pleases - go back to their home in vegas or just travel. so she will have more time to visit. my dad works 3 weeks in north dakota, and then has 1 week off. [the same job my mom is currently in, but about to leave] i know it will be hard on them to be separated more, but its nice that they get so much time off to come visit and such
haha! youre mom sounds like mine! my mom cries at all sorts of television shows! i never was very emotional unless i get very angry, when i usually cry. so the pregnancy hormones are so weird and different for me. this go round, though, i seem to be handling them a bit better. thankfully!
you should be totally prepared for a baby! thats awesome that you have so much experience with kids, im sure it makes you feel much more secure about what is coming! i had been around kids my whole life too, so i felt pretty assured about having a baby. but my poor friend had a baby and had never so much as babysat or held a baby before...it was hard for her because she just didnt feel confident and didnt know how to do certain things. it is weird, the transition, though. we have my stepson 1 night a week and the weekends, and to go from that to having audrey 24/7 was strange. it was like
"whoa! we are really never going to get a break, are we?!" lol. but we settled into easily and i love it. i actually have only left her overnight once, and that was at 8 months with my mother. ive become one of those "if i cant bring my baby, im really not that interested in doing it" sort of moms. its a huge change for me, because i was always the "partier" and independent one before having kids. its funny how they change things! lol
x
