The Bright Side

We met up with some friends this week at the farmer’s market. Which was fun… excepting that I hadn’t realized that this would be the last time we would see them together as a family, since my friend’s husband is deploying.

You can really tell that deployments seem to come in waves. My dh is leaving on a different schedule than most of the friends I have here, which is good and bad in itself. Of course I’m glad to have him home yet, but I feel guilty somehow. I would much rather suffer together. And conversely, a year from now when all their husbands are coming home, mine won’t even be close to being done. That’s hard, too.

So I thought I would join the crowd (since I’ve seen a lot of these lately) and write my own list of things I appreciate about deployment. What’s always funny to me is how similar many of them are! Here we go:

1) I GET THE iPHONE! (ok, ok, so I’ve mentioned this one just a few times before)

2) The extra money (for any civilian readers, during a deployment military pay isn’t taxed, and the service member receives extra pay. Of course these things have names like “hostile fire pay” and “family separation allowance” which I really don’t like to think about)

3) I am a night owl, and dh is a morning person/ light sleeper. I love being able to stay up until all hours of the night and do whatever I want (and relatively loudly).

4) I gleefully leave all the lights on (his pet peeve)

5) If I want to eat mac and cheese with the dutchkid for dinner or Nutella on toast no one asks me what food group that is.

6) I am really looking forward to trying out Netflix (which I’ve never done before).

7) I lose weight while under stress, and I have a good 5-10 pounds I can live without.

8 ) Vacations back home to see my family that do not involve intense negotiations on who we will have time to see.

That’s all I have on my list at the moment, but I’m sure I will add to it as it gets closer. Sadly sometimes these lists make me think of all the things I will miss, but those things can go without saying for now.

A good day to be a milspouse

Happy Milspouse Appreciation Day! I promised myself that this year I was going to take advantage of all those wonderful freebies out there… namely to get a free massage. But here we are, and as usual I am too lazy to investigate (or brave any potential crowds). Last year at least I was productive, in that I wrote out my PCS Checklist. It’s a checklist for all of the cancellations and address changes to keep track of when you move. I do hope it’s been helpful, and I get a lot of searches and hits for it, so it looks like that’s the case. Since the bloghop I do have some new readers, so I thought I’d put it up again here as we head into PCS season (only I’m not moving this year, yeah!)

PCS checklist

I hope that all my fellow milspouses have a wonderful day today, and somebody go enjoy a massage for me, will you?

Military Spouse Bloghop!

Riding the Rollercoaster is hosting a milspouse specific blog hop today! I’ve been meaning to do some investigating to add some new blogs to my reader, so I thought I would join in the fun (my very first bloghop, to be exact).

So, hi! I’m Ellen. You might find me elsewhere as dutchgirl or dutchican.

I have been married for almost 12 years to my wonderful hubby and we have a 4 year old daughter who is affectionately known here as the dutchkid. My dh was in the Army already when I married him, although we met in college and I’m pretty sure I remember him saying how he was not making this a career (ahem). We are currently preparing for another deployment this fall.

Things you might find me writing about around here:

• music (Once upon a time I was a nurse, but I’m currently back in school, as a music major)
• life as a mom
• military life
• crafting
• photography
• or any other number of random things that cross my mind. 

So welcome and feel free to poke around!

A small housekeeping note: Because I have a wordpress.com blog, I can’t use Google Friend Connect here, so I would love it if you would bookmark me or add me to your feed reader!  You can also find me on Twitter. I’m going to try to see if I can follow in return from my blogger account that I use for commenting.  Thanks for stopping by and I look forward to visiting you in return!

Monday mash-up (midtours and porridge)

There are actually plants starting to grow in my garden! I’m even fairly certain they’re my lettuces and not weeds.

I’m glad that I’ve managed to sit on my hands and not plant anything cold-sensitive. Just when I think I can breathe a sigh of relief that spring is here, we had a light dusting of snow this morning. I live in the southern part of my fair city, and I’m really glad about that sometimes. The folks up north (like only 20 minutes from here) got a bunch of snow over the weekend but we were spared.

Also this weekend, dh started talking about when he put in for his midtour leave (evidently it will be all scheduled out beforehand and he already submitted his dates). This is not helping my denial any (aka: I don’t want to think about this now, I have all summer before I have to face it thankyouverymuch.) He wants to push it as far back as possible. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but Goldilocks has nothing on me: “This midtour is too early. This midtour is too late. But THIS midtour is juuuuust right.” Oh well, looks like the first half is going to be the big hump. I may have to eat my porridge cold, and LIKE IT.

Now if you’ll excuse me, we have a Barbie hair crisis I must attend to (I kid you not. There is crying). Have yourself a fabulous Monday!

A military child

April is the “Month of the Military Child”. I’ve seen some mentions of it here and there around the blogosphere.

It’s made me think a little bit more about the dutchkid and her life as a military kid. I used to write a lot more about military life and sort of felt like I ran out of things to say. Most of the time I don’t feel defined in that way for whatever reason. Nor do I tend to define my kiddo as a “military child”. I’m not saying that it doesn’t have an impact on us now, or that it isn’t a part of our identity (it most certainly is!). Then again, my dh has been home for awhile so that could be why as well. In my mind deployment is the big deal breaker. We look like your average suburban family until that comes up. I’m curious to see if/how the upcoming deployment will change what I write here.

But, (oh you knew there was a but, didn’t you?) when I am honest with myself, I admit that I am worried about the next deployment and how my military child will deal with it. I know that overall she will be fine, but it still makes me wonder what I’m in for. I may be an old hand at dealing with his absences, but she is not. She was just a baby last time he deployed, so at that point as long as mama (aka the milk supply) was nearby she was good! I know someone here who insists that at her age now that deployment is just as easy.

I’m not so sure. She’s plenty old enough to miss her daddy. She certainly misses Grandma, who we only see a few times a year! She doesn’t have a very good grasp of the passage of time, which could be a positive or negative. It may seem to her that he really has been gone “forever.” Also in my experience, reintegration last time was harder because of the added parenting aspect. My dh and I have different parenting styles, so I am forseeing some big adjustments in that arena.

Oh, who am I kidding. It’s going to be a big adjustment in every arena. A year is a really long time, no matter how old you are.

Merry Christmas to you, too.

The list is out.

THE list. Available assignments for the coming summer PCS cycle. It was sent out on Friday evening, after duty hours. Isn’t that nice? So everyone can agonize over what’s on the list, without being able to get any answers over the week of Christmas.

Maybe they thought they were doing everybody a favor, but personally I would have been happy to spend Christmas in blissful ignorance.

What do you say to that?

Last evening my dh came home late from his economics class. This grad school program that he’s doing requires mainly weekend classes as well as online stuff. He was discouraged because they’d had a test and not only did he feel like he didn’t do well, he also felt like he had wasted hours and hours studying the wrong material. Inevitably our conversation turned to the future and this is what he said to me:

“I’m worried that they’re going to send me to a MiTT team and as I get blown up, my last thought is going to be how I wasted my time on this grad program instead of spending it with you guys.”

It takes a lot to make me speechless. I finally managed to say something about how you can’t go through life that way, and then I proceeded to try to be rational and help him talk through the pros and cons (would the masters truly be helpful in the future? Did he need it for promotion? Would he be able to finish it later if he stopped now? Would he regret not just getting it done?). But on the inside I felt like crying. I’ll be honest, I walk around most of the time pretending like the bad stuff happens to somebody else.

I miss him being around now, and let’s just say the “good family time” that this school was supposed to be turned out to be a myth. Being a single parent when your spouse is actually at home sucks. But I want what is best for his future, I’m so used to sacrificing what I want for the cause I didn’t know what to say. What are you supposed to say?

And so it begins.

My dh contacted branch a few days ago to find out the timeline for when they’ll be determining his next assignment.  We figured it would be late December/early January before we would know, and that will definitely be the case (dh’s school ends in May, so we’ll be moving by early June).

I feel like I’ve blogged this subject to death over that past year or so from our last move, so I’ll try to spare you until I have actual news.   As always, the waiting drives my inner control freak crazy.  We are not particularly hopeful for a great assignment.  We are planning worst case that he will deploy within 6 months or less of our move because his dwell time will be over a year.    We had hoped the school he is attending now would have led to some interesting opportunities, but because his branch is so short he has been told that he will most likely get a regular old assignment where all the benefit of this school (the honing of his Spanish language skills and experience working with Central/South American counterparts) will not be used at all.

It’s discouraging because as his time in the Army draws to a close, we are starting to think of all the places we would have liked to have been, jobs he would have liked to have done.   In the past, he let other things go because it didn’t seem like a good career move, in retrospect now it doesn’t seem that important.  After this upcoming move we will likely only have one more before he drops his retirement paperwork and this Army chapter of our life is finished (that’s scary for me to even type).  This is the time we would like to have one of those cool overseas assignments.  Honestly, it makes me wish we had gone to Korea after all.

Such is life, I guess.  You do the best you can with what you know at the time.  Now we wait.  I’m trying to not let my cynicism get the best of me.

I am really starting to like it here.

Today as I was pulling out some spent annuals and planting some pansies in a flower bed, my dh asked me why I bothered to waste money on flowers when we’re leaving in 7 or so months.

A valid question.  Particularly for the frugal among us.

The first reason is because my funk is gone and I am so glad to do something productive.  And really, nothing cheers me up like flowers, anyway.

The second reason is because I really do like it here.  I love that we can walk to the park, and there are sidewalks for long shady strolls and quiet streets for the dutchkid to practice riding her bike.    Planting flowers makes me feel settled here, even if that’s only an illusion.  Plus, I still have this weird habit from when I was a kid of attributing feelings to inanimate objects (there’s a term for that but it escapes me).   So I like to think that it makes the house happy to be loved and for someone to take the time to do things like plant flowers.

And thirdly, well, this reason should probably be number one…  After we moved here and I planted flowers in the first place,  I received so many compliments about how pretty they were.  When I’m out watering, strangers walking by often tell me they like them.  All of the houses on our street are exactly alike.  For those of you not familiar with military housing, I don’t mean how some suburban neighborhood homes are all similar, I mean carbon copy exactly.   Some of my neighbors have great lawn furniture or spectacular playsets and some have immaculate “House Beautiful” interiors.   I don’t have any of those things, but the flowers are my stamp that this house is mine.

35 dollars well spent.

So that’s why I married him.

Right now I am eating the best green curry to be had in this neck of the woods, better than either of the Thai restaurants in town.

The way that my dh has been relaxing lately is by cooking.  And let me tell you, he needs to de-stress.  He absolutely hates being in a school environment and it shows in every aspect of his attitude about life.  In short, he’s miserable to live with.  He’s trying to do a master’s program along with the Army school and every time he talks about it you can practically see his blood pressure rising.  Sometimes I think that he would have rather deployed than be here, and lately I’ve secretly been wondering if that wouldn’t have been easier on all involved.

Well, easier on everything except my tastebuds.  The man can cook. He has some serious culinary skills, which used to bother me a bit because I’m competitive, but I’m way past that now.  If only I could get him to clean to de-stress I would be set.