Monkey Update

The monkies have grown.  The original Monkey is 12 now and in the throes of tweendom.  Cowboy is now 10 and just as sweet as he was when he was 4.  Odie's 5 now, as he'll remind you of every time he talks to you.  And the Princess is 2, and has a temper worse than I've ever seen.  She's very much like Monkey though, and will likely be a diva.  I can't imagine my life without them.

Here's a quick update to show how they're doing.

Re-entry

It's been a while.

For some reason I've been reading my old posts on here recently.  It made me miss it, and to miss reading blogs in general.  So much has changed over the past few years in regards to technology and the internet.  As I said before, this blog was originally designed to keep in touch with friends and family.  Facebook has effectively taken care of that.  Cell phones, texting, all of that eventually made this blog obsolete. But upon re-reading a lot of my older posts, what I found was that I missed the writing, the constant oberservation of the world around me in a search for something to blog about.

I am ten times busier than I was before.  In the last couple of years I worked as the Base Commander's aide, and then moved to be the Operations Officer of my home squadron.  The thought of writing and taking pictures every day sounds daunting--but I'm going to give it a shot.

I need to, if only for my own sanity.

Life

What is the price of life?

I sit here watching my 4 year old son, flailing miserably in his swim class. he doesn't judge himself--no, he is full of smiles from ear to ear. My thoughts are of tasks to accomplish. I have managed to convince my boss to allow me some time off, and my plans are to use that time off to catch up in projects that are in dire need of my attention around the house. As I watch my son, I have checked my watch 4 times in 30 minutes.

6 hours away in Houston a person I know only in passing sits in a hospital room. Her four year old son lay in a bed undergoing his latest round of chemotherapy. For the last year this little boy has fought brain cancer, and it appears to be winning the fight. His cancer has spread--and their hopes lay on trial treatments, hoping to cure the incurable.

The thought crosses my mind as I watch my child try in vain to complete a backstroke--this mundane, simple task I am doing, distracted by a lawn that needs to be mowed, how valuable would this simple time be to my friend?Something so small to me, an inconvenience in my simple mind--of what value us this to one fighting for her child's life?

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Welcome to Earth

Well that happened a bit faster than anticipated.

After going in for a routine appointment, the doc (most likely motivated by the fact that the holidays were two days away) decided to induce SW on the spot. Within a few hours, she was sweating from the levels of magnesium being run through an IV and feeling contractions from the Pitosin.

Things were going just fine until "the rush," a stage in SW's birthing process that, after four kids, I have come to know and hate. It always seems to happen when I leave the room--with monkey #3 it happened when I went home to get the grandmas, with this one it happened when I went out to the parking lot to give my brother-in-law the car seat for aforementioned kid #3. SW goes from calm and stable to "holy shit, push NOW" in a matter of minutes.

That's when things got a little interesting.

Wilford Hall is a teaching hospital. As such, they typically have the "not fully qualified" residents do a lot of the procedures until something goes wrong. Even then, they continue to teach--I kind of equate it to having my students fly the plane with the engine on fire, but thats neither here nor there. As it turns out, the rpobelm was that the baby's heart rate kept dropping a lot. The cause was that she was face-up coming out--something that each of the four studnets missed, but the head dude caught as soon as he started probing.

Once the problem was identified, the forcepts came out, solidifying in my mind my happiness that I am a man and won't ever have to go through what I wathced SW go through in the next 10 minutes. After what appeared to be excrutiating, I watched as monkey #4 was yanked from her womb. Before I could react she was whisked to the heater to get her lungs sucked out, making me even more nervous.

In the end, all was well. SW is having blood pressure issues, but they seem to be more of an inconvenience than life-threatening, and (God willing) we'll be on our way home tomorrow.

Monkey #4

So here we are again.
Lillian Rose Lachance is being convinced to leave her nice warm home of the last nine months. When she does in a couple of hours she will complete our family and bring us to a final tally of 6.

Loading the Crazy Bus

We've made it to Wilford Hall.

Quick update--monkey #4 (baby girl) is due to arrive any second. Since we don't have a burning desire to risk life and limb by having the baby in Del Rio, we managed to get referred to San Antonio. The good news is that I get reimbursed for it. The bad news is that for the last few months we've been hauling it back and forth the 2.5 hour trip to the hospital at least once a week for the last few months. My fear was that SW would go into labor at home, and all of the ass-pain would be for naught.

Today we loaded up 3 adults, 3 kids, a dog and a fish (more on that later) and all of our stuff, plus all the stuff including car seat for the new addition.

It was a bit tight.

Day was characterized by butt-cold winds (no, not -20 like Minnesota, but this is Texas for crying out loud) and a lack of sleep from being up all night wrapping presents, since Santa will show up the night we get home. But we made it, and are comfortably set up in the TLF's on Wilford Hall.

Ready to go.

Excellence

Whenever anyone would say that my training at requal for Undergraduate Pilot Training would be easy my answer was always the same--"well, it's not exactly like riding a bike."

Apparently, in a lot of respects, it is.

I'm doing well. Very well. I've been through eight official aircraft training formal schools and I've managed to keep my head above water in all of them. The hardest of them all was, surprisingly, the Cessna 172 training that I went through in Hondo, TX in 1993. But I survived them all. Key word in that sentence is "survive." For the first time in my career, I'm excelling at a flying program.

The T-6 Texan II is an absolutely amazing aircraft. Usually when that description accompanies a weapon system it implies a great deal of complexity. This plane is no exception. I am essentially going from a go-cart to a sports car. But there have been two concepts that have been pulling me through that apparently are working in my favor.

First--the single-seat mentality. In T-37's 90% of your flying was a notch higher on the difficulty scale than flying by yourself. You were actually flying with another person that literally had no idea what exactly he was doing--so your awareness had to be even higher than if you were alone. That ability, that I thought would have been lost after four years of sitting on the ground, has served me extremely well in the last month or so. The mentality that I am truly alone, rather than being safeguarded by an instructor in either the front or rear seat of the plane, has allowed me to make decisions and fly the plane better than I could have ever hoped to fly my last one. It seems to be paying off.

Second--the "training" mentality. I have been going through this course not only with the perspective of surviving to the next flight (which is definitely a concern) but looking at it through the eyes of a basic UPT student. How would what I am doing come across to a student learning to fly? That thought has allowed me to not only look at it from the 1st-person perspective, but also to expand the possibilities of what we are actually doing here. It has made me very comfortable with operating the plane.

So, as an update, things are going well. I have never "slam dunked" a course in my life, but thus far I seem to be doing just that. I just hope that it can carry me through to the end.

On the Road

Moving a family of 6 1/2 plus a dog is no small feat. Every time thus far, I get to haul the majority of the cargo in my truck--without much room for anything else. Gives me lots of time for deep thought...

Farewell Montgomery

Moving Day.

They say things are slower in the South, but this has been kind of taken to an extreme. The longest I've had movers take to pack us up was two full days, and that was when we went 2,000 ponds over our weight limit. This time around they took a full THREE days, and still hadn't finished packing when the truck showed up on the fourth day.

It is now 2100 on the fourth day, and I'm guessing they have a couple of more hours to go. Unbelievable.

So...an update.

I have officially graduated ACSC. What I learned in the end that while it is extremely difficult to do very well here, it is multitudes more difficult to do poorly. I ended up with an average GPA (which was significantly higher than the GPA I earned after four years of college), made some good friends, and got in the best shape of my life. On top of that--one more goal was accomplished:

Baby #4 (and God-willing, final) is on the way.

This brings with it a whole slew of concerns. The majority of the pregnancy will occur while I am in training in San Antonio learning to fly my next aircraft. During that time we're essentially living out of suitcases until we can find a home in Del Rio. Once that happens the rest of the family minus me and the pooch will go there in time for Princess and Cowboy to start school. The remaining two months of my training will be done solo while they are several hours away.

The biggest reason that we had such a big split between Cowboy and Odie was because we took a hiatus while we were stationed in Del Rio the first time (sidenote: it is extremely rare for someone to be stationed there twice, and even more rare to have someone volunteer to do it). The hospital there is not what I would consider spectacular, and SW was working there. Those things combined made us wait. By this strange twist of fate, in the end we're going to be having a baby while we're stationed there anyway.

Funny how life works that way.

We also made our long-planned and highly anticipated Disney World trip last week. I'm not going to go so far as to say we were disappointed, because a) we weren't, and b) that would mean I flushed $3500 down the drain. I will say that, to my surprise, we liked Disneyland better. Unfortunately I don't see us blowing the cash to take a trip all the way to Cali just for one park. Either way, we've gotten Disney out of our system for a few years.

So, as I sit here in Cowboy's empty room, watching the last pieces of furniture being moved away, I can say that this last year was a life-changing experience for me. Not because of the school, or the education, or the friends I made here. Rather, this "pause" in my career gave me an opportunity to re-evaluate what was really important to me. I wear a "livestrong" bracelet on my wrist now and no watch--things I didn't do deliberately but am glad that I have. I am so much more concerned with the wellness of myself and my family that things that don't directly contribute to that goal have fallen by the wayside. I only hope that I can continue to keep this focus after I leave the deep south.

So--that's it. Goals accomplished, motivation charged, I'm off to the next leg of my life's Desert Odyssey. There's so much happening--I hope to be able to write about it.

Saturday Morning

Saturday morning.