See You in the Spring

*written Sept 23- it has taken me this long to get the pics on here*

Today was the day. Our last day with Daddy before his deployment to Iraq with the Marine Corp Reserves. On the way to the airport this afternoon, we were talking about what we were going to do when we got home to make ourselves feel better. A sheet in the living room floor with popcorn and a movie was suggested. I then asked what the kids thought Daddy could do to make himself feel better. ReRe said flatly, "Not go."

She then, along with Sisti, developed an elaborate plan to hide Daddy in the woods at the lake. We wish girls. We wish.

We obviously have some puffy eyes and lonely hearts around here, but I think we have come up with some pretty good ways to stay as connected to Daddy as we can for the next 7 months+:

1) Sometimes families make paper chains- one link for each day until a special day or whatever. If we were to do that to anticipate Daddy's return, it would have to wrap throughout our whole house! Plus, that's a lot of work. We instead (actually Aunt Kim did for us- thanks again Kim!) filled a big jar with enough M&M's for each of us to eat one each day that Daddy is gone. We will see them (slowly) disappear until an empty jar means Daddy is home! I was surprised at the size of the jar- I thought 1000 M&Ms would look like more than that!

2) The girls have "Daddy Bears" that they made with Daddy at Build-a-Bear (or someplace like that) before his last deployment (they were 2 and 6 mos old) with Daddy's voice recorded in them. We have planned to get 2 of these for the smaller two kids, but just haven't done it yet. We did decide to get them in Daddy's normal clothes rather than his uniform, though, mainly because they are more accustomed to him in his regular clothes.

3) We have a voice recorder to "talk" to Daddy whenever we want to. He has one too. We will send the tapes to each other when they are filled. We did this last deployment also and I especially loved it. I can talk to him whenever, without having to sit down to type or write. I know the girls are going to love it but we may have to set a time limit or something because these girls can go on, and on, and on....

4) Pictures. Each kid has an album of their own with pics of their time with Daddy in CA. We also made a book for Daddy with pics of all of us and each of us with him, and we each wrote notes in it also. I told the kids to write what they would want Daddy to think about when he misses them. The girls especially had some great memories to write about. We also put together some collage type picture frames with pics from CA. Each kid has theirs frame next to their bed. Here is Junie's- next to my bed, of course.


5) This morning I videotaped Daddy reading each kid's current favorite story (with the kid,) then having a huge wrestling match! I have a feeling we will be wearing out that DVD.

I have not explored the video conferencing like Skype yet, but plan to use something like that as much as possible. We are hoping Daddy will have wireless internet in his room, as we have heard rumored- just depends on what area he ends up in.

So for the next 7 months, we have many ways to communicate and try not to miss Daddy so much, but as for now, we are sitting on our sheet eating popcorn, watching Monsters Inc and feeling awfully sorry for ourselves.