The Ohrvalls | The Life and Times of

The following post is from a testimony that I shared with my MOPS group at Immanuel Church in Gurnee, IL in 2019. It is written to be spoken aloud infront of a group of moms of young children like myself. It is about the time that I spent mothering my two children solo while Matthew was deployed. It was our first deployment and a rough one for me. The following is some of the things that I learned from the experience. Hi ladies, most of you know me but incase you don’t, my name is Jennifer Ohrvall.  My husband, Matthew, and I have been married for over 9 years and we have two children:  Isabella who is 4 and conner who is 2. I’m here this morning to talk to you about the year that I’ve had.  I know this is the day of “tea and testimony” and usually when I think of telling someone my testimony it involves the entire lifetime story of what Christ has done in your life.  That is a long story!   So today I am going to focus on this past year because there have been a lot of st

It has been quite here again.  I promise there is a logical reason for that! With Matthew away on deployment the kids and I took an extended vacation down to NC for the holidays.  We were there for Thanksgiving, Christmas, the New Year and for Conner's birthday.  Of course we were looking forward to seeing all the family and letting the kids get to know everyone better.  One thing that I did not anticipate happening while we were there was all the very natural and frequent mention of my mother. You see my mom passed away very suddenly and unexpectedly 3 years ago.  With us being a military family, we aren't around our extended family very often.  My extended family are the people that knew my mother the best.  They hold her in their hearts daily as do I, but it is a little different in NC.  Different because they live in the same area that she lived and a lot of their surroundings can remind them of her. While I was in NC there were so many places, occurrences, people and c

It was just another normal Saturday morning.  We love to take it easy on Saturday mornings, no school work to do, no plans until later in the morning.  Isabella was busy planning what costume --read princess dress-- she was going to wear to the trunk-or-treat event that we were going to later that morning. As 9:30 rolled around we headed out so that I would be able to get the decorations up and ready to go before all the trick-or-treaters arrived.  I had planned a game themed 'trunk' in the back of our van.  I had a tic-tac-toe game, a spider target game and a pumpkin bean bag toss game for the kids to interact with while making their rounds. The only problem with my plan was that I did not account for the amount of wind that would be blowing while we were outside.  As you can see in the photos the wind caused all the games to blow around so much that we were not able to play them.  The wind also caused what would have been a chilly day to be a freezing cold day!  

I want to tell you all a little story about a day that I had recently, yesterday in fact! I'll start where my day always seems to start: Six am on the dot with a mouth breathing Isabella standing right beside my bed.  Anyone else have one of those type of children?  The ones that wake at the same absurd hour of the early morning? Both of my children have inherited that lovely trait from their father, not from me! Anywho, I could sense that she was there; standing beside me, staring at me, willing me to wake up.  You know, that ability to feel someone's presence before you actually see them?  Yep, that is how I wake up most mornings since Matthew left on his deployment. And so the day started!  Conner was already awake as well, I could hear him 'talking' to himself in his bedroom.  So in we went to get Conner up and changed to bring downstairs with us.  Only problem, Conner woke up on the wrong side of the bed on this particular morning.  So begins that whining, th

Hello everyone! I know, I know, it has been a REALLY long time since I last posted anything here.  We have since been in Great Lakes, IL for a little over 2 years now and I feel like we have made ourselves a comfortable home and extended group of friends that are like family in the area.  But of course, like true Navy fashion, and God's design for life, nothing goes according to plan. I thought here in Great Lakes there would be little to no chance of Matthew ever getting deployed. God had a different plan.  Long story short, he is now deployed overseas and has been for almost 3 months.  He will be back sometime around May 2019 (that's about 10 months total). I've been having a lot of thoughts about how my days and plan are escaping me and I have trouble remembering what I've did yesterday let alone last week.  And so, I've decided to try and take back up on the blogging.  Hopefully it will be therapeutic for me and as well as help me when I want to look back

Hello all!   I know that it has been quite a long time since I last posted a blog but I decided it was time for another post.  Having a little one crawling all over the place really takes up my time now-a-days.  Infact, the only reason I am able to write this now is because she is napping.  Maybe I will be able to get this done in the time it takes for one nap...we shall see.  So here it goes. This past week the Ohrvalls' took a much needed vacation to Cairns, Australia.  Matthew and I had such a blast taking Isabella on her first family vacation but it was difficult to transition our old vacationing without kids mindset and bring it to a vacationing with a baby mindset.  It is quite different going on vacation with an 8 month old than it is with just two adults.  Needless to say, we spent a lot more time in the hotel room during nap time and at parks for playtime.  But we were still able to do a lot of really fun stuff as a family that we will never forget (atleast Matthew and I