A few months ago I heard good advice for military families moving to new duty stations. The impulse is to spend your first six months unpacking and getting your new house in order and to spend the last six months packing and waiting for the next move. As a result, you spend a year of your three-year tour puttering around the house when you could be exploring your new community. (The other two years are spent wondering where you will be moving next, but that’s another issue.)
We have now been in Singapore for two and a half months. In that time we have already traveled to the Philippines, Malaysia, and back to California. So it is no wonder that today was the first day we felt okay with inviting friends over for dinner. About fifteen of the 300 moving boxes remain and most things on the floor are in semi-organized piles.
One of our neighbors is a Coast Guard family with a little girl a few months younger than Citrus. Sometimes they play together, and other times they play along side each other, and they seem to get along well. Each of them was competitive, in a polite way. After each claimed that she was the tallest, they got down to business. PCS (Permanent Change of Station) boasts.
Nearly every time I have heard a public speaker in the milspouse community — at a family deployment briefing, conferences, magazine articles — the introduction includes the number of moves the family has endured:
Kelly has moved 18 times in fourteen years and has been through five deployments!
So tonight we had two three-year-olds. One started with an innocent, “I used to live in another house.” And then my daughter recited that she lived in Virginia Beach when she was a baby, and then in “downtown Silver Spring, Maryland when I was 2 years old and also in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland when I was 3 years old.”
As with the milspouses, I half expected her to follow this throwdown with a break-dance spin and pose. Top that, _____!
It was a stalemate so things did not degenerate. They moved on and made sugar cookies with a set of cookie cutters my mom gave to us several months ago.
