Predeployment

Predeployment

My name is Annie Thompson, and I have been part of this military wife life for a lot less time than most.  While my husband, Andre, has been serving for 24 years, I have only been on board for about the last 7 years.  I’m pretty unseasoned although we have gone through three permanent change of stations (PCSs), we’ve had two kids (one of which Andre missed the birth and almost the entire first year of her life), one mobilization (thus missing his daughter’s birth and first year) and here we are folks…days away from our first overseas deployment as a family.  Old hat for him, brand new territory for me.  So while I may be “new to the game,” I certainly feel sprinkled with seasoning.  After surviving this deployment, I may even consider myself marinated.    

We have a 4-year-old daughter, Raina, and a 2-year-old son, Joel.  Raina  doesn’t remember her Dad being gone the first year of her life, obviously, so this is all very new to her, and she is just old enough that she will remember it.  Joel, on the other hand, may or may not remember, but he is old enough to miss his Daddy when he is gone.  Andre has been gone for a few months here and there so the kids, more so Raina, mostly understand that he is as important to his job as he is to our family.  This time he’s going to be gone just shy of a year in a country that has a significant time difference.  I can’t reveal much more than that because “loose lips sink ships.”   What does that mean for us?  Almost every single routine we are used to is going to change.  There is an amazing children’s book by Julia Cook about deployment (Deployment: One of Our Pieces is Missing) that we have read countless times, and one of the key messages is, “Different is change and change is good.  Change can help us grow.”  That couldn’t be more accurate.  I will grow so much in this next year.  We all will. 

Being days away – literally – from deployment day has my heart racing, and sometimes I find it really hard to breath.  I have good days and bad days – today I feel pretty good.  In fact, today I feel like I just want him to be gone so we can at least get this countdown started.  Tomorrow, I’ll probably breakdown, cry my eyes out, and wish we had three more months to prepare.  Prepare.  How do you prepare for deployment?  You do all the things.  Then you watch all the things fall apart right before they leave or about 22 ½ hours (sometimes less) after they leave which is commonly known as the “deployment curse.”  We have created for the kids and myself a pretty neat deployment wall that includes:

• two clocks – one with our time and one with his time
• a monthly countdown – each month I have a big activity planned for the kids and me
• a daily calendar so Raina can X off each day before she goes to bed and eventually Joel can help participate in this
• a mailbox to collect things we want to send Andre in his monthly care package
• a white board so we can write things down to tell him when we get to talk to him
• our deployment bucket list which includes: pedicures, theme park, touring an ice cream parlor, fishing, museums and so on.

I will also be making a weekly paper chain to add to the wall, and we have a bunch of pictures we still need to put up. The kids each have a Daddy Doll. These things are brilliant! They are small dolls/pillows that look just like Andre. We recently gifted Andre dolls of us to take on deployment with him. The goal is for him to be able to capture pictures here and there of the kids’ dolls doing different things overseas with him, and, once he’s home, I am going to make each of them picture books – think Flat Stanley.  

Happy Father’s Day to all the Dads!  We are showering Andre with tons of love today. This time next year he should be home from this deployment and while that feels like an eternity away, it’s truly amazing how fast a year can go by when you look back on it.    

Some of this blog will be little insights into military life but mostly it will be a lot of stories about life in general.  Life that happens from moving all the time and meeting different people, mom-ing, and trying to raise good little humans.  Thanks for joining the ride!