Wide awake on a Friday Night

So the house is quiet, everyone has gone to bed hours ago and I am up at almost one a.m. Not really that late for me, especially on a weekend. I am tired but I just can’t shut my brain off! I just got a bit of my weekly homework done but I have LOADS I need to get done this weekend, including a final project and a quiz. Yuck. Just got an email with my actual graduation ceremony date, so that is exciting, but I have to actually pass these last two damn classes first!

Besides school I have a million per things rattling around in my brain:

Omg! Are we ever going to get our hard copy of orders so I can start planning? The Navy is killing me with this one!

Clean out all the closets and start selling crap.

Stop shoving food into my face, ten fifteen extra pounds aren’t cute.

Crap, keep forgetting to call and reserve our community center building for Bunco this month.

O went to bed with a fever tonight and is coughing now, hope he isn’t getting super sick.

Haven’t bought anything for the kids Easter baskets (not that they need a bunch of junk) Thank goodness mom sent them outfits so at least they will look cute.

Also haven’t grocery shopped for a single thing for Easter dinner. I am actually not even sure that the commissary got hams this year. Oh the joys of living overseas.

Also need to grocery shop in general, no food in the house, but also start eating all of the excess pantry items.

For Gods sake, clean the house!

It is really raining out there. Hope all the stray cats in the neighborhood don’t decide to come sleep on our cars again. At least the rain sounds nice.

Okay, I think I am done pouring my brain out and getting everything down that is making my head hurt. Can I just say I am REALLY looking forward to NEXT weekend when I hopefully will have much less on my plate and may actually be able to relax!

Winter beach day

Sometime last month we drove over to the beach on base with the dog just for fun.  Now ‘technically’ this beach isn’t open right now, and ‘technically’ Americans are usually only allowed to use it during a certain part of the summer, and ‘technically’ I don’t think dogs are allowed (certainly not off leash!) But I have a tendency to be that person who asks forgiveness instead of permission!

You can see the Spanish Armada right over that stone jetty... Pretty cool!

We had the entire beach to ourselves. It was still a pretty cool day and windy too, not beach weather at all. Unless you have two kids obsessed with seashells and seaglass and a dog that LOVES to run.

Treasures

Crazy doggie! Those front feet just crack me up!

Attacking waves

We need to get back out there before it starts to really warm up. It’s really nice to be able to let the dog go crazy on the beach. I’m kinda curious to see if he can even swim, he is so top heavy!

Beach baby

Beach babe

Wiped out and COVERED in sand

Our time did get cut a little bit short as another family came onto the beach with a picnic basket. I knew Bowser wouldn’t leave them alone (he ran up to them as soon as he saw them walk down) so home we went with baths for everyone.

I am just so grateful that we can live so near the beach. I can see the bay from my driveway. I can hear the waves as I walk in our housing area. We can go anytime we want to some beautiful beaches along this sunny Spanish coast. While I might complain about the Navy (who me?) I am SO glad my husband isn’t in the Air Force or Army! At least with the Navy we are pretty much guaranteed to be near the ocean! I am so so so looking forward to Hawaii where I can go to the beach every. single. day!

Also: I am totally going to order this print. I just adore it.

16 x 20 paper print - The Cure for Anything Is Salt Water - inspirational ocean artwork, beach word art typography poster

Image via maechevrette etsy.com

Impromptu ER visits (are there any other kind?)

The responsible party.

So we were having a wonderful Saturday afternoon playing frisbee in the front yard along with a couple of neighborhood kids. M went chasing after a frisbee and wasn’t looking where she was going… She tripped over the edge of this concrete thing and fell right onto the concrete base. At first (because I am just a horrible person) I may have laughed and said “See, this is why we keep telling your brother to stay away from those!”. But then I realized she really was hurt. Thank goodness daddy was there to pick her up and carry her inside (the girl is almost my size!).

Once inside she didn’t calm down and was crying pretty bad. I grabbed some ice, my purse and told her we were going to the ER. She said she was fine (in between tears) but into the car we went. She said her wrist and hip hurt the worst but she had scraped her knee and elbow as well. I was pretty much convinced that she had a fractured wrist.

What a happy camper!

Lucky for her I had my point and shoot still in my purse from earlier in the day! I get to document the whole thing!  I am so so so grateful that our ER is pretty much always empty. We’ve never had to sit and wait for a bed – I’m actually trying to think if there is even a waiting room. The guys were super nice and made us stop halfway across the parking lot so they could get M a wheelchair (she was limping and holding onto me). So she was in right away and we just had to wait for an x-ray on that wrist. (By this time her hip was feeling better)

The corpsman asked me if she had x-rays before and I said no, only dental ones. Then after a few minutes remembered, oh yeah, she had a chest x-ray when she was like 5 because they thought she might have pneumonia. I can’t remember everything, okay!

Time for an x-ray.

She did great the whole time. They took three different shots and some of them were painful for her but she held them.

Taking pictures as I am hiding behind the glass...

She thought her wrist x-ray looked pretty cool. I am so mad that I didn’t get a good shot of it, or at least be able to tell where the bones are in this picture instead of a white blob!

Doctor came and talked with us and said it didn’t look like a fracture or break. She is pretty much just battered and bruised after her fall. M was pretty bummed since we missed her girl scouts Earth Hour party but she needed to take it easy and sit on the couch. I’m thinking tomorrow morning she is REALLY going to be feeling it.  The ortho doc is going to double check the x-rays this week just to make sure they didn’t miss anything but I am hoping we can avoid a cast!  M had previously stated that she wanted to break something because she wants to wear a cast. After this she said if a sprain hurts this bad, there’s no way she wants to break a bone!

Saturday!

So our Easter Egg hunt was rained out so we decided to go run around town…

 

First stop: Lunch. We grabbed kebabs in El Puerto.

Clown!

 

M was journaling our day...

 

Yum. Shawarma Kebab!

 

Fries with kebab meat and sauce. I did share these with the whole family. They weren't just for me!

Then off to do some shopping at Decathlon. We actually came home empty handed because we were looking to buy a ripstick. We are all a bit obsessed with riding M’s right now. The ones they had were super pricey so we’ll probably just order from Amazon.

Decathlon!

But if there is ANYTHING you could ever need, it would be here. They have EVERY sport imaginable.

 

Horse tack, just in case.

 

I don't even know what Padel is... It's not raquetball and it's not tennis.

 

 

 

So we came away empty handed today but I think I want to go back because they had some super cute swimsuits out. Hope you had a wonderful Saturday!

 

Pre-nostalgia…

Is this even a thing?

I was at the commissary yesterday right after work to pick up a few things and it seemed like every aisle I went down had someone I knew.  I’ve never lived in a small town before and moved a LOT as a kid so I’ve never had this opportunity to really know a large part of our community.  I know it’s never going to be like this again. We are never going to live on such a small base, we are headed back to big cities with tens of thousands of people.

It is going to be so weird to have traffic again. To have to drive more than 10 minutes to get to everything relevant. To have to start over from scratch not knowing a single soul in the whole entire state of Hawaii.  I’m just so comfortable here.

I was driving around the other day and I’m already missing being here and I hate it! There is so much pressure (coming from myself) to enjoy every last second of our time here. Don’t waste any of it. We may never be back in Europe so we need to get all those ‘must-do’ trips out of the way.

I’m trying to not stress out about it and just live. Just enjoy these last few months. I’ve been trying to say ‘yes’ more when it comes to making plans.  I know that when we leave there is still going to be a HUGE list of things that I wanted to do or see or experience but that is going to be okay. I’ve loved all of the amazing things we’ve been able to do so far and moving to Hawaii is going to open up a whole new experience for us.

But damn. I really do miss it already.

Girls Weekend!

{So it starts out sounding a little crazy….}

A bunch of women from base are going to be spending the weekend at a hotel…

{…but then quickly goes downhill to boring mom-ville …}

and we are going to be scrapbooking the entire time!

I cannot tell you how much I need this. Just to get out of my head and spend some time on my favorite hobby that I am SO behind on.  I am not planning on spending the night but I do plan on hanging out for most of the day Saturday and possibly leaving my stuff and going back over Sunday (the hotel is only about 10 minutes from my house).

And even though I am looking forward to tomorrow -yay scrapbooking!- I am also a little nervous because while I know most of the women there, I don’t KNOW them. I don’t have any close friends in the group that’s going. So I am hoping that people actually talk to me and that I am not a loner the whole day because while I would probably get a lot done, that would crappy and boring. But enough with the girl crap.

So to get ready for this weekend I have been frantically trying to get all of my homework done ahead of time and it has kept me busy, along with night training for work this past Thursday. LOTS of fun stuff coming up at work, we are doing a TON of stuff for April for the Month of the Military Child because – shocker- we have quite a few military children! Also Feria, which is kind of like Spain’s county fair but that needs MULTIPLE posts with a ton of pictures.

Hope you have a WONDERFUL weekend!

P.S. Birthday shout out to Ben, my son’s brother from another mother!  Happy 5th Birthday Ben!  Wish we could be there to share it with you!