We're In the Army Now

Yesterday, Jerry officially started his training to be a paralegal specialist. Which is what was scheduled to happen. But until he actually started, we were a bit skeptical. It turns out that his particular class is made up entirely of prior service soldiers, which is good news for us. It means that they will be able to eliminate some of the field training, which will make his training period shorter. And that translates to less time that Jerry Giant and I will spend apart as well as knowing sooner (hopefully) where Jerry's first post will be. So it's a pretty exciting time for us both, a time where we will start to get some answers to the questions about our future. We've submitted our post assignment requests, with two of the three domestic posts requested being in Texas. We are hopeful that he'll be stationed in Texas, so that we can see a lot more of Elyssa. We'll be keeping our fingers crossed! Our third choice is in Washington state, which I think would be an interesting place for us to live. If we're shipped overseas, we've requested Germany (I would really love that!), Hawaii and Alaska. Yeah, they're considered overseas. I'm hoping that we are not going to be sent to Alaska, but we had no other choice when making the requests. From what Jerry's heard from other soldiers, we may have his post assignment as soon as three weeks from now. Which would be great for my peace of mind, at least knowing where we're going and then beginning to do the work I'll need to do to start looking for employment and planning a move.

Jerry's also requested to go to jump school. To be a parachutin' paralegal :-) Ithink that's pretty cool and hope it works out for him, even though it would mean a few more weeks apart between his training and his first post assignment.

Here's a photo I took of Jerry when he came home for Christmas, wearing his costume. I mean uniform. He's very handsome, don't you think? I guess I'm a little biased!

Yesterday, I called USAA to update our insurance policy to reflect the new last name and Jerry's marital status. Because of their affiliation with the military, the very nice lady directed me to a really cool website for army spouses. It's called cinchouse.com. Already I've found some really great articles about health and fitness, as well as information on finding jobs when we move from post to post. It turns out that there are a lot of sites like this, which I think are gong to be very helpful to me as I try to navigate life as an army wife, something that is so new and so foreign to me.

That's all for now in the exciting life of GiantPantz!