Living in a family of six is always interesting to say the least. Last year, we were privileged enough to have the opportunity to build our house. It was exciting and scary, stressful and emotional but life changing. We were able to find a builder that helped us transform plans we found online into the house of our dreams!

There were many steps to the process but one major obstacle we overcame was living in our RV for almost 4 months. The length of time is a whole other blog post but we willingly moved two adults, three kids and three dogs into our RV on base at the RV Park. (Thank goodness Talon was at A-school so we had one less participant for most of it. He did visit for three weeks though!)

The decision to move was not an easy choice, but it was mostly a necessity. We were really working on saving a large chunk of change for closing costs, down payments and all those sneaky fees that suddenly appear out of the blue when closing on a house. This helped us do that.

Months of planning and a few tears from the kids about learning they had to share the back bedroom of the toy hauler, and subsequently a promised vacation to Universal Studios if they all got along, and we were ready. We moved in the week before schools were out for spring vacation, which meant I was also going to be off from teaching.

The little kids weren’t with us for this vacation because of amazing custody schedules (she says with a forced grin) and Brock was playing baseball and couldn’t leave town. My hunky husband and I decided to go visit Talon in Pensacola, Florida while he was still there for A-school before transferring to his first duty station a few months later.

We had a fairly uneventful trip to Florida, which was nice after the stressful pack out from the house into the RV. We were looking forward to not only visiting with Talon but also getting to visit a good friend from Paul’s former squadron.

We hadn’t even been there for 24 hours when we received the phone call around midnight our time. It was almost 10 at night at home.

“Mom, I flooded the RV!” Brock exclaimed on the other end while calling from Nevada.

My subsequent responses will not be written down in order to prevent ever being used against me, but let’s just say I wasn’t quiet! It took some time to work through the process, but basically it boiled down to two teenage boys staying in the RV, which had a water pump that stuck just enough in the bathroom. Lucky for us, Brock handled it quite well and did a decent job of cleaning up the mess but not before he described water running down the stairs from the bathroom into the kitchen/living room area. It took almost 30 minutes on the phone to make sure he could fix the issue and confirm the cleaning operation was thoroughly done.

Let’s just say that Paul and I both pictured money floating out of the trailer with total water damage, rotting floors and mold. Lucky for us, the boys cleaned up the water and dried it sufficiently. That was also fortunate because with it being on base, we were limited to who we would be able to call for help while we were thousands of miles away.

This was one of the seventeen-year-olds first adult trials and he stepped up and handled it. He doesn’t exactly have the greatest cleaning track record, so I would be lying if I said I wasn’t worried, but he proved us wrong. I can say it is one of the times we were perfectly happy to have our teenager prove us wrong!

Mom! I flooded the RV...