Change is inevitable

Tonya Fennell: Cannon Connections

May is a month where change is evident in more ways than one.

The weather heats up, the grass turns green and schools release the students for a couple of months of relaxation.

And around the Fennell house there has been much change as well.

Our oldest child, 17-year-old Josh, has completed his first year of high school, experienced his first minimum wage job in food service and is starting to seriously consider what he wants to do with his future (he does know that it won’t involve food service.)

He is also driving and figuring out that money does not grow on trees.

It seems like only yesterday that I was dropping Josh off at the junior high school where his only worry was how much playing time he would get in the upcoming football game.

Our 12-year-old son Riley completed his final year of elementary school this month. He was chosen to give a speech at the promotion ceremony where he talked about how excited he is to be going into junior high. “No more bathroom buddies, No more accelerated reader books and no more walking in lines,” he said.

He’ll be a teenager in just a few months and he is almost as tall as me. Just yesterday it seems he was a pudgy baby who was scared of bubble baths and Jello.

The youngest member of our family, Peyton Grace, experiences change every day. At 16 months, she is busy wrapping her daddy around her finger and discovering the world around her. It seems like yesterday that the delivery room nurses were exclaiming how much she looked like my husband. But, now she is walking and talking.

My husband has experienced change this month as well.

His squadron, the 523rd AMU, inactivated, so he has replaced his Crusaders patches with Fireball patches and said goodbye to many good friends who have gotten new assignments hundreds of miles away.

Change is in the air for me as well. With my new assignment as Cannon Connections news coordinator I find myself juggling between being a mommy, a wife and a journalist. Being a military wife and writing for a military related paper has proven to be a challenge.

But, I keep hearing that change is good.

Tonya Fennell is the news coordinator of Cannon Connections. She can be reached by e-mail at:

[email protected]