Here are the other posts in this challenge I’m participating in:
I was very very grateful that my MIL agreed to take me and my daughter in after trying to take care of her myself after hubby left for training in North Carolina. Some friends of ours at the church we went to were kind enough to help me get everything we owned into storage and clean the duplex we were living in. Thankfully we were under a contract with our property managers that said if someone in the military was deployed I had the right to break our lease with no additional charges.
Then I made the 8 hour drive all the way up to Oklahoma with my precious cargo and some other necessary things we’d need while there. It was the first time I’d actually driven that long of a distance by myself, so I was quite scared. Nevertheless, we made it safely.
The entire year living in Oklahoma forced me out of my comfort zone and taught me A LOT. Half of the things I had to do I never would’ve done before. For example, I hated talking on the phone at the time, but because I was the one maintaining the household without the help of hubby I had to get on the phone from time to time unless I wanted to be a hermit. Once I got used to it I found out I was actually pretty good at it!
My MIL also taught me how to cook from scratch. When I moved in with her I only knew a handful of very simple recipes and everything else I had to get out of a box if I wanted to eat it. I was pretty shocked with the many things that could be made from scratch and that tasted so much more divine than getting it out of a box! In fact, I seriously had no idea that you could make pudding from scratch. I was quite confused when my MIL said she was going to teach me how to make it because I thought the only way you could get it was in the cups you get at the store! Then my eyes got as big as dinner plates when I realized that we were actually going to make it ourselves, lol!
As for the weather in Oklahoma, close your ears if you love living there because I’m gonna say that if I can avoid that state I will! The weather there frightened me in just about every season except for summer. There was a pretty nasty ice storm that rolled through the state when we first moved there that had me believing that we were going to end up with no power and would freeze to death!
Thankfully the power didn’t go out, but the extreme cold during most of that winter really did have me very nervous. I was quite afraid that Ariela would freeze to death regardless of how much I had on her. Going grocery shopping caused me to panic a lot because I had to take the baby with me which meant that she was going to be exposed to the elements until I actually got into the store. I kept praying that if God would just get me through the winter I would be just fine…and then Spring came.
Spring was FAR more frightening than I EVER thought winter was thanks to those God-aweful tornadoes!!! There was one night in particular that had me so scared I really thought I was going to pee in my pants! I woke up at 2 am with hail pounding on the roof, wind shaking the large oak tree right in front of the house so much that its branches were touching the ground, and thunder making so much noise I wondered if my eardrums were going to explode.
Since we lived in the country we had satellite TV that is very unreliable when there is a storm so I had no idea if I needed to run to the storm shelter or not. I ended up getting Ariela up, closed all the doors in the hallway, and crouched down just in case a tornado came through. It was the scared-est I’d ever been in all my life.
Stay tuned tomorrow to find out what it was like when hubby finally went off to Iraq and the fears I faced while he was gone.
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