Duty

My blog is titled "Navy Wife & Mommy Life," but as of late has had very little to do with the Navy aspect of our life.  Well, it's had very little to do with anything at all since M got home because I have been slacking horribly in updating, but I digress.  I find that a frequently define myself as "Navy Wife" and not much else.  I hope I'll make time in the next week or two to post about how that has been weighing on my mind recently.  For today, I'm just going to be the Navy wife.

Before M left, we were told that his ship would be going into drydock for maintenance when they returned from deployment.  A few weeks ago, that finally happened.  This is good news, as it means there is no chance of him re-deploying for the length of the stay in the shipyard.  And that should mean that we get to see him more!  During the week, he generally works regular days: 0630-1530.  Every fourth day - weekends included - he has "duty."  Duty means he is required to stay on the ship for 24 hours and be on call or standing watch for that shift.  His department has four duty sections that rotate, so the reactors are manned 24/7.  This means that if his duty day is on Sunday through Thursday, he goes in to work at normal time, is on duty for 24 hours, then works the regular workday the next day.  If duty is Friday or Saturday, he goes in at normal time and spends the night on the ship, but is usually home by 9am the next morning.  And if duty falls on a Saturday, he does not have to go in to work on Monday - so we still get a two-day weekend.

Even though Saturday duty days seem like they shouldn't be that bad, I hate them.  They always fall on weekends when I have a million things I need to get done and they just end up being horribly inconvenient and stressful for me.  Today was one such day:

My in-laws are coming tomorrow evening.  I am excited for their visit, and have known about it for months.  For some reason, though, the fact that I needed to prepare a place for them to sleep escaped me until a few days ago.  I realized that I really needed to finished unpacking the last few boxes that are still stacked in the guest bedroom and I needed to make up the beds in that room for them.  And those tasks needed to be completed in addition to the standard cleaning that I like to get done before I have visitors.  I got a lot done yesterday in the way of laundry and regular cleaning, but still needed to get the guest room ready today, as well as clean the bathrooms and finish making up the beds.

Our church was also having a spring cleaning day this morning and I had books to return to the library.  I had planned to get up at 7, shower, get SJ up at 7:30 (her usual wake-up time), head over to the church for a few hours, drop the books at the library on the way home, and work on cleaning up the guest room.

 SJ had other plans, of course, and decided she wanted to say goodbye to Daddy before he left for work.  After I tried to get her back to sleep for over half an hour, we got up for the day around 6:30 and it was all downhill from there.  She only got about 9 hours of sleep last night (she usually averages 11-12), so she was in a miserable mood from the moment she woke up.  She napped, but only for a total of about an hour and a half, and that was divided over three naps.  She was incredibly unwilling to occupy herself for any amount of time today, so the only thing I managed to accomplish on my to-do list was the unpack the boxes from the guest room.  Unfortunately, unpacking them was as far as I got.  We had dinner and then I finally gave her a bath and got her ready for bed around 7.

We had been under a tornado watch all day but hadn't gotten any storms yet, so after I put her down I decided to turn on the weather just to check it out.  A very strong line of storms was approaching and the NWS issued a tornado warning for my city.  And I live in a third story apartment, so I obviously have no basement or real safe tornado shelter.  So I went and got SJ, grabbed my laptop, and ran down to the complex clubhouse to wait for the storm to blow over.  While we were hanging out there, a very loud alarm (not the fire alarm) went off and continued to sound the entire time we stayed there.  The tornado warning was lifted at 8:15, so we headed back to our apartment after that and I finally got SJ to go back to sleep at about 9:15.

And now I still have my entire to-do list to do.  I think I will just put away the clothes that I unpacked earlier today and clean up the dishes from dinner and head to bed though.  I am exhausted!  Tomorrow M will be home to at least occupy SJ so that I can finish the list after church, I hope.

Goodnight friends!