I’m at a milestone. My job is 50% complete. 1/2 of my kids have made it to adulthood. Anyone with older kids knows that 18 is not the magic number where all the work is finished, but it’s a transfer of legal responsibility from me to them and it’s another (giant) step in the letting go process that began the first time they tried to roll over by themselves.
I look at this kid and think what a cutie he was, but have no desire to go back in time.
Captain Jack Sparrow costume from Auntie Ginger — wasn’t even Halloween
Instead I look at this kid and think, “He is going to do great things and I can’t wait to see what they are.”
I love you Carter. I hope you enjoy your late night Raider games and still manage to be a functioning adult in the morning. Pretty soon it will be late night Raider games with Navy work in the morning. You’ll figure it out.
Of course, you’re not a reader so you won’t see this, but maybe your brother will tell you all about it. XOXO
One of my favorite stories from this summer happened when we all went to visit the Navy recruiter so Carter could register to enlist. I never imagined that as Josh and I were exiting military life, one of ours would be entering. And that it would be Carter? No way. #leastlikely
I thought Caleb might go the military route, with his love of physical challenges and Survivor spirit. But my work smarter, not harder child has decided that it’s smarter to get paid to do a job and learn a skill than to pay someone else to go to more school. And that sounds pretty brilliant.
He’s probably right. I think alternative education/non-traditional college is the smart choice these days. Our plan for our kids is to spend educational dollars wisely to get them marketable job skills and experience so they can be productive adults. There is no dream college that will magically set someone up for success. Too many kids graduate with a degree that requires more money and more school to do anything (Political Science? English? What job does that get you?**) and have dug themselves a student loan hole that leaves them a decade behind when it comes to saving/investing/becoming financially independent.
** those are our degrees. Bless us. I should have gone into nursing or accounting or something practical. Just because it worked out for us doesn’t mean we would make the same choices again.
Dreamer with an English degree
I thought this summer would be a time for Carter to meet with the recruiter, get a feel for what the process would be to enlist after he graduates . . . just a feeling out period. Nope, he found out from the recruiter that he could get an assigned job and boot camp date NOW, and then he’d be all set to go after graduation. So we jumped into a mess of paperwork, trying to remember all of our old addresses, personal contacts from each place we’ve lived, countries visited, and medical history. Just what I wanted to do in the last 2 weeks of summer.
Credit to this kid — when he wants something, he gets it done. Hours of collecting info, taking exams, messaging people, and updating his recruiter.
The big event for us was taking him to the recruiter office, signing permission for him to enlist (since he’s under 18), and spending several hours helping him fill out his medical history and other paperwork.
Good sports
While we were there his recruiter gave him a 3 page medical questionnaire and instructed him: “don’t mark anything yes without checking with me first.” Basically a yes is a red flag for a medical issue that could possibly disqualify someone from service and because it’s government paperwork, any mistake means you have to start over and fill the entire thing out again.
Since Carter is virtually an adult, I’ve been letting him drive this entire process, so he starts working while I kick back. At the very first question he hesitates and reads aloud, “Do you have double vision? . . . that’s a ‘yes,’ right?”
I do have double vision, right?
Horrified, I blurt back, “NO!” He’s all, “Isn’t it asking if I can see out of both eyes?” Ahhhh, no baby. I guess I can understand your confusion . . .
The recruiter, Josh, and I all laugh and laugh and laugh some more and maybe Carter wasn’t laughing because he had 3 more pages of double column medical questions and at this rate he was never going to get out of there and to In N Out for lunch.
So I did the mom thing and leaned over his shoulder and prompted, “No, no, definitely No (are you pregnant?), and more noes until he got the hang of it.
A week later he left with the recruiter for San Jose where he spent the night with other recruits-to-be and went through MEPS (military in processing) where they do all the vision, hearing, drug testing and medical screening and he made it 99.8% of the way through. He was one step away from meeting with the career counselor, choosing a military rate (job) and a boot camp date when the doctor looked at his knee and saw this:
What are these bumps?
Yep, a few warty looking bumps can derail/postpone your military career. The doc said before he could be cleared Carter has to see a dermatologist and have them sign off on his skin condition. (Basically he needs to get rid of them.) Currently he’s burning them off with compound W and when our residence visas get approved he’ll take care of that.
I guess I skipped the entire month of August. Oops. No worries. It can be summed up in a few words:
storage shipment
jet lag
school/work/sleep
The month began with my 9 year old storage shipment of 7 huge crates plus oversized items, weighing in at 8,000 lbs, being dropped off while Josh and the boys were all scuba diving. Of course our final military move would suffer the same kind of scheduling issues that occurred during every other PCS over our 21 years. But we had paid for 2 large storage units to house it all and the movers were fantastic. As tetris experts, they pieced it all together and left me with a puzzle to figure out over the next 7 days. How to get rid of all of this stuff?!
Thankfully I had a great helper — we worked while the guys were getting their scuba certification each morning and then they’d come home and we’d all work some more. With the help of my mom and dad, 362 trips to Goodwill, and kids who were willing to let things go, we got through the entire load in 1 week.
I spent the days unpacking, sorting, and transporting the big items and the evenings sorting through photos. I kept a few, but often just snapped a photo of ones that I liked and tossed the hard copy. I was under a time crunch because the storage units cost $800/month and I wasn’t going to shoulder that expense all year!
The day before we left, I had it pared down to a few storage bins and our bikes. Then my hero Joe came to take the rest away. (Bless Yelp and all his good reviews for helping me find him!)
Toss it all and hop on a plane! Josh stayed behind in the US to work for another week, but I had to get back to start work myself. Basically the past two weeks has been work, come home, eat dinner and crash. Wake up at the crack of dawn and repeat. As soon as we got ourselves sorted, Josh came home and had to struggle through the body clock wars.
