It's Been Too Long... But We're Back!

So it's been a while, but now that life is starting to settle down again after the many changes we've been experiencing lately, I feel like I finally have some time to catch up on this here blog again. Yay!

First, I've been wanting to include a little timeline of Foreign Service events somewhere before I forget it.

Oct 2014- So over two years ago, Garrett decided to apply for a job with the State Department. He heard about it in college, only you couldn't apply without a few years of experience so he's always planned on applying after working for a little while first. So he worked for the LDS Church as a Facilities Manager. The State Dept job was the same position, only he'd manage Embassies and Consulates, which he felt really qualified to do, after he put in those 5 years with the Church. When he told me that it would require international moves once every 2 years, I was a little frightened, but the idea grew on me with time, and luckily, I had a lot of that (time) to get used to it.

March 2015- We decided to sell our house in West Jordan and rent a place in Midvale. We knew it wasn't our forever house, and with this job possibly on the horizon, we felt like it would be nice not to have any big things holding us back (like a mortgage we couldn't get rid of had we wanted to) so we sold our home. The value had increased while living there, so we used the extra money to pay off debt. We saw it as a win-win, even if the job didn't pan out.

June 2015- Apparently the State Department tried to contact Garrett via email to request an interview with him, only it went to his spam folder so we had no idea and instead we continued to live in anxious curiosity about whether we'd ever have closure relating to this job.

August 2, 2015- By this point, we were pretty antsy to know about this job one way or the other so we could start making other arrangements. With a little encouragement from me, Garrett finally worked up the nerve to email the State Department, asking if there was anything else they needed from him. They responded by referring to the June email that had requested his interview for Aug 10, that he never replied to and so he was too late. Only once he said he was definitely still interested, they suggested he come out Aug 12 (10 days later) and he accepted. This was a pretty exciting day for us.

Aug 12, 2015- Garrett flies solo to DC on our own dime for his Oral Assessment. This assessment was rumored to take several hours, and it did not disappoint. It included a multiple choice test, a few essay style questions, and an interview with a panel of decision makers. Each part was scored and at the end, they told him he scored well enough to be offered this position, conditionally. He still had to pass the background security stuff as well as get worldwide medical clearance, which turned out to be trickier than we would have guessed. I do remember, however, that as I walked to the car from the girls finishing their swimming lessons, I was crazy anxious to hear back from Garrett. When he finally called and told me the good news, we were ecstatic. We had talked about getting this job for almost a year so it felt amazing to finally know that they were just as interested in Garrett as he was in them.

September 2015- Garrett turned in all his security documents and they started talking to all his references. We also spent 2 solid weeks getting all the medical stuff taken care of, going in once or twice every single day during that time. Luckily, we were literally 2 minutes from the doctor, but it was still really intense. The State Dept medical folks told us, now your doctors are going to think some of these tests seem invasive and that they don't need to do them, but you'll need to tell them that they really do need to do them. And that absolutely happened, so I'm glad they prepped us. So here's a weird thing that started happening. Eventually the 3 kids and I all got our medical clearances. They were experiencing some difficulties with Garrett though.

The protein levels in a few urinalyses kept coming back really high and the doctors couldn't figure out why. Eventually they had him go in for a kidney biopsy to see what they were dealing with. Turns out, he has a fun, super rare kidney disease called C3 nephropathy. Basically his kidneys weren't filtering properly and since the disease only affects like 1 out of every million people, they don't know how serious it is. They say that it's possible that nothing bad may ever come of it his whole life OR it could cause a lot of problems, resulting in dialysis or kidney transplant. So they determined that they needed to monitor it indefinitely, every 3 months for the first 2 years, and then if it was stable, every 6 months forever after that. Plus they put him on a couple medications. We reported back to the State Department on all this and they then rejected Garrett's medical clearance. We were devastated. It seemed like all our hopes that had just shot right back up after the Oral Assessment, had just plummeted back down.

Later Garrett was in touch with someone on the medical board who told him that he needed to appeal. Basically the information gets put through the system and it automatically rejects him. But if he appeals, his case goes to a medical review panel, with actual humans and they get to make a different call if they choose. So Garrett appealed. Only their choice wasn't what we wanted to hear either. They told us that since his diagnosis was so new and there wasn't much research done about it yet, they really wanted to wait another 6 months to see what his condition would do.

Again, another blow to us. After all that waiting, we felt like we finally knew we were probably getting this job, only to find out that nope, instead we get to do some more waiting and stay in limbo even longer.

Luckily, our landlords were super relaxed about us possibly needing to stay longer or move out early so that wasn't a huge issue. I had decided to quit my jobs because I had assumed we were moving soon, but then I learned we wouldn't be going that soon. I was fine with it though, because I felt like I'd rather be home and have time to do all the medical errands and school and whatever else than be busy working the whole time.

March 2016- So after 6 long months and 2 of his appointments, Garrett's levels were looking really good. The bad levels went down and the good levels went up with the medication and other levels looked more stable. After passing on that information, they finally got back to us and gave Garrett the Worldwide Medical Clearance that he needed in order to continue remaining a candidate for this job.

April 2016- We were notified that Garrett had passed all the security checks and was officially on the Register (which is the list of cleared candidates). After a couple weeks, they invited us to join the training class starting in September and we happily accepted!

May 2016- They contacted us again to let us know that there was actually room in the July class if we wanted to go out earlier. And since we had done SO MUCH WAITING, we were really ready to go, so we accepted that instead! Over the next few months, we purged and donated and got rid of almost all the furniture we owned, because we knew that everywhere we'd live was furnished.

June 2016- At the end of June, we had our packouts and then began our trek across the country. We packed our van full of stuff and drove down to Arizona for a quick vacation at the Ranch and to Mesa a little. Then we drove 6 DAYS with our 3 small children through New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Virginia. We stopped each night to sleep in a hotel and the kids actually did really well. I was super anxious about this road trip, but it ended up going way better than expected, for which we were really grateful.

July 2016- We arrived in DC and stayed a night with Garrett's parents, who were in town for a Principal's Conference, and then they stayed with us for a few nights in our new place as well. A couple weeks later, my dad, his girlfriend, and my niece were in town visiting as well. I invited them along with my aunt and cousin to our Flag Day, at the end of the month, when we would find out where our first post was going to be. After about 3 days of working, Garrett received his Bid List. It included (and I'll list them how we ranked them):

1. Manama, Bahrain (which is a little island right off Saudi Arabia)
2. Mbabane, Swaziland (which is right near South Africa)
3. Dhahran, Saudi Arabia (which again, is about an hour from Bahrain)
4. Malabo, Equatorial Guinea (which is another island on the coast of Western Africa)

We had a couple weeks to rank the posts and Garrett also met with someone to talk about why he chose the way he did. There were 4 people in his training class (all FMs) so there were 4 posts and each person would go to one of those places. So Flag Day was the ceremony where they gave you a little flag of your new post country and announced where you'd go. There were about 60 people at the Flag Day and we had no idea what order they'd call everyone in. Garrett was actually second, which totally caught us off guard. Our first post was going to be Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

I'll write more later about how we felt about Saudi Arabia specifically. But for now, I'll say, we're here and we made it! Maybe next time, I'll include some pictures too as well as talk about how it was living in Arlington for 6 months.

So now we're kinda caught up. Yay!