New life choices?

I have lamented a few times about how I find it challenging to be a military wife and to still feel like I am maintaining my own identity. Pair that with being a temporary stay-at-home mom and it gets REALLY difficult to feel like I have my own life. Our PCS sort of spurred feelings of my career being, well, not an actual career. I feel like I have simply been working whatever jobs came my way and that I could tolerate doing until we move along to our next base. I don't want to feel like that about my life/job/career. I hate feeling like I am wasting my degrees, but at the same time, my options in Great Falls were limited and sometimes it feels like those limited options are going to affect the job search here.

I have been thinking about this for a while, and last week Brian and I decided to seriously look into making this thought a reality...I have been thinking about going back to school to get my BSN and eventually my MSN. I know this probably seems like a completely random career path for me, but ever since my pregnancy and birth experience, I have wanted to be a part of making other people's birth process a positive one. At this point, my thought process is that I would go to school to do labor & delivery nursing and then go on to get an MSN in midwifery/women's health. I'm also planning on doing Lactation Consultant training (which I can do with or without nursing school.)

It is a huge decision and sort of a scary step to potentially commit myself to 2 or so years of more schooling. It comes with a lot of logistical issues to figure out (how to pay, do I work FT and go to school PT or just go to school FT, etc). Since I already have my undergraduate degrees, I would take an accelerated BSN program, but I still have to take 4 science classes (A&P I and II, Chemistry and Microbio) before applying to nursing school (since I was a Spanish and Latin American Studies major in college, I never had to take all of these science courses!) so my plan is to take those as well as the initial LC training this year and apply for the BSN program next fall or spring. Getting into nursing school is competitive, so I am a little nervous. I guess all I can do is really do well in my four science classes this year and try to make myself as strong of a candidate as possible by doing extra things like LC training.

This is sort of in the elementary stages of planning and actually comes with a lot of decisions to be made...we have had to really talk about all sorts of hypotheticals. They are mostly questions like: Can we use the GI Bill/are we willing to commit to another 4 years in the AF? How about NOT committing another 4 years and getting out when Brian's commitment is up so that we can stay here and I can actually 1)finish school if I haven't and/or 2) establish myself. And let me tell you, with how difficult this PCS has been in terms of stupid little bureaucratic issues, the option of leaving the military world is looking better and better. Regardless, it feels like this could be a major life decision and with that comes with SO.MUCH.PRESSURE.