I hope everyone appreciated Chili’s words of wisdom from Monday. I definitely had to utilize them last night as I hit my breaking point of stress with this PCS. I realized yesterday, though, while listening to a podcast, that Chili’s advice only works when people are ready to be strong.

I’m going to stop promising when the PCS checklist will come out. It will be on the blog sooner rather than later, but my own PCS prep is consuming my world right now. And I want to be thorough with what I give y’all so that it actually helps. So today, let’s talk about Bluey.

I know I said that today's post would be a compiled PCS guide. I've been working on it for a few hours, and it is nowhere near done, so that post will go up on Monday. Today, I wanted to talk instead about morale.

I know it’s not technically PCS season since the winter cycle is usually much smaller than the summer one, but it does feel like open season for my stress levels. So, I want to focus on this process a bit to help myself and hopefully anyone else going through it. I’ve talked a little about buying a house in Georgia and selling our Oklahoma house. But there is so much more to the process. It’s never as simple as going from one place to another.

It was strange buying a house without my husband. We are PCSIng to Georgia in January, but we have too many trips planned over the next few months, so we couldn't spare any leave for my husband to look with me. My mom, my son, and I went out to look. Between two trips, we saw 26 houses, which my husband would never have sat through, though I don't know many people who would have had the patience to do that in the first place, so maybe it did work out.

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! We ended up having a wonderful time with a close friend's family. It was definitely touch and go for a bit, though, as to whether we would be doing anything at all. I was starting to feel really sad about the idea of skipping the holiday, as you can tell from Wednesday's post. Thanksgiving has been an interesting holiday for us in military life.

This is the first year that life in the military has really messed with the holiday season. My husband has missed half of our Thanksgiving Day celebrations, but I still spent those at home with family. And as much as I enjoy Thanksgiving, it is not my favorite holiday. But this year, the military is coming after my Christmas/Hanukkah celebration.

I am struggling to live in the in-between right now. It seems like the worst time of year for this transition to be happening. We move to Georgia no later than January 20th. We are in the process of selling our house and buying a new one. My husband is out-processing while trying to stay current and being told he’s a low priority.

So, how exactly does one go about having five dreams come true within the span of a week? Well, first, it starts with having five dreams. It’s hard to make that many come true if we don’t have them to begin with. But the reality is that we need more than five dreams. We talked about it months ago, but I want to revisit our list of 100 dreams.

Either everything matters, or nothing matters. That’s why I believe dreams can be massive earth-shattering things or simple everyday moments. We have to have both, and we have to have a bunch of them. Maybe all of our dreams won’t come true. In fact, I can almost guarantee they won’t. We all have an expiration date on this earth, and will definitely leave things unfinished.

Moving on from the comedy show (although I'm sure I'll keep referencing it because it was fantastic), but sticking with my Ireland trip, let's talk about the Blarney Estate. Blarney Castle is located in Cork, Ireland, and is probably most famous for the Blarney Stone. The stone is located at the top of the castle and is said to grant whoever kisses it the gift of eloquence. As someone whose dream is to speak in front of audiences, it was a must.

Part two of what I learned at the James Acaster: Hecklers Welcome comedy show is that we must protect the child. James shared that growing up, anytime he was in some sort of audience, where some sort of performer was doing something, his immediate life goal became to do whatever the performer was doing. At some point during his kindergarten year (or whatever they call it in the U.K.), his grandmother came in to teach the class about weaving.

Sunday night, I attended a comedy show written and performed by one of my favorite comedians, James Acaster. We bought these tickets months ago and then promptly planned a trip to Ireland to use them. He hasn't gone on tour very much, and it's been a while since he's been to the U.S. (although I was considering driving the 7 hours to Austin to see him last year when I was 8.5 months pregnant, but the show sold out too quickly). All that to say, this was a dream come true, and I immensely enjoyed the show. In my husband's words, "It met and exceeded expectations."

Often, the biggest thing holding us back from our dreams lies between our ears. It's the constant battle that we face in our head between everything that we know we've been and everything that we know we can become. It's the thing that keeps us from asking for what we want. It's the thing that keeps us from trying new things. It's the thing that keeps us from changing our lives.

The pain point will come. I am telling you this now so that you can anticipate it. If we wait until we are too deep into the pain point, then we will delegate from a really negative place. It’s hard to find the right person to help us out if we are looking at the task as the worst thing ever.

With every endeavor, we enter a buyback loop. This is especially true with our dreams. As we go forward in our quest to achieve, we will inevitably hit a point that hurts. It might hurt from the repetition. It might hurt from the boredom. It might hurt from the monotony. We all get sick of doing the same thing over and over again, no matter how exciting that thing was at the beginning.

Continuing on the importance of consistency, we not only have to be consistent with our actions, but we also need to stay consistent with our metrics. We live in an ever-evolving world with an infinite amount of information at our fingertips. With every new thing we learn, we will likely want to change things.

Consistency will forever and always be the biggest indicator of our chance at achieving a dream. We have to stick to the basics of what our dream demands. We have to show up every day, week, and month in whatever way our dream needs. Rain or shine, we do what we need to do. It’s only through that consistency that we can make real progress towards our dreams.

For those following our house-hunting saga, here is a quick update. We put forth an offer, they countered, and we accepted it. The next step is to send in the earnest money and get the inspection taken care of. We close in less than a month! Having our housing situation pretty much taken care of is definitely a weight off of my shoulders. Although, I forgot about how stressful spending this much money upfront is. I felt the same way last time we bought a house, which my husband reminded me of. But, still, it is hard to basically empty our savings to cover closing costs and moving (because we all know that the “military pays for everything” doesn’t quite work out that way).