We are talking about what lies ahead lately.
We have a year, maybe less than, and with such frequent deployments, my husband knows he’s in the hunt for our next set of orders. And soon.
After the holidays, we will have to decide – along with the rather severe and not always so accommodating needs of the Navy – where we are going.
East Coast or West Coast; North or South; a maintenance or teaching job.
We could move to somewhere we used to live; we could move to a whole new location.
It’s all very exciting. And, exhausting.
Granted, considering it’s July and I’m pregnant with my third child on the cusp of my third trimester, I keep jokingly telling my husband we need to move to Bangor, Wa., as quickly as the Navy will let us go.
The fact that we have friends there who wear sweaters during the summer months makes it attractive enough to me, right now.
Attractive enough that I would even consider driving cross country with a dog and three kids.
Though honestly, and more realistically, we’ve been chatting about the first Navy city we lived in, Charleston, a lot more than we thought we would at this point.
My oldest was born there. We love that city. And I always swore that if we ever went back, I would have one more, last baby, at the birth center with the midwife who delivered my oldest child.
It would be a nice little book-end to my childbearing years, I joked.
But that means we would have another baby after this one.
Another pregnancy. Another summer sweating in the South, swelling like a watermelon, and wishing we spent all my time incubating babies while stationed in the Artic Circle.
And still, the thought seemed appealing.
Even though we said we were done after this baby.
My husband laughed when I told him, “Well, maybe we don’t do anything permanent, if we could be moving back to Charleston.”
He always said four kids was a good number; I’m worried that his amusement was perhaps a little bit more of a twinkle in his eye, rather than just a laugh at the thought of another baby.
Not that we should pick our next duty station based on the possible existence or not of a fourth child.
But I still wouldn’t put it past my dear husband.
Plus, it seems like as good a reason as any.
Moving to any duty station we or the Navy pick is going to be perilous with our brood in tow, even if it remains just three children and the older-by-the-second dog.
In fact, Charleston would be the shortest move we could make out of all the options open to us; though, I didn’t point out to my husband, whose idea of a road trip is pretty much the same thing as a detour through the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno.
And while another baby may not sway him entirely into picking a duty station, a short move time might.
