2019/2020 The Year full of surprises and The ‘Rona

Let’s start in September 2019, when my wife and I found out we would be PCSing (permeant change of station) to the states. Which meant that my wife would need to have her green card all sorted and we would need to downsize our belongings and figure out the process to bring our giant dogs with us. You see we only had about 30 days to have all of our affairs in order and leave Germany for the good ole U.S of A. Like I said in my first post I had to sell one of my dream cars that I had only bought a year earlier, we also had to figure out how to bring our 115 lbs Newfoundland and Husky mix, and ship our other car to the port in L.A. So the frantic calling began and after a few trips down to Frankfurt from Spangdahlem, which is about a two hour drive, we learned we could book the dogs on the flight with us, for a hefty fee of course. I ended up finding a buyer for my GLI two days before we left, and my wife’s green card was complete and she was good to enter the country. So now all that was left was getting the house all packed up and start our journey to Fabulous Las Vegas.

Now it’s the end of October and we have landed in L.A. with the animals and we are all reunited, and our drive to Las Vegas and our new home can now begin. Part of all the frantic calling was getting in touch with a realtor and trying to find our new home. Well, being new to buying a home we had one lined up, earnest money deposit was paid and it passed inspection. So we started planning our paint schemes and what we wanted to improve on only to have it all come crashing down with the pool having a major problem and the VA loan wouldn’t move forward with the sale. So now what, the military only pays for 10 days in a hotel when you arrive and we were already 6 days in? Oh, did I forget to mention that our dogs also had to be boarded on our dime since the military base closed all of the pet friendly rooms? So, in comes our amazing realtor, who now was showing us multiple properties everyday until the perfect one became available. With the perfect house found again, we started the whole buying process over again, earnest money deposit put down, inspection passed, VA appraisal done, and then we had to wait too close. While this all is happening we had to move out of the base hotel because our 10 days were over and there was an air show going on, so all of the rooms were booked. That’s when the search began to find a pet friendly hotel that would let us stay for longer periods of time, and incase you forgot, on our own dime. Once again in steps the best realtor in the world (seriously) and she negotiates us to take early possession of the house while we were waiting on the close date. Meaning we could finally move out of the hotels and finally start to settle into our new home.

It’s now December and we are finally in a house with all of our pets and most of our belongings just in time for Christmas and New Years. Living in the fabulous Las Vegas, my wife and I went down to the strip to bring in the New year. We watched the fireworks from the parking garage of The Strat and played the all too familiar now game of gun shots or fireworks. We think most of them were the fireworks, but once the cops showed up on the streets down below, we decided it was time to leave and head back home and see what 2020 had in store for the Miller Family.

A few days into 2020 and everything seems normal. We starting painting the interior walls in the new house and finally making some-sort of dent in the sea of tan that was the interior of the house. So far January was looking to be just a normal month, then my wife came out into the living with life changing news, she was pregnant! At first I didn’t believe her, I checked the pregnancy tests and saw they were expired and said maybe they were giving us a false positive. So we did what any rational people would do and bought like four different brands of tests from our local pharmacy. Once those tests were taken, they all confirmed that the first test was correct. We are gonna be parents, something neither of us had planned for, especially since we were just settling into a new house and new city.

A week or two into knowing we were gonna be parents come August/September, something no one was expecting started showing up in the news…COVID 19. When the virus first came onto the scene, my wife and I along with the rest of the world had no idea the impacts that it would have on everything. To us we thought it was gonna be like a flu warning and life would go on as normal. We started to plan the gender reveal party, thinking up what the theme would be and who from the small group of people we knew from our new home town we should invite. Then things starting taking a turn for the worst with Covid. Business were shutting down, towns and cities were going on lock down, and now they were telling everyone they needed to stay away from people because they were thinking the virus was airborne. Great! Now how were we supposed to have a gender reveal when no one could attend, and the one person that knew what the gender was, was now tasked to deploy and couldn’t attend even if she wanted to. Our plans were falling apart just as fast as the virus was spreading.

We talked it over and decided that having a gender reveal wasn’t going to happen, so we would just open the envelope ourselves and just tell people over FaceTime or Zoom. The time came and we opened the envelope to discover we were going to have a bouncing baby boy! I was thrilled, my wife not as much, she was really hoping for a girl. Now came the new tasks of narrowing down the names. We talked and thought about it for the rest of the pregnancy, right up to the day he was born.