Marching On. Or Maybe Not.

As many of you know, our Croatia move is on hold until further notice.  The notice will likely come this week...so after 4 weeks of living in limbo (on the tails of 6 months of banking on an overseas move), we will either find out we're still going as planned (just later) or not going at all. 

The news of the delay came just one day before our scheduled Going Away Party at our house on August 4th.  We didn't have much time to soak in the news before party prep began (tons of food, food, food, bouncer for the kids, a keg for the grown ups...).  Scot and I considered not telling anyone about our news as we dreaded the subsequent conversations that would ensue.  But, it's hard to keep mum about life changing details to life changing moves, so we opened up about the situation and our friends and family, of course, were great about it.  The overriding themed to be, "Oh, we're so sorry for you...but happy you aren't going right now."  It's good to be loved. 

To my surprise, I haven't gotten all that stressed about this living in limbo nonsense.  There were phone calls to make to uncancel things that were already canceled.  Get Ava back in school.  Get the cleaners back on the schedule.  Tell my boss my last day wouldn't be August 24th after all (ugh, that one especially sucked).   But otherwise, it was back to life as usual.  In fact, in some ways the delay came as a relief, because there were things that should have been happening with our move that weren't, because Scot was still waiting on his orders.  It was nice to take a break from things to worry about like, "how will I unlock my iphone?" to "when and how will we get our Ford Fusion to St. Louis to get on the next boat to Europe?" to "how in the world are we going to fit our 2 cats in soft carriers under the airplane seats and withstand 20 straight hours of meowing since Delta won't let them fly in the cargo hold between May 15 and Sep 15?"  If we do find out we are in fact moving this week, we will have to worry about these things once again, but we will know 100% for sure that it will be for cause.  We knew these things would be hard when we signed up for this gig back in January and we were willing to pay up in the form of a really ugly transition in order for the pay back to get to live abroad for 2 years. So, we shall see.  If we don't go, we don't go.  And we'll need to find another way to spice up our lives.  (Scot is already working on Plan B for himself.  Plan B has 2 wheels. And a motor.  Not that we have anything else going on right now.)

In silver lining news...It turns out the woman we hired to manage our house as a rental was an idiot.  Well, she hadn't rented it out yet.  We could have gotten the news that we weren't moving to Croatia at the same time we were moving out of our own home.  Anyway, we have since given her the boot and have Scot's cousin on standby to get things moving again on this front when/if the time comes. 

As far as why we're in limbo, well that comes down to lots of government beaurocracy.  "They" decided that after all this time (after hiring Scot, after sending him to a school for 3 weeks, after sending him to Croatia twice), that "they" were changing the rules and not approving an Air Force guy for an "accompanied move", meaning they won't pay for all of the costs that the girls and I would incur to go over there and live for the 2 years.  It would also mean I would no longer be on diplomatic status, which means I would not be able to work. If Scot were an Army guy, it's not a problem - they'd pay for it all.  Awesome. 

So, there you have it.  We should know in a few more days because time is running out - they need to fill the position one way or another, either get Scot (and the rest of us approved) or offer it to someone else.  I think we've gotten used to the idea of not going...but we sure would like to still go.

Over the weekend, I had another Going Away party - just girlfriends this time.  I'm a lucky girl. Much love to Jess, Kelly, Julie, Tricia, Linda, Mandi, Sarah,and Cami.  And to Angie, Lauren & Laura who couldn't make it.  It's hard to think about saying goodbye so I'll ignore that for now.  :-(  Good thing I got some fun bath stuff (thanks S & C!) - going to unwrap one of those babies now.