Shiny and new...

Yesterday, I made a video of our new home and put it up facebook. Everything was empty, and the carpet was fresh with the tracks of a steamer. It sparkled. I opened the patio doors; squealed when I talked about candles around the garden tub. We went out with a good friend and bought a TV and new shower heads. Occupational therapy got Aaron a new shower bench. Today, household goods came with the things we haven't seen in a over a year (20 months for Aaron) and Haverty's delivered our new furniture. The piece-of-pie shaped coffee table (they call them cocktail tables now) won't fit so we'll cancel that. We had to rearrange everything and rent a storage unit. Everything's a mess right now and it's so incredibly wonderful.

But there is so much hope in those carpet steamer tracks, the sparkling kitchen, the ice maker in the fridge. It's our first "new normal" home. New normal. I am almost sick of that phrase. It is used more for people after deployment than it is over here. I like "post-blast" better. This is after the blast, right? We can finally start living it. These are our first steps out into the regular world, the one that kept spinning when ours nearly stopped. It definitely began spinning in a new direction, but we've adapted. We can spin backwards and do flips. We can run with chains on our waists and drive without the petals. We chose this new condo not because the Army told us to live near a certain city and base. We have decided to settle here after he has reached full potential with  rehab. If we were going to find a new home in another state, we'd stay in the building at the hospital, but we have decided this where we're going to be. So we stepped (rolled) out, did the research, and made our choice.

The future is bright. And we're wearing sunglasses.