What's Happened Since...

     So, it's been a while.  Almost 4 years, actually.  So much has happened since then, I'm not even sure where to start.  Four years ago we were living in Elgin, Oklahoma.  Juliana had just turned one year old, and Jericho was wrapping up his first school year in pre-kindergarten.  Those last months began to reveal something in Jericho that would eventually lead to a diagnosis later on, but that's another post for another time.  We were enjoying life in our small Oklahoma town.  We'd made friends and memories, and things were going well.  I had stopped blogging because I'd simply become too busy with the kids to be able to sit down and write a coherent paragraph, much less a post that didn't have to do with diapers or school lunches.  Summer was spent in the backyard, catching butterflies and painting on the back porch.  On the hottest days, we would fill up Jericho's water guns and write letters and draw funny faces with them on the wooden fence out back, eventually turning on each other in water gun attacks that left us soaking wet.  Some days when we were bored, we'd tie a bell and a fishing bobber on the end of my old fishing rod, and we would practice casting into Mrs. Tommie's yard in hopes of getting the attention of her cat, Nyla.

     Our time in Oklahoma seemed to go by slowly.  Michael was at work at Ft. Sill before sunrise every morning, and he'd get home around 11 o'clock each night.  Being a drill sergeant was a brutal job, but he enjoyed the mentoring aspect and took his position seriously.  That was a long two years.  Jericho's Kindergarten school year went well, and he joined the town's soccer team, his first team sport.  Juliana loved to spend soccer practice being pulled around the field in our wagon and hunting for dandelions.  Two months into Jericho's first-grade year, Michael left for a year-long tour in Korea.  The next day was Jericho's last day in public school.  His teacher had been awful.  The school had discipline methods that were counterproductive.  Our son wasn't thriving, and he'd been having trouble getting his classwork done.  Things were getting worse (I'll talk about that later) and I needed to do something fast.  Homeschooling seemed to be the solution because it would allow us the time and freedom to look for the answers we needed for him.  To this day, it's still one of the best decisions we've made.

     One year to the day, Michael came home from Korea and a month later, we were settling into our new home on post at Fort Carson, Colorado.  For him it was going to be a new job, new people, and a new setting.  For us as a family, it would be a fresh start with tons of things to do and see.

To Be Continued...