The post In Which I Complain A Lot

How are you??  This question gets asked a lot.

Currently I have two distinctly different answers to this question.  I have rarely before been so aware of how blessed I am.  My day to day life is wonderful. I have 3 great, healthy, sweet kids.  I have a hard working, supportive husband.  A great house, too much food, nice vehicles, etc.  It is easy to take these things for granted and being reminded how sweet and precious each day is, in a way a wonderful blessing.

That being said there is a lot of big crap happening in our lives too.  As you know my dear brother (one of them - I have 3) is really sick.  Since December this has been a daily source of worry and stress.  It is never far from my mind or heart.  So, when people ask, "How are you?" if I say anything better than "fine" I feel like that's totally not true.  Daron is currently 11 days post-transplant.  My mom updated the caring bridge for those of you waiting for an update.  Daron is thankfully stable but still miserable.  Please be praying for him.  This is such a long awful battle.  I wish there was someway we could fast forward 6 months so Daron didn't have to suffer so much.

Another source of grumpiness has been selling our WI house.  In February, the military told us that we had qualified for the HAP program.  We moved from WI to the DC area 5 years ago because Victor got activated from reserve status to active duty.  This was not voluntary, if he turned down this activation they told him he would go to Iraq at some point instead.  So, despite having built a brand new house and expecting our first baby, we moved across country.  At first it was supposed to just be 4 months.  So, I stayed back and worked most of that time (my employer at the time was wonderfully flexible and let me take 7 weeks off so I didn't have to be away from Victor the entire 4 months).  Anyway, 4 months became 12 months, which got extended again.  Victor ended up spending 3.5 years on active duty.  During that 3.5 years the value of our brand new house in WI tanked.  We did have the choice to go back to WI but by then we were pretty established out here.  We had been renting our house for 3.5 of the total 5 years we've been gone and were okay with that although each month we lost some money.   We had tried to sell it 18 months ago but just couldn't stomach the 100K loss so rented it again.  So, you can imagine how excited we were when we got the email stating we'd been approved for the HAP program.  This likely wouldn't have reimbursed our loss completely but we would have probably been comped 60K by Uncle Sam.  Knowing this we put the house on the market again.  Our renter moved out, we got an okay offer, and the military informed us that OOPS! we no longer qualify for the HAP program.  So sorry.  We decided to sell it anyway and closed on it about a week ago.  It's nice to not be responsible for 2 homes but I am still trying to get over how crappy losing close to 100K feels.  Thankfully, we had put down a large down payment so we weren't under water. Still crappy.  In addition to that we've had lots of other unexpected expenses during the past 6 months.  My parents (thank you) have helped us out quite a bit on the ones related to California traveling but it still feels like we have been bleeding money the past 5 months. (We'll be fine and we really do love living on the east coast!)

So that's it.  I'm done complaining.  Just know if you ask me how I am doing and I say "fine!" there is a lot I am not saying.