Welcome to Our Crazy Life!

Soooo after being a faithful reader of a dear friends blog for almost two years now I finally decided to leave my post as an observer and become a newly acclaimed (well self-acclaimed) participant! I also thought it would be a good way to keep everyone so far away from us updated on our life here in wonderful New Jersey. I mean I know our life is boring and never changes but I'm sure I can make it sound interesting. Haha Anyone who has talked to me in the last few years knows that last sentence is a lie since I have literally changed jobs and places of residence more times than need to be mentioned.

On that note I thought I would provide a little summery of what these last two years have involved....

In March of 2007 I married the love of my life in the best city in America (duh the field of the Bakers). My amazing husband then carted me away to the most wonderful hotel ever: The Ritz Carlton in sunny San Fransisco. Oh and if you ever go there you have to go to the Sunday brunch in the Mark Hopkins Hotel (top of the Mark)..so yummy! We had the most amazing time and ended our honeymoon in New Port, RI. We then hauled all of my stuff to the Great State of New Jersey where Josh is Stationed and had been living for most of the year before. I am not going to lie...it was a hard transition. In the first two months of our marriage Josh went from working the day shift to the mid shift to the night shift..oh and did I mention that we were a one car family at the time. Oh yeah and we have also changed cars a lot during the last two years :) I also had the great joy of learning how to navigate my way around New Jersey without GPS. For those of you who don't know what jug-handles are..well..lets just say you don't want to know. However, as hard as the adjustment was to this new life I can't even express how wonderful it was to finally be Mrs. Joshua Reno and starting our new life together!!


Josh continued growing in his career and I settled in to the new apartment and got rid of all of the lovely (or not so lovely) bachelor items. I loved shopping and decorating our new little place. I relished in my new role as housewife and stated cooking and cleaning anything I could. Our place was small though and two people can only eat so much, and I soon realized how bored I was (for those of you who have seen my room you know how I don't really thrive in clean areas)! That is when my addiction to finding and starting new jobs started. We experienced our first military separation in July of 2007 when Josh was deployed for the first time for two months and I returned to Cali for a month.


When Josh returned we decided to make the first addition to our family and in September of 2007 we welcomed our new Yellow Lab puppy into our home: Charles Dyson Hoover Bartowski Reno III..or Charlie for short. Let's just say the Charles has provided us with many laughs and tears throughout the last year and a half!! HOWEVER...no one told me how much work having a puppy would be or how expensive they are!!! let's just say we new we weren't ready for kids anytime soon! I really do consider Charles our first born and boy have we learned a lot from him (and don't worry I do know there are a lot of differences between a dog and a kid)! As the puppy continued to grow our apartment soon started to seem smaller and smaller and the stairs up and down to take him potty started to become more annoying than ever! soo...we found a nice house with a yard and in January 2008 moved into our first rented house. Charles soon discovered many ways to entertain himself including ripping out the heating tube underneath the house and allowing us to heat the outside for about a month (no joke)! I do truly believe though that we could not have survived this last year without a yard! Charles loved to run around and explore all parts of the yard although his favorite thing to do was see how many different ways he could get out of the yard and visit his friends in the neighborhood! A big shout out to all of our neighbors who rescued the escaped pup numerous times throughout the year.

However the long drive to work everyday for Josh (about 40 minutes) and the fact that Charles was starting to eat everything in site in our house while we were gone (including a bag of m&m's, pillows, swiffer dusters, Dewar's chews, outlet protectors, etc.) proved that it was time to move on base. Unfortunately though after many miscommunication and who knows what else the base house wasn't ready and our lease was up and we were homeless!!! We are in a time of limbo right now and living in temporary lodging on base. Our poor Charles who we miss dearly is at his puppy camp (most people know them as kennels). But don't worry because we have been granted visitation rights so we can see him when we want. We are hoping to move soon to the new house but for now all we can do is wait. We have found a nice church though and have made some good friends so far and God had definantly streched both of us in ways we never thought possible.

Thank you all for hanging in there for this long re-cap of our past two years!!! I look forward to sharing our everyday experiences with our friends and family all over the country!