Leaving breadcrumbs

It's been three months since we arrived in Seattle.  When I started this blog a year and a half ago I had every intention of writing about being an insta-mom when we got our foreign exchange student Muro.  Now that I am a mom, I have no idea where the time went and there is this big abyss between this blog post and the last.  I suppose life is like that.  We spend our lives looking ahead, fixating on that end goal, where we want to be and at some point, we stop and have to connect the dots to figure out how we ended up where we are. Some of our living is deliberate while other times life just takes its course and Duane and I let it.  I wanted to start this blog up again for two reasons.  One is to give myself a roadmap to talk about the goals we set for ourselves as a family, as parents, as spouses, as friends, as workers, as Airmen, as humans.  The other reason is to give us a place to reflect on where we find ourselves when life takes its course and there is no trail of breadcrumbs to get us back to where things are comfortable and familiar.  In the end, it's all about the journey, the trail of breadcrumbs we leave along the way and the things we see and experience while leaving them, not the destination.  This blog is my trail of breadcrumbs.

I recently created a book for our families that took them back to our beginning.  It got me thinking about all the places we've been and how far we've come in just a short time.  

All those images and memories dance in my head and they emerge when something triggers them.  Big fluffy snowflakes make me think of Duane's smiling face when he was in Iraq.  I was living day to day then, each day waking up hoping it wouldn't be the day I had to leave him, yet wanting to leave Iraq and get home to Japan.  Then I spent the next nine months wishing time away so we could be together again.

Last night Duane and I watched the movie Click where the character in the movie, played by Adam Sandler, spends his days with a magical remote fast forwarding through life, hoping he will hurry and get to the good part only to find that the little moments in between where he finds himself is the good part.  It isn't until he is on his deathbed that he realizes he's inadvertently wished away all the good stuff.  Looking back over the whirlwind of the past five years, I want to make sure those moments in our lives find a home that will always be there.  I was able to capture some of that when I made that book, but I realized I've been a terrible keeper of our memories.  This fueled my decision to blog again.

Five years later, here we are.  How did we get here?

I'm not really sure, but it sure was nice to go back and connect the dots.  I realized in the process I hadn't left myself any breadcrumbs and trying to make sense of our journey was harder than I'd thought--we'd done a lot!  All of those memories in between might one day fade away.  At the same time, here we are in Seattle, making new memories, and we are here alone.  Our friends have to live vicariously through our facebook posts and our families cling tight to their email inboxes, hoping for another photo of August.  Whatever we do, whoever we tell, one things for sure: wherever we go, there we are.  Time will continue to pass and I don't want to forget what happens in the middle.  So come along with us on this journey and we'll get lost together.  At least we know there's a trail of breadcrumbs to get us back to the comfortable and familiar.

With that, I'll end my first blog post in more than a year and leave you with this video of the little girl who changed everything: