Life Is Like A Dream

I’m starting this blog so friends and family can keep track of what’s going on with my family.  Arthur and I have been married 17 years and we have three children:  Deanna is 15, Debby is 12, and Thomas is 5.  We also have a cat named Sweet-Tart.  We live in Cornelius, NC right now, where we enjoy the climate and good jobs.  I work at a bank and Arthur is a Project Manager/contractor.  I’m presently on a leave of absence from work (medical) until March 15 (possibly April 15) and have been off since January 11.  I’m doing a bit better and am enjoying the extra time with my kids.  I’ve actually been so busy driving them to appointments and school; I don’t know how we managed when I was working full-time.  Well, my parents and sister (and her husband and one of her daughters) live in Huntersville, as does my mother-in-law, so we have a lot of support.

I got my Bachelor’s and Master of Fine Arts degrees in dance and danced a short time with the Lexington Ballet, in Kentucky.  Two years after we married we had Deanna, and Achilles tendinitis made it impossible for me to continue dancing en pointe.  I taught at several private and one public school in Lexington and also started a dancewear retail store called Dance Essentials, Inc.  My parents moved from Indiana where I grew up to help us with the baby and the store.  We had the store for 10 years, but 7 years into it Arthur and I moved to NC to be near his family.  It turned out to be a good decision because three years later his dad had a brain tumor removed, and then he only lived an additional 16 months.  By then we also had Debby, and I became pregnant with Thomas.  Art, my father-in-law, named him Thomas Rhoades Stanwood, and was still alive and well enough to travel to the hospital to meet him after his birth.

My husband is now in the final stages of acceptance into the US Foreign Service.  Many people who leave the US and become families of Foreign Service Officers keep blogs, so I thought now might be a good time to start one for our family.  Next month he has the oral assessment in Washington, DC.  I haven’t seen any blogs where the spouse was ambivalent about moving overseas, but this spouse (due to my health issues) is very nervous about the prospect of leaving my family and home here in the states.  But I hope that my anxiety about moving will dissipate so I can be excited along with the rest of the family, and partake in this wonderful dream of my husband’s if he makes it past the oral assessment.