Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a great time celebrating. We were in bed by 10 p.m., which is just how I like it, and we started the new year by completing the first leg of our PCS journey. We drove 6 hours to Memphis today. We’ll do three hours to Nashville tomorrow to see some friends. Then, we arrive at our brand new house on Wednesday, just in time for our household goods to be delivered on Thursday (the timing works out like that when you spend three weeks living out of suitcases before moving).

This is the last post before the New Year, which probably means everyone is busy thinking about their resolutions. Those 12 goals are my resolutions, but it is not enough to set them. We have to actually create a plan to achieve them and find ways to navigate and maintain that plan even when life is hard. I know we’ve all had years in the past where we made resolutions that quickly fell off the books as soon as we missed a day or got a bad night’s sleep.

I saw this reel the other day and totally fell in love with the idea. You can watch it here: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C1IHVoQgbxI/?igsh=ZTcxMWMzOWQ1OA%3D%3. The text says, “This is your sign to your 2024 goal on champagne bottles so you can pop them & celebrate when you reach your goal.” I think this is a great idea, and I fully plan on doing it when I get to Georgia.

I'm going to keep it short today since it is Christmas, but taking today off from writing felt like looking for an excuse not to focus on my dream. I've taken enough days off this year already, and honestly, today just feels like a day to me. This definitely won't go down in the books as my favorite Christmas. We aren't with family. There were no decorations and no gifts. We are running on fumes after getting back to our friend's guest room at about 1:30 last night. It's been a draining day, and that's really all it's felt like. I'm very lucky that I have my spouse home, though, and I am holding on to that fact, as well as knowing that next Christmas will look very different with so many amazing firsts. I know some people had the best Christmas ever, and others are really struggling, so I just want to say:

The second AJR song that speaks about the sacrifices of a military spouse comes from their most recent album, The Maybe Man. They have the third installment of the song Turning Out on this album. Listen to it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVAXNmZQdQc This series has talked about how views of love grow and change through each stage of life.

Since we talked about sacrifices on Monday, I wanted to continue that chain with two of my favorite songs by the band AJR. They recently released a new album, and we'll talk about that song on Friday. Today, I want to focus on the song Christmas in June from the OK Orchestra album, which came out two years ago.

The old saying goes, "When one door closes, another door opens." I've been thinking about that a lot lately. Recently, we've seen a lot of doors open up in front of us, and I had kind of forgotten about the impact of the one's closing. But that's how it goes. That's how life works, and we can end up living with a lot of bittersweetness.

I think one thing that people struggle with when it comes to dreams, especially when making that list of 100, is that they end up feeling very materialistic. Most people want to stay away from that feeling. It’s not like materialistic people have ever been represented as the good guys in any show we’ve seen. I want to explain some of the reasons this happens, though, and what it all points back to so that maybe you will be encouraged to continue making that list.

Consistency will always be the number one thing I preach when it comes to dream achievement. The most significant factor to our success is going to be showing up. Most of the time, this means showing up well, but it also means showing up when the best we have to give isn’t very much.

Yesterday marked exactly four years since we moved to Oklahoma. My husband got home from SERE on December 6th, 2019, and as soon as the weekend was over, he did the last of his out-processing from Tyndall Air Force Base. We hit the road and started the 14.5-hour drive to Oklahoma City.

Sorry for the delay in getting Friday’s post up. Honestly, I didn’t even realize that it was Friday until about 11:30 last night. Things are crazy around here, if that gives you any context for how out of it we’ve been. I did spend the day in Kansas City with my dad, sister, and some friends and got to see some excellent training that both opened up and answered the questions I’ve been asking recently.

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.