Tag: deployment 2013

Communication is still very spotty. Sometimes I think it would be better to have no communication than the two minute phone calls that consist of me yelling…

“What?”

“Huh?”

“I can’t hear you!”

I say that, but even a minute of yelling is better than nothing at all.

We got a post card today. My eleven year old read it aloud to everyone else. As soon as he got to the last line he burst in to tears. The real kind. The kind where your chest heaves and you can’t stop shaking.

I know he is taking this the hardest. My heart breaks for this one. I can’t do anything to change our situation. I can’t make it better for him.

He’s old enough to understand it all. It stinks as a parent when you can’t fix things for your children. Especially when it is something they don’t deserve or didn’t sign up for.

The last deployment he was only four. He had no concept of time. A week was a day, and a month was a year to him. This time he knows. He knows every day, every minute, every second.

He needs his dad.

My husband has been deployed to the Middle East for 274 days.  These are my real thoughts expressing my heart during his absence.  I appreciate your prayers and kind words as we cope, adapt, and carry on without him until August 2014.  To read from the beginning, click here.

I keep getting up earlier and earlier in hopes to catch up on everything that needs to get done around here. Of course no matter how early I get up, there’s always something that comes up that makes it impossible to catch up. I attempted to make more progress on my stair project, and am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

We moved the television upstairs to the family room because even though I watch no TV, I like the Christmas specials and I thought if the TV was on the main level I might actually watch them with the kids.

My son told me that I would still not watch any television and that we should have kept it in the basement where they could play movies as loud as they wanted without waking anyone up.

So, to prove him, wrong I watched the Wizard of Oz with my little girls last night. This is probably my all time favorite movie. I did not realize how scary it might be for a four and seven year old as we watched. Whoops.

The best part was that my four year old fell asleep in my arms at the end of the movie. She’s never been one to fall asleep on you, so I this was actually pretty awesome. Even lugging her very heavy, sound asleep body up the stairs wasn’t so bad because I realized these moments don’t happen very often around here.

I finally hired someone to help me finish the stair project. My basic math computations told me it would be 2023 before I would finish it if I didn’t get some help. Looking forward to whatever progress gets made this week from my painter.

Internet connections are still pretty crummy and communication has been hard over the last few days. I’m thankful for the texts and messages that do go through.

My husband has been deployed to the Middle East for 274 days.  These are my real thoughts expressing my heart during his absence.  I appreciate your prayers and kind words as we cope, adapt, and carry on without him until August 2014.  To read from the beginning, click here.

Today was a busy. I wanted to get a Christmas tree, but I couldn’t find a place that had them unwrapped on the log. I ran errands with the littlest and we all worked together to clean out the garage.

Let’s just say that cleaning out the garage with seven kids isn’t my favorite thing to do on a Saturday, but it needed to be done, so we all worked together to do it.

In the end it wasn’t that bad and the garage is almost finished. I can see a car parked in there in my future!

We tried to talk via Skype  today but the connection is spotty at best. I think that is one of the hardest things about the deployment. When he was in Iraq years ago we talked almost every day for a few minutes. He always had a way to contact us, but he didn’t have much time to talk.

This time around he has time off every day and access to internet but the connect is so bad we can’t talk. Yesterday I had some important stuff I wanted to talk about (which doesn’t happen very often) and we couldn’t get a connection.

I realize that many deployed service members don’t even have the opportunity to call, so I’m fortunate. The kids talk to him several times a week via video chat and I realize that is something many other families don’t have.

I worked on the stairs, we moved furniture (again), and we watched a basketball game. It was a good day.

My husband has been deployed to the Middle East for 274 days.  These are my real thoughts expressing my heart during his absence.  I appreciate your prayers and kind words as we cope, adapt, and carry on without him until August 2014.  To read from the beginning, click here.

I realized one of the things my kids were missing is fun. In our house Dad is the fun one. He makes brownies for breakfast, takes them to Chuck E Cheese for no reason, and will rent and watch movies just because they asked.

In fact, my kids look forward to me traveling because they know they’ll get an extra dose of fun.

Even though he’s been gone for 24 days, he was at training before that with a short break in the middle, so we’re really going on about two months.

To try to make up for “fun dad” being gone I started weekly dinners out. Now I have to admit this is mostly for me so I don’t have to cook and we can eat vegetables, but the kids look forward to it and I let them vote and pick the restaurant.

So if you are reading this Commander, all your special deployment pay is going towards our weekly dinners, this week they picked Outback. 🙂

After we went to dinner we went shopping at Target. I had a few things I needed to get and instead of rushing in and out of the store, like I normally do we lingered and I let them spend way too long in the toy aisle making their Christmas wish list, looking at books, and trying out the electronics.

It was a really fun day.

My husband has been deployed to the Middle East for 274 days.  These are my real thoughts expressing my heart during his absence.  I appreciate your prayers and kind words as we cope, adapt, and carry on without him until August 2014.  To read from the beginning, click here.

Good news: My eye is better.

Bad news: Today was really cruddy. It seemed like no matter what I got done, someone would undo it. For every thing someone would remember, they would forget two other things.

I don’t like getting upset with my kids, but today I was upset with them. All day.

They are good kids. Not perfect, but good. I need to remember their little hearts are breaking and show more grace, more mercy.

The more grace and mercy I show them, the more they have to show each other.

The more joy that flows from me, the more that flows from them.

It is a simple idea, now if I could only walk it out in real life.

We talked about getting our Christmas tree this weekend. It seems early to get a tree, but with my kids’ work schedules it might be the only time we can get one for the next few weeks.

Thanksgiving is late this year and maybe a little Christmas is what we need around here.

My husband has been deployed to the Middle East for 274 days.  These are my real thoughts expressing my heart during his absence.  I appreciate your prayers and kind words as we cope, adapt, and carry on without him until August 2014.  To read from the beginning, click here.

It’s been three weeks since he left. The days fly by but the weeks are creeping. In all the years with all the TDY’s and deployments this will be our first Thanksgiving apart in eighteen years.

We aren’t really big Thanksgiving celebrators (if that’s what you call it). For years we didn’t even cook a turkey, we had pizza.

When we lived in West Virginia our Thanksgiving pizza tradition was replaced with a Thanksgiving hunting tradition. We won’t be hunting this year as I have no desired to clean a deer by myself.

I think my boys are bummed about it, but they have a good idea in spite of it all.

I’m proud of my boys. They’ve all stepped up in one way or another. I know this is hard on them, really hard.

They miss their dad.

My husband has been deployed to the Middle East for 274 days.  These are my real thoughts expressing my heart during his absence.  I appreciate your prayers and kind words as we cope, adapt, and carry on without him until August 2014.  To read from the beginning, click here.

I saw my brother and his wife today. For some people that isn’t a big deal, but since he lives in Florida and we live in Maryland we don’t see each other that often.

We met in South Carolina to swap cars. (long story)

It was late and we all looked like we had just driven to South Carolina so no obligatory Facebook selfie to prove we were together.

It was great to see him, even if it was for only a few hours. I like days like today because the deployment doesn’t see that real. It just seems like another crazy day where my brother and I meet up at a South Carolina Olive Garden at 9pm to switch cars. 🙂

My husband has been deployed to the Middle East for 274 days.  These are my real thoughts expressing my heart during his absence.  I appreciate your prayers and kind words as we cope, adapt, and carry on without him until August 2014.  To read from the beginning, click here.

For the last three months our home has been in some state of construction. We completely gutted and remodeled our kitchen, laundry room, breakfast room and dining room. We painted the entire upstairs (except my room) and just replaced our carpet.

While the project went as smoothly as remodeling can go, it has taken it’s toll on everyone.

Last night my son was on the phone with his friend and he told him he needed to go because it was time for dinner. His friend said,

“Let me guess, pizza rolls?”

The sad thing is that he was right. It was pizza rolls! We had some fruit too, but we are now known as a pizza roll family?

If you are a pizza roll family, I’m not judging. You gotta do what you gotta do. We just aren’t and not because I think we are better or have superior cooking skills. My kids don’t really like pizza rolls and they act like crazy animals when they eat that kind of food, which is why we try to avoid it.

But now we are the pizza roll family.

Something has to change around here.

It isn’t that hard to make dinner, what is hard is actually getting to the grocery store. It seems like every day I have great intentions of making a list and grocery shopping but things keep coming up and I never make it out of the house.

Since I have children who can drive they end up running to the store for milk, apples, and pizza rolls which apparently is enough to sustain us.

In other news, my eye flipped out after all the carpet was ripped up. I think it is a coincidence, but I’m not sure. I spent the whole day trying NOT to rub my eye off my face. Any suggestions? I tried a warm compress, but I don’t know if it worked since my eye is still driving me CRAZY!

 

See how the upper lid is red and swollen? Thoughts, ideas?

My husband has been deployed to the Middle East for 274 days.  These are my real thoughts expressing my heart during his absence.  I appreciate your prayers and kind words as we cope, adapt, and carry on without him until August 2014.  To read from the beginning, click here.

Sundays are my favorite and least favorite day of the week.

They are my favorite because we go to church, see friends, and go out to lunch.

They are my least favorite because I still haven’t figured out how to get our co-op homework finished before Sunday evening. So every Sunday evening is spent staying up late going over personal pronouns and the geography of Asia. Not.fun.at.all.

Today was extra special because my honorary eighth kid just got back from bootcamp. Before he left he was an almost daily visitor at our house and frequent dinner guest.

I didn’t think it would be a big deal when he went to bootcamp but we really, really missed him. Not only is he a nice young man, he’s wiling to move furniture, eat leftovers, babysit, run errands, and just hang around. You don’t find many kids like that these days.

He’s back from bootcamp for a few months until he goes to his next training. It made for a very happy day.

 

I couldn’t help but look at him and think about how when I was his age I was marrying into this military life. Seems like so long ago.

My husband has been deployed to the Middle East for 274 days.  These are my real thoughts expressing my heart during his absence.  I appreciate your prayers and kind words as we cope, adapt, and carry on without him until August 2014.  To read from the beginning, click here.

She lost a tooth today.

I had worried about this moment. Our first missed event.

I was worried there would be sadness over dad missing it.

Thankfully she wasn’t sad it all.

We took a picture so he could see it and she went about playing with her sister.

Later she asked how many more days were left…. I told her a lot, too many to add up.

She doesn’t really understand how long nine months is and that’s okay.

My husband has been deployed to the Middle East for 274 days.  These are my real thoughts expressing my heart during his absence.  I appreciate your prayers and kind words as we cope, adapt, and carry on without him until August 2014.  To read from the beginning, click here.