FAA accademy

Hey everyone. I have been meaning to write a post for ages but I never get around to uploading pictures so i kept postponing it! I promise to follow this post with one of pictures so you can see what we have been up to and how big Preston is getting!



Cory is 3/4 of the way through school here. Its challenging but he is doing well and has passed all of the tests so far with high marks! He has got to learn all sorts of fun things like the phraseology of ATC and how to spot 50 different planes from the air and know what they are and how much wake turbulence they cause and how heavy they are. He has me practice with him and i get to pretend to be the pilot and rattle of fun things like " Academy Tower, continental 312 heavy over woody" then he tells me a bunch of gibberish about wake turbulence and when and where to land and then i say " continental 312 heavy, roger, runway two-eight right cleared to land" its like a fun little game. I have learned more about air travel than i though i ever would! I have much more respect for it all too!



MOVING again!



So in three weeks we will leave Oklahoma and all the humid sticky windy-ness behind. I will miss some things though, yes that is right Oklahoma has grown on me! I love all the green here. Its so beautiful! We have driven around a lot and there are some quaint neighborhoods i would love to live in with lots of luscious green lawns and big sprawling trees. I just love trees!! Plus housing here is really affordable, which is not the same for midland! ( its an oil town and remember all those 4 doller prices on oil? there are more millionaires per capita in midland than any town!) Right now we are having a thunderstorm. I never saw anything like this in Utah. The whole sky lights up with huge spidery lightning and followed by a rumbling that surrounds you from all directions. This has currently been going on for HOURS and not a drop of rain yet! Its so beautiful and I love to just watch the flashes and listen to the rolling sounds of thunder ripple through.



We went to Midland Texas over Memorial day weekend. Man is that place in the middle of no where! Its a seven and half hour drive.. which is not too bad and we have the DVD player in the car so we thought easy peasy great weekend trip. It started out great and we were enjoying seeing some of Oklahoma's beautiful and lush country side where everything was green and wild flowers grow along the roadside. After two hours of driving I realized we had missed a road and were 2 hours off track of where we should be. I don't think i have ever been so frustrated! So we got back on track and by now the kids are fussy and want to stop when really we have not even started yet!



A few more hours into the drive we stopped to feed the kiddos and hopefully regroup them because we still had a ways to go to the hotel i had already booked and payed for on priceline ( so i couldn't cancel it and i am cheap and was not going to pay for another one closer to where we currently were!!) We stopped at cracker barrel for dinner, which we all enjoyed and wondered why we never went to before! The kids even ate their food which is really the deciding factor in weather or not its a good place to go! Near the end of the meal Theo started patting is bum and frantically telling me poo poo. Let me interrupt my self here to explain that he has decided to potty train him self right now against all my wishes since i know we are in the midst of moving and i would rather just deal with it once we are moved in, so like July. Theo has decided now works for him and has started taking his diaper off and randomly using the little potty chair. So when he started saying he needed to go i took him away to the bathroom because i didn't want him screaming poo poo at the top of his lungs in the crowded dining hall and i knew that is what would happen if i didn't address his need. Sadly we got to the bathroom a little late but i took off the diaper and he finished on the toilet. This is when i realized i didn't have a diaper bag! I threw away the diaper, cleaned Theo up best i could with paper towels and washed all our hands well. I just put his shorts back on and figured he would tell me if he had to go pee and he just went the other so we should be fine the next 10 minutes till we were don't eating and went back to the car.



This is when being a lazy mother does NOT pay off! We go back to the table where my food is now luke warm and i start to eat again. About 2 minutes pass and Theo looks at me alarmed and screams poo! i then look alarmed grab him and RUN to the restroom. Oops. its loose and everywhere down his leg, all over his shorts, in his shoes! I wanted to throw up right there! If i had been at home i would have put him in the shower and hosed him down. But no shower here. I was in the stale and took off his shoes and shorts. i wiped him up best i could than waited till the restroom emptied out. The i put him in the sink nekked from the waist down and washed him with soap and hot water. Then repeated a few times. ( i am so greatful that no one came in while all this was going on!) I dried him off and sat him on the counter to watch as i tried to clean off his shoes.. thankfully he is in love with these stupid cars shoes that are like crocks and easy to clean! then i looked at the shorts... and rolled them up in a paper towel and threw them away! i didn't like them much anyways... and we were in the middle of no where and i didn't want that in my car for the whole weekend stinking it up! It was at this point i realized my two year old had nothing on but a shirt and a pair of red foam sandals. We are at the restroom which is behind the whole general store part of the cracker barrel restaurant where lots of middle aged people are browsing around and i am sure not wanting a nudist streaker! I also did not have my phone with me.. so i couldn't call Cory and just tell him to bring me the diaper bag. I finally picked Theo up so my arms were covering his bum and walked out to my car as fast as i could! I am halfway through getting the diaper on when Cory and the other kids show up at the car. He wanted to know where i had been for so long... i wanted to know why he wasn't at the table with my yummy half eaten but still wanted meatloaf? He thought i was done since i left??? yes that's what i do when i am done with meals. I grab a kid and just go out to the car and wait 30 minutes hoping he gets the hint and joins me. It was a frustrating day. We finally made it to the hotel at 1:30 am.



In the morning we got our first taste of Midland. Its really barren and looks alot like Utah in the sense that all the brush and weeds are that grayish yellowish white color and no green thing exists unless some dedicated person has been watering it. The only trees are the ones that have been planted so the older neighborhoods are nice with shade, but newer parts are pretty sparse. We found an apartment to live in. Its a small 2 bedroom but its a townhouse style so thankfully no neighbors under us to be annoyed at our kids and no one over to bother us! We will be moving june 25th. We went out to the tower where Cory will work at the airport. They gave us all a tour and were really friendly even though our boys were tearing the place apart! We had dinner the next day with one of Cory's new co workers and his wife. They will be in our new ward and were really sweet to feed us and allow our boys to tromp through their place! Then we started the long drive back to Oklahoma and driving away from midland on the dry flat boring roads sprinkled with oil rigs on both sides... i just wanted to cry. this i my new home, for years, maybe for ever?? I little part of me at that moment wished that Cory would not pass his final test here so we could head on home to Salt lake!! SHHHHHHhhhh don't tell him i said that! ( ya he doenst read my blog...) I got over my pitty party though and reminded myself that when we first got to Oklahoma i wondered why anyone would want to live here and now i like it. So i am sure in a few months i will post all the awesome things about midland.... lets all hope anyways!