Two Questions

Two questions that I've been asked pretty much every day of the last month have been, "do y'all where you're going next?" and "has Henry picked a school yet?". I felt pretty confident saying "we won't know our next assignment until probably April" and "he hasn't but he's almost positive he's going to Montana State. "

I was wrong on both. 

We found out last week that Matt is going to be the next AFSOC Command Surgeon at Hurlburt Field. It's an incredible opportunity for him but it does mean another two years here. It took me about 12 hours to fully wrap my head around that, but I'm getting more excited now. In reality, we've only had about 7 months of regular life here in Florida. The last year has just been pandemic and isolation, and oh, that damn election cycle. Life in no way has been normal. I'm going to be hopeful that in another six months we'll start slowly getting back to real life. There's a lot of Florida that we haven't been able to do - Disney and Universal with Viv, swimming with the manatees, Key West - all things that we were looking forward to before our Eglin assignment, and all now still a possibility.

That's the short answer to the first question. On to Hen. For the last few months, it's been all Montana State University. MSU checked all the boxes that Henry thought he wanted checked. He applied to MSU, Iowa State, Case Western Reserve, and Seton Hall and was accepted with great scholarship money to all of them. We put the housing deposit down for Montana State and planned to tour the school in a couple of weeks. I thought we were set...until Thursday night. That's when Henry told us that he has been thinking, and he isn't 100% confident with MSU anymore. I figured he was just getting cold feet (pun intended) about going so far from home, but as he talked more, I knew he had been thinking about this for a while. In true Beansie fashion, he had to think through it all before he could talk to us about it. I kind of wish he had mentioned a little something before I booked airline tickets to Montana and put down a housing deposit, but whatever. 

This past weekend he submitted his application for Florida State. He's researched it and has a good plan. A plan that I can't argue with, and options that are across the board. So now we wait. Again. I couldn't have imagined a more different college search than this one, but I also know that Henry doesn't follow anybody's path but his own. 

So there you have it...we are staying here in Florida and Henry has not decided on a school yet!