It's been six or seven weeks since we arrived to Alaska and so many things have happened. The first two weeks were really the hardest. I think out of the first 14 days we were here, I had worked 9 of them (several of those days being 12 hour shifts). Also during those first 14 days we welcomed here our nanny Sara, the kids started school, James started work, we bought two new vehicles, picked one vehicle up from being shipped in from Texas, bought a new living room set, had the movers drop all our stuff off at our home, and had to stock our house with food. Which actually was kind of difficult because we were so busy, it was hard to think about making meals!
The kids have had their ups and downs. They loved getting here with all the snow. Sledding was first on their list of priorities and oh my goodness, what fun it was to watch them get to experience that for the first time. They had a blast. they wanted to go sledding every day... until all the snow melted. They also went ice skating on the lake behind our house yesterday for the first time. I think that we would have had more fun if we had more snow, but shortly after getting here it all melted in a freak warm-front and just last night we finally got a couple inches. It's hard to be excited about living somewhere new/cold when there isn't much to do outside from lack of snow. Hence... they've had a somewhat hard time as they've realized how much they miss about Texas. They miss their school, teachers and friends immensely. Elisabeth came home crying (or in some other emotional mood) from school for about two weeks straight because she felt so overwhelmed with all the changes with school and such. Noah has done pretty well actually. And Amelia has done incredible. She has done really well going from daycare every day to being at home with mostly only one adult all day long. She spends her time playing in the playroom, with her toys and seems so happy.
I thought I was loving Alaska until a couple weeks ago when I would find myself randomly bawling because things were just so different. Just going to the doctor, grocery shopping, running errands... little normal things started to frustrate me because of how different it is here. But I blame pregnancy hormones! Overall it's fine. I like my new job, church has been good and our new routine at home has been well. At this point, moving or not, I think that I'll be much better off once this little Baby Bear is born because I am so limited in what I can do with being 8/9 months pregnant. I want to unpack more boxes (which I have to say, we only have a handful left to unpack, I'm very proud of that!) but I'm too tired all the time.
My sweet honey bunches of oats seems to be doing okay. He's gotten into a good routine with his semi-long drive into Anchorage every day. He gets home at a pretty decent time, he's home for dinner every night, which we all appreciate. However, by that point he has been gone for 12 hours. I work 12 hour shifts, but only three days a week, he does it five days a week. Poor guy. But he's been working on getting his enormous garage situated. He bought a four wheeler and has been working on getting our house all in order. I don't know what I'd do without him!
I'll admit, in the craziness of the past six months, I feel like him and I have been putting our relationship on the back-burner. It seems like we spend so much time trying to keep all the balls in the air, we don't have time to work on us. Our communication skills have become mediocre at best and we never seem to be quite on the same page. We've talked about it, but yet don't know what to do at this point to fix or help it.
