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When You're Far Away

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My granddad passed away a little over two weeks ago. He was a great man and I was really lucky to have known him. But we live in South Korea right now. So I wasn't able to fly home for the funeral. Okay. Technically I could have. For about $2000 and 20 hours of travel, I could have loaded up my 4-month-old and my almost-three-year old and flown by myself (because my husband couldn't take off work) to Springfield, MO. My husband even told me that I could go if I wanted to. But I made the decision to stay. It wasn't just the long flights, it was going to be two jet-lagged babies too. So my heart was broken once when I learned that he passed away, and twice when I made the decision to not go to be able to hug my grandma and my dad. I prayed about it and came to peace that it was the right decision, but that didn't make it any easier. When you're a kid, you imagine all these things that must eventually happen when you grow older. Eventually, you get married. You
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Running After Baby #2

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I have been wanting to give a running update, but I've been putting it off at the same time. So here I finally am. And here's the truth: running is painful right now, so I'm not doing much. And I can't enjoy it while it feels this way. My pregnancy with Ellie really did a number on me. Between our move and some pre-term labor I had around 31 weeks, I didn't work out much at all for the last 2 months. It got to the point where I couldn't even walk my dog for 30 minutes at night without waking up feeling sore like I'd run a half marathon the day before (and you know I know well what that feels like). I was carrying her really low at the end (which made for a quick labor!). But I think to accommodate that, my hips and all surrounding muscles got really loose and weak. When I run now, it's painful. It's not so painful that I think I'm doing more damage, but it's not what running should feel like . There's lots of uncomfortable-ness. The w
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A Day in the Life in South Korea

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Life with Two Littles: How I'm Surviving

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I had a very well-meaning mom tell me straight-up, very seriously, that she wished someone had told her that transitioning from one to two kids was harder than the transition from zero to one kids. I'm still not really sure if this was a helpful comment or not. I think it made me unnecessarily scared and gave me a lot of anxiety about our move right before. But on the other hand, it was very hard. I felt like I was drowning, to be honest. At least for the first few weeks, after my parents went back home and James went back to work. But  I am happy to say that for about the past 3 weeks or so, I've not only felt like I'm not drowning, but I've got things under control and I'm able to actually enjoy this time with my children at home, as a stay-at-home mom, in another country away from family. By the way, did I mention that my husband is in company command right now? *Cue big sigh.* So it's a far cry from a deployment, but he has been getting home later and
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Ellie's Birth Story

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Here's Ellie's story! This pregnancy was not as easy as my first and was emotionally much harder on me. We moved when I was 8 months pregnant from Yongsan Garrison in Seoul to Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek. As if moving wasn't stressful enough, Camp Humphreys does not have a functioning hospital yet. So to have the baby, we had to drive back up to Seoul for my final appointments and for the delivery. When there's terrible traffic (and there often is), it can easily take two hours to drive from where we live to Seoul. Most women will not deliver that fast, but it's still makes you feel uneasy when there's videos online of women giving birth in the car. By the way, when we decided to try getting pregnant, I thought we would still be living at Yongsan, a mile away from the hospital. I'm not even exaggerating about how close we were. I often walked there for appointments. And now we had to drive possibly two hours. So we prayed. Almost every night, we pra
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Yongsan to Humphreys and New Beginnings

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Hello there. I've had this blog for just over 6 years (6 years! that's ancient on the Internet) and have started and stopped it several times. There's been a few big things that have happened since I last posted. I love writing and I miss blogging. So I'm having a go at this again. The biggest major thing that happened is we have a new addition to our family. If you follow me on Instagram, you know this. Her name is Ellie Joy and the name suits her well. We moved from Yongsan Garrison in Seoul down to Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek when I was 8 months pregnant. That move was the most difficult move so far (yes, harder than moving to Korea initially). It might that it was mostly hard because I was hugely pregnant and emotional. It might be because it was Jensen's first move in which he (kinda) understood what was happening. It might be because we moved from our American "bubble" on base to an off-base Korean apartment. Or really just a combination of all of
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