The Beginning

The Husband received notification of permanent (ha ha!) change of station in December. I don't recall the exact date, but early enough in the month that we knew it would be our last Christmas here in Arizona. Wah wahhh.

As soon as Christmas break was over, I started things moving with our paperwork.

Medical clearance for the family includes:

• Pediatrics appointment (basically a wellness check) for all three kids
• Family Practice appointment for moi
• Women's Health appointment for me, too. (I was due anyway. Wheee!)
• Dental checkups/cleaning for the kids
• Dental checkup/cleaning for me. This also meant I had to seek out a dentist because I had managed to put it off for over three years. No cavities, by the way...

I brought along the required paperwork for the doctors to fill out (not necessary in women's health, as your primary doctor in Family Health signs off). Dental was easy-peasy, so those were completed right away. Pediatrics took just a day or two. Mine was completed immediately as well.

Plan on not being able to get an appointment in pediatrics right away. We had to wait about a month.

Next up, the kids' school paperwork. Basically, it's a fairly short form that wants to know whether your child has any sort of special needs in school...an IEP. Other needs, such as requiring gifted learning instruction, etc. were not mentioned. This is not important to them. :) What I did was fill everything out myself and had an office administator at their schools look it over and sign and date. That's it. If my children were in school on base, I would have left it for the staff to fill out, but I didn't want to make it seem uber complicated and intimidating to the regular public school, since they're not used to seeing military documents and might be afraid of getting court marshalled or sent to Gitmo if they happened to fill something in without complete accuracy. (This is just an assumption.)

Was that all? For being such a fat looking stack of papers, that doesn't seem like it was much... but that was that! After everything was filled out and signed off on, The Husband scheduled our medical clearance, which is a pretty fun family event. You all get to sit at a long boardroom table and seemingly get quietly observed by five or six people as someone goes through each individual's medical records verbally. Thank God there was nothing embarrassing in there. In a nutshell, they're looking for:

• Severe/debilitating/ongoing physical illness or injuries (We were quizzed about our asthma status.Our youngest and I have it, but haven't had a major issue. )
• Severe/debilitating/ongoing mental illness

I have an anxiety disorder and have taken medication for it for years, so they decided to pull my records for Kadena to review and decide if they could handle another wacked-out military spouse (I kid!). They had a 14 day window to get back to Luke, but I was cleared in less than a week. Thankfully, there was a shortage of wacked-out military spouses at the time. Whew.

Other than that, medical clearance was seamless. After ours was cleared, The Husband was able to schedule his. The servicemember does theirs separate from the family's. They're special.

Having your medical clearance done is a big "WHEW!" moment. If everything is going as planned, your actual, real, written on paper and signed by people in blood orders come shortly thereafter.

This took place over about a two month period. Next task: the dog.

~Heather