In the beginning…

When I was a little girl, I remember flipping through the Sears catalog and seeing my future very clearly. I would cut out pictures of the dresses I would wear and the bedding for my beautiful bed. I imagined all the little details that would make up my grown-up life. My plan was to do great in school, graduate, attend college, and land a fantastic job. I dreamed of meeting an amazing man, getting married, and having wonderful kids—essentially, the whole white picket fence fantasy yada yada….

Check out all things 80’s I found right here!

I grew up in the eighties, the generation of big hair, great music and riding our bikes everywhere until dark. It seemed so logical that we would all grow up and live the fairy tale. What could possibly go wrong?

Well to start with, no one handed me a guidebook to anything that was coming and worse yet they don’t even print the damned Sears catalog anymore, what a tragedy.

Instead, during one of our life planning meetings (always happening on our rank second or maybe third hand sofa) my girlfriend says to me “let’s go to bootcamp” We grabbed the big thick yellow page phone book and the Navy was the first one we found. The recruiter (God bless you Darrell) was there lickety split. He arrived to our run down trailer house and probably thought “this is going nowhere”. Well fast forward a couple of months, a lot of testing, a few medical pokes, the papers were all signed. So began the first of the “what the he** did we just do” questions. We filled our last summer with adventures, friends, bonfires and dirt roads (you know who you are). Before we knew it our date came up and following many tears from our mother’s, my best friend, her sister (because who wouldn’t want a part of this action?) and myself were off into the great big world, going to conquer all they could throw at us. Again thinking “what could possibly go wrong?” We were about to find out….