Thoughts of the Day
My life has qualified me as "experienced" on such topics as Army life, parenting, mental health, loss and grief, multi-tasking, and adapting to all things new (good, bad, or indifferent). I will share my thoughts on these topics and hopefully you will find some calm in the chaos knowing that others have been where you are.
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39 Things I Have Learned on my Journey Out of the Darkness Into My Happiness
Recently, I have been thinking an awful lot about the journey that brought me to this current place in my life. The friends who have come and gone. The friends who have remained or reconnected. The friends who are distant memories. The relationships that I had. The ones that ended amicably. The ones that ended disastrously. The ones that just ended. The paths that I chose. The easy ones and the difficult ones. The decisions that I made. The good ones and the bad. My experiences, each and every one of them, and my perceptions of these events, and the way in which I handled each one at any given…
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The Real Story Behind Deployment
This post is about my military wife friends (and the spouses whom I do not know) who have lived though multiple deployments while starting and raising families, pursuing their own personal development, and nurturing and strengthening their marriages through the long separations. I respect you. I support you. I applaud you. I have already written about this deployment being our first as a family. We are almost half way through and so far it hasn’t been as terrible I thought it would. Certainly, it is true that everything breaks as soon as your husband leaves… …but that’s really not a big deal. We laugh about that. We make jokes and…
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Old Friends are the Best Friends
Do you have that one friend (or a few) whom you have been friends with forever? That friend whom you may not see or talk to for years and pick right up where you left off as if it had been only a few days? That friend whom you know you can always call in a crisis, but never really need to? That friend whom has seen you at your best and your worst but really only sees just you? That friend whom genuinely and sincerely only wishes the best for you without hidden resentment or jealously? That friend whom has always been your friend and always will? Yeah, that…
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Funky Sunday (or Deployments Suck)
Deployment life is definitely not for the faint of heart. In fact, it pretty much downright sucks. Today marks 108 days since J left and we have been in a funk since day 85. And in case you’re wondering, we definitely count the days…Every. Single. One. Which is why I know the exact day when the funk set in. Some days move quicker than others. Some days are easy. Some days are long. Some are really, really long. And some days are completely awful and I think, “How the heck are we going to make it through the next ____ days?” Long holiday weekends, like this one, are difficult because…
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Deployment Blues
Today marks 100 days of deployment! I think it also marks a turning point in our moods because yesterday during Friday Night Skype Time, emotions were running high for all of us. It was the first Skype date that ended in tears all around. The kids were crying that they miss Daddy so much and they want him “to come home forever.” This, of course, led to both my husband and I tearing up. We have all been doing really well with this separation, better than I expected, in fact. Last night truly was the first time that the real Deployment Blues set in… Appropriately, I donned a mostly blue…
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Cheese Curd Day
Thursday is Cheese Curd Day where I live. At least it is at The Cheese Store on Route 3 in Watertown, New York. I had never heard of cheese curds until last week when a local resident insisted that I must try the fresh cheese curds on Thursday. So yesterday, we headed out to The Cheese Store to see what all the excitement was about. I admit that I did a Google search on cheese curds because I was very unsure what to expect. In fact, the name itself kind of grossed me out! For those of you who are also unfamiliar with this local delicacy, this is what I…
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Church and Church Appropriate Attire
First, let me start by telling you that I am not a strict church-goer. In fact, after college where I completed a Minor in Religious Studies and analyzed the world’s major religious belief systems in an intensely academic way, I was completely turned off to all religion for a very long time. However, this past winter while my husband was away on a painfully extended training trip which lasted from the first week of January until the last week of February, I decided it was a good time to see what church could offer me at this point in my life. I was alone with my two young sons braving…
