Navy=Stress

Life is busy around here.  I've finally gotten fully back on my feet and am becoming the wife/mom I haven't been in well over 6 months, especially since Catlin is 3 months old and the 3 months before that I was on bed rest.  The house has finally gotten clean again and even more so after doing a major re-arranging of our living room to make it more open.  Catlin is now sleeping 8-10 hours at night and how wonderful all of that is.  Kaden recently took a genus test to see just how smart he is.  Only a few select kids in his class were even offered the chance to take this test so it is quite exciting.  Annabelle is in speech 2 times a week and we can already see a difference in her vocabulary.  Catlin is now 3 months old and the teething is already beginning.  She drools all the time, but is mostly happy.  She smiles, laughs, coos and is trying so hard to sit up.

Then there is Jay.  To say he is stressed is basically the understatement of the century right now.  He is in his last week of school for a while.  He started up 8 weeks ago and thanks to his ship this will be the only class he takes until shore duty, unless the ship stays broken (which I'm beyond praying for at this moment).  His schedule went from being about 8-9 hours on the ship (unless it was a duty day) to now he is gone for 11-12 hours a day.  He is lucky if he gets more than one meal a week and that meal is usally dinner as he walks in the door from work.  As a result of the change in work hours he virtually has no time/energy to even do the one class he is in.  Thank heavens this is the last week of it.  He is getting ready to put in for shore duty orders, we're hoping/praying he gets orders for here so we don't have to move, and as this all is happening he gets told he has to do PTS (Preform To Serve)- not cool.

PTS is one of 2 ways the navy is currently determining who stays in and who is kicked out and unfortunately you can be a steller sailor and still be denied and booted.  We had no clue he would have to put in PTS paperwork for selecting orders until his first class dropped it in his lap 13 days AFTER he should have put it in.  Yeah that sent his stress level through the roof.  He spent days scrambling around the ship and here at home to put it all together for submitting it.  He has 3 chances to be approved or we get kicked out of the navy.  We're hoping that it is approved, but we also are fully aware that the opposite can happen.  We've seen too many good, hard working Sailors be kicked out recently all due to PTS.  I wish we knew what was going to happen, but unfortunately we don't.  Jay is sitting here 7 classes away from his Bachelors and wants to do 20 years with the navy and it is all up in the air.  At this point all we can do is trust in the Lord and know that no matter what happens it is for the best, it just doesn't make the waiting game any easier.