How it Began

2024's been a doozy of a year. So if you want to go way back to the beginning, Casey and I decided our family needed a little shake-up. We live in a magical bubble in Florida called Ponte Vedra Beach. We love our bubble. But it's a bubble. Our two girls were 13 and 14 at the beginning of 2024. Casey had been hired by United Airlines, a huge milestone in his return to flying, but as soon as he was hired, he tore his pectoral muscle off the bone in a horrible bench press accident. It required surgery, followed by 4 months of disability before he could even go to orientation. With many months spent healing on the couch, watching our savings disappear and life feeling stagnant at best, we started fantasizing about totally changing up our lives. Being a reservist, Casey had already deployed a couple of times, in addition to tons of time away from us as an L3 pilot and then long-haul cargo pilot for Atlas. With all of his hard work, Casey made 06 in the USNR. Huge accomplishment! But we knew another deployment was probably on the horizon. We were sick of having been separated for so much of our lives. We thought "what if we take the bull by the horns, volunteer for a deployment, but to somewhere cool where we can go together, as a family??" (i.e. not Iraq). Germany was at the top of our list. Casey threw his name in the hat and we waited. In June, we got the news: he was being assigned to Wiesbaden, Germany, reporting to Norfolk on November 15!

In the meantime, Casey's parents, in an extremely generous move, decided it was time for our house to get a remodel. We love our townhouse in PV, in a gated country club community, on the golf course, 2 minutes from the beach and my beloved tennis. However, our house was almost all original 1985 design. It wasn't pretty. So, once Casey was healed enough to fly out to Denver for his several weeks of United training, demolition began on our house (literally that day). My own parents generously opened their home to me, the girls, Rafa and our two cats. We crammed most of our furniture and belongings into our garage and lived with mom and dad for two months. It was not an easy time, between single momming, managing day-to-day frustrations that always happen with renovations, missing Casey and not living in my own house. But when our house was done, it was SO worth it! Our house was finally brought to its full potential, and Casey came back soon after (funny how that timing worked out!).

Once we got the definite news about Germany, it was time to tell the girls. We had a German-themed cookout and surprised them with the news. Both girls started laughing. At first. Genna kept laughing and saying "OMG!! THIS IS SO COOL!" Molly's laughter transitioned into tears and she had to be excused. It was a lot to take in and she was understandably upset about missing her friends and missing out on the end of 8th grade. We let her have her space, then discussed that her worries were valid, but that this was also an amazing opportunity that would change her life.

With that hurdle past us, it was time to start planning logistics of our move: girls' education, renting out our house, traveling with the dog, finding a petsitter for our 2 cats, selling Casey's truck, how to store my car, storage units, realtor contract for listing our house, buying flights to Frankfurt with the dog, realizing inside one month before leaving that the girls' passports had expired, moving the majority of our stuff into storage units, multiple post office visits to ship our stuff, rental van to drive to Atlanta for our flight since we couldn't fly from Jax with Rafa. Oh and doing it all again on my own for the last month since Casey had to report to duty on 11/15.

I'll just say it was many sleepless nights to get our butts on the plane. NOTHING was easy, everything had at least 3 more steps to it than we thought...my fists and shoulders were clenched for months. But everything fell into place. December 11th we departed Atlanta and on December 12th at 7:30am local time, we landed in Frankfurt.