My new "home" city

We have found our new city! Joshua, Jax and I, along with our two English Bulldogs, Barrington and Brixton will be starting a new life, post military, in South Florida. From my life in Southern California,  to taking a leap of faith by moving across country to North Carolina to be with Joshua, to Northwest Florida where we got married and had our first child, we are now starting our new adventure, our first life changing adventure after the military, in Port Saint Lucie, where Joshua has accepted a new job. We are excited to explore this city, which prior to Joshua's job offer, we had never visited before. I am grateful for his job that has allowed us to transition out of the military more smoothly than it could ever have been without one. I am grateful that where we have moved to is still by the coast, where I can continue to enjoy the beach and the warm weather. We are excited to be surrounded by a few major cities, including Miami and Orlando, so that we can start enjoying once again the benefits of a big city, such as attending professional sporting events and concerts, night life options, and simply more opportunities for enriching experiences and more diverse cultural influences and interactions, that I have missed since living in Southern California. On the other hand, we are happy to settle and have our home in this smaller city of Port Saint Lucie, in which we can enjoy the calmness of living in a quiet place, where we can easily go for walks anytime of the day, avoid traffic, get to hopefully really know our neighbors beyond the "hi, how are you?", most likely to easily meet other Moms with little ones like me for play dates and new friendships, spend afternoons seeing Jax run around in the numerous parks in our area and truly be able to have the family life be our focus. Joshua and I have waited a long time to start this particular kind of life that we are about to begin. It is a life without deployments and the kind of worries, one has when married to a man who is constantly far away, in the midst of danger, hardly with anything of comfort and sacrificing his life, his family's life, in ways that are much more unimaginable than we want to think. We are relieved to have overcome all the challenges that we had encountered along the way, to get us to this moment in our life together. Despite the excitement of this new adventure, I was reminded, more than ever, just within this past week of having to say good bye to friends I have made, that I will truly miss our home along the Emerald Coast. I have grown to really love that place! It has the most beautiful pure white sandy beaches I had ever seen, along the clearest of ocean water, sometimes more green than blue, but always impressive and breathtaking. I definitely never grew tired of going to the beaches along 30a. I will cherish that place forever and will be back there constantly throughout my life, from here on out! It was where Joshua and I got married and where Jax created his first memories. For those reasons alone, our home there holds a special place in my heart. The truth is, it was the military that brought us there. For that, I have come to acknowledge that as challenging as the military life can be, I have also been fortunate to have experienced it at all, for within the challenges of the military life, I have become stronger as a woman, wife and mom and even as a friend. Being around other women who more days than I can count, were my sanity. I learned to be a friend in ways that I never had to before. We held unto each other for companionship, relief of loneliness, laughter, solution to boredom, even gossip and like family, we were in each others' lives in the most ordinary situations to the most unpredictable circumstances. We shared days doing the most mundane activities that over time, given us security in one another's presence. We bonded over the smallest, simplest things but also together feared, hoped, dreamt and conversed over the craziest ideas. I can only hope that in my new life, I will gain friendships as special as the ones I had made in our previous home. Joshua and I are excited of all the possibilities that lie ahead of us. We are excited to think that this could be the place we make a permanent life for our family, where Jax will grow up and our family expands. I am also nervous. I sometimes get anxious of what is still unknown to me and what may be left unfulfilled, but we are here now. I am in this new place, new adventure, new life, a reality of our choosing, and just like every new place I have ever lived, I will be exploring as much of it as possible. I have no doubt, that there will be many surprising pleasant discoveries. My faith relies in my determination to continue finding every bit of life's treasures.

See you later, 30a life...

30a, Florida

Photographs taken on 4.27.2014