Trying to catch up!

So, I have not been the greatest at keeping you all up to date. I'll try to give a quick update and then I'll keep up from there! As most of you all know, Marvin left for Seattle, Washington on February 26th of this year to join his new shipmates on the USS Abraham Lincoln(is that ever a run on sentence!). He was there a whopping 13 days before his ship deployed to the Persian Gulf. We decided it would be best if the kids and I stayed at our home in Charleston, close to our church home and only 3 hours from my parents. The first 3 months went pretty well, of course with our ups and downs. I hired a wonderful woman to help me a few evenings a week, so I could clean the toilets without help and go grocery shopping. If you have ever tried to go shopping with a 5year old, a 4 year old, a 2 year old, AND 2 infants, you can understand the pain of that task!!!! If you have not, I'll leave that incredibly crazy scenario to your imagination! Adelle came to be a member of our family during those few months. We were managing greatly UNTIL on memorial day weekend there was a notice that said we had 90 days to get out of our base house because they were renovating it. Yes, another SHOCK, as the housing people assured Marvin that our house was not scheduled for demolition until January. So, the housing company offered us a house almost half the size of ours. It was a very hard decision, as leaving Charleston and such close friends, where the kids had spent their entire lives was a hard decision to make. Here were the options we were given. 1) Move into the smaller house in Charleston, getting settled for 3 months and then finding a place to store the stuff that wouldn't fit in that house. 2) Move in with my parents and share 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms between 3 adults and 5 VERY loud, very FAST children. But let the Navy take our belongings to wait for us in Washington. 3) Move into my mom's cousin's(from here on out to be called Aunt Nancy because it is just much easier!) house which has 4 bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs that no one uses. So, we opted for Aunt Nancy's house so that the kids can spend as much time with Granny and Grandpop as possible before we move a whole country away from them. And, because I just can't move everything twice in 3 months, just wasn't in me. It has been so hard to leave the wonderful friends we made while in Charleston. Sam was in a class full of kids that he had known since birth. It took quite a few weeks for him to understand that we would not see his bestest friend Gray at church this week. Michael still talks about "the Maddie that I love" as though there are no miles between them. Every time they hear a name that is familiar they say, I have a friend named Hannah(as that is the one they are hearing a lot of being it is the hurricane headed our way right now!). And every time we watch Kai Lan on Nick Jr., they say, "that is where MoLi is from, she says Ni how"(sorry, I'm not sure how to spell it, but you get the picture!). I hope those friends will stay with them forever in their memories and that we will meet again very soon, you just never know what the future holds, maybe sooner than later!