A Soldier's Welcome

I have been waiting to decorate our home and truck for weeks!  I bought the window paint months ago!  I made a wreath for our door for just this occasion!  Finally, homecoming day had arrived! I was up at the crack of dawn placing little flags along the walkway.  I used my son's sidewalk chalk to write "Welcome Back Daddy" along the path.  I hung a patriotic bunting and welcome home sign along the fence.  Here's a taste of what our home and truck looked like on that beautiful homecoming day...

Are we there yet?

 It's been 11 months, 5 days, 22 hours, and 52 mins since we gave "knucks" to daddy and said "see ya later" at the hanger.  But who's counting, right?  Anyhow...if you're wondering why our goodbye sounds so informal, it's because it was.  I never got out of the car, never unbuckled the boys carseat.  We didn't hug, we didn't kiss...there was no long embrace, no tears.  While some would say that sounds terrible, you should know this...We've done that before.  We did the tears, the hugs, the painful goodbye, and it was HORRIBLE!  It's like having someone you loved ripped from your arms.  We couldn't put our son through that.  He is still too young to fully grasp a deployment, though for weeks leading up to the deployment, we had many many discussions about daddy's job, where he was going and what he would be doing.  He seems to understand, but like I, has not shown much emotion regarding the deployment.  I attribute this to the fact that we don't often refer to it as a sad thing, but instead an honorable situation.  Our son tells his friends, "Daddy is my hero, he's fighting the bad guys".  He is very proud of him.  But as strong as we have all been these past 11 months, the last several weeks are certainly proving to the hardest & most trying.  While I'm doing anything and everything to keep my mind and body busy, the days are CRAWLING!  But even so, I'm seeing signs of a redeployment in our future.  Tough boxes are beginning to show up on our porch, my husband has recently moved out of his room to allow for his replacement soldiers to take over, the FRG's are having redeployment briefings, my "Welcome Home" signs are arriving in the mail this week, and I've been making "Welcome Home" daddy outfits for friends all month.  In case you were wondering why I had not added any new care packages to my posts lately, it's because we've passed the mail cutoff date.  To help my son (and certainly myself) get through these next few weeks, here's some of the things we've done to pass the time and prepare for daddy's return:

 I made my own camo purse...still don't have a name tape for it.

 Making Welcome Home signs at an FRG function. 

Made my own door wreath for daddy's welcome home decor.

I've also created a Popsicle countdown for our son.  He gets one Popsicle per day.  When they are gone, daddy will be home!!

This week, I'm breaking the rules and I am sending out one final care package...it's just a box full of cookies and nothing but cookies...7 dozen cookies to be exact!  My husband has no intentions of keeping them all for himself.  He just wants something to hand out to everyone before they head home.  Hopefully they make it, but if not, no harm...someone else will enjoy them I suppose.  I'm also beginning to nest this week.  I've redecorated my kitchen, started repainting some rooms, replaced bad light bulbs throughout house, organized closets, and there's so many more (unimportant) things to do.   Preparations are finally underway for the hubby's return and I couldn't be more excited!

The Coolest Care Package Ever

Yeah that title is a pun, but you can take it literally too...because Penguins are awesome! You would already know that if you had read my previous post.  Anyhow, as I've already noted, my husband loves penguins, so I HAD to send him a penguin themed box this month.  To date, this one is my favorite :D  Honestly, I think the boxes just get better and better.  I've got about 9 stacked up in my office, every other day I'm adding a couple items to each box until they are filled.  I have a box that is just about filled to the top, so I just need to make some cookies this weekend and I'll have it in the mail Monday.  I can't discuss the details of the box yet though, it's Top Secret.  Well, really it's because I think my husband has been checking my blog lately, spoiling his themed box surprises.  So you'll have to wait until he sees it before I can discuss it.  But to hold you over, here's this week's box.

Freedom isn't Free

My hubby's 4th of July box is packed and ready to go out in the morning! :D  Here's a quick peek at the contents.  Check out the post that follows for more details on baking & decorating the cookies.

Picture Perfect Cookies

Tomorrow morning I'll be dropping off my husband's 4th of July care package.  So tonight is prep night :)  I've been feeling a bit crafty lately, so I did a little online research and found some tips on cookie decorating here.  Instead of just smearing royal icing over a cookie, I learned about flooding a cookie.  It requires a thinner royal icing. You can add more milk to your royal icing or look up a recipe for glacé icing.  The technique requires you to first outline the cookie with your regular royal icing and then use the thinner icing to flow out to the edges.  I used a toothpick to help direct the icing to the corners.  This is a pretty simple technique, hard to mess up.  They turned out super pretty!

Celebrating our Wooden Anniversary

Well, it's been 5 whole years since we said "I do".  I'm sure a lot (if not all) of our family and friends didn't see us making it this far.  After all, we knew each other a whole five minutes before he popped the question, I said yes, and we were walking down the isle.  It was love at first sight, and though we were crazy, five years later we are still going strong.  This year is a milestone in our marriage, five years marks the first official symbolic anniversary, the wooden anniversary.  I wanted to get him a new golf driver (not actually made from wood, but it's considered a wood), I also pondered a guitar, a drawing table, a work bench, etc.  Unfortunately, I couldn't really come up with a wooden anniversary gift that would fit into a flat rate box...so I gave up on the whole wooden gift dream and decided a cardboard shipping box was close enough to wood and settled on a gift I knew he'd want.  When my husband came home for R&R last month, we had a spat over a pair of $100 headphones, yeah 100 freaking bux!  He wanted them, I responded with laughter.  He wasn't joking.  Well, I finally went back out and wasted way too much money and bought those suckers. I hope they are the best freaking headphones ever.  For that price, they better make Miranda Lambert sound like Patsy Cline. (Sorry if you don't like country music, that's my only analogy for this post).  While I had about a week to decorate the box, it was down to the last minute before I had purchased anything to go into the box.  I have a reasonable explanation, however.  I promise, I'm not a last minute shopper!  For one, I couldn't come up with any ideas...I shopped and shopped, but I had no clue.  Secondly, I was in the midst of packing up and returning to NY this week.  Well, basically if I wanted his package to arrive by our anniversary, it was going to have to go out this morning.  So at 9 am, I was running around town in a rainstorm, desperately seeking out some goodies in the grocery like I was a contestant on Super Market Sweep.  (Oh lookie there, I lied, I did give another analogy).  Anyhow, I got the box out on time and it's currently making it's way to the middle east.  I made sure to snap some photos in the truck before I dropped it off at the post office.

Is this enough care packages for you??

So I've always been a bit of a smart a**.  So it was obvious what I was going to do when my husband told me he wasn't receiving enough care packages (poor guy, apparently everyone else gets more than just 3 a month).  He said he wasn't sure if I loved him anymore :*(  (Don't worry ladies, I could see his fake poked out lower lip through the phone). Well, of course I felt soo sorry for my hubby, I knew just what to do...send him 4 ridiculously embarrassing packages.  One was filled with hearts, hershey kisses, teddy bears, chocolate, poetry, and anything else that would be sure to get some hazing outta the surrounding soldiers.  The next box was Jagger's fathers day box to his daddy, which included his own hand painted pottery plate and Perry The Platypus (my husband's favorite cartoon to watch with Jagger). The third package was a requested package...his supplements and a new toiletries bag.  However, I still managed to "girlify" the bag and throw in some kisses, poems, a flower, a card, and more.  The last box I sent out was a tribute box. You see I took my father to a reds game for an early father's day gift last week.  My husband was so sad he couldn't be there with us.  He kept saying stuff like, "Oh well, you enjoy that Reds game, I'll just be here, alone, serving our country"...again picture that lower lip poking out and quivering.  Well, I felt bad for him (a little) so I sent the game to him (figuratively speaking.) I sent him a couple of our favorite baseball movies, a reds cap, peanuts, pop corn...etc.  You get the idea.  I also took a picture of Jagger and myself in our Reds fan gear.  So this father's day, my husband can have us and a reds game too, sort of :/ But hey, that's the army for ya, you gotta learn to compromise.  Well anyways, I have about 4 boxes in the dining room currently being filled and prepared for next week.  As I finish those, I'll make sure to post them too.

It's the little things...

Typically, I send my husband a care package every 2 or 3 weeks.  I'd send them more often, but getting to the post office hasn't been easy this winter (I hate you too, Fort Drum).  Now that the snow seems to have melted for good (fingers crossed), I plan to make up for the shortage of care packages my hubby has been receiving these past several months.  Recently, my husband sent me on a mission to clothing and sales with a mighty large shopping list.  Apparently, getting your standard issue isn't so easy in the sandbox.  I wonder what men without families back home do about getting these things??  Okay, back on point...So I went to the clothing and sales, purchased everything he requested (which I might add was not cheap...why do we buy the uniforms anyway?...okay another blog...) and then took my son over to the PX and tried something a little different.  I told him to pick out whatever he wanted to get daddy.  I guess he's done this enough with me now, because he did REALLY good.  He picked up cheese-its, gummy worms, instant mac n cheese, oreos, oatmeal, beef jerky...you get the idea.  I think he might have done better than me.  When we returned home, I took some photos of Jagger packing the box and I threw in a DVD slideshow I made of us.  All in all, it was an awesome care package.

I also found time today to make a countdown chalkboard frame that I discussed in a previous post.  I promised if I ever made one, I'd post a photo.   Here's my completed masterpiece. It's not great, but I'm proud of it.

Help Keep Them Close

During my husband's first deployment, my son was just a newborn.  His only care was eating, sleeping, and crying for hours on end.  The fact that his father was thousands of miles away probably didn't have much of a major affect on him at that time.  When my husband redeployed, it really began to hit him just how much of our son's life he had missed.  He left home with a pregnant wife and returned to a walking toddler.  Over the next year, my husband did his best to make up for lost time with our son.  The day he deployed again, our son was nearly 3.  We had prepared our son for several months beforehand for what was to come, knowing he was too young to fully grasp the situation.  We talked to him about it almost every night after prayers, explaining that daddy would be gone for a long time, but that he didn't want to leave us and that he would be home as soon as he could.  A week before the deployment, we took our son out for a special day, just for him.  Before the day was over, we visited Build-A-Bear, where my husband dressed the bear up in camos and recorded the bedtime prayer in his voice.   We asked our son what he wanted to name the bear and he said, "Daddy Bear".  We teared up right there in the mall :)  Now every night before bed, my son makes sure he presses Daddy bear's hand and says his prayers with daddy and then gives it a kiss goodnight, just like he always did with daddy before.  It is the one thing that really keeps daddy close to him when he's so far away.

If your child doesn't have their own "daddy bear", have no fear!  There are plenty of alternatives out there for keeping daddy (Or mommy) close during deployments. Here's just a few I've found:

http://www.operationhugahero.org/

http://www.huggeemissyou.com/product_p/rcdc2.htm

http://flatdaddies.com/  (If you cannot afford one, you can also apply to have one donated to you).

http://cool.canvasondemand.com/category/operation-hi-mom-honey/operation-hi-honey/  (Again, you can apply for a free one.)

Here's a photo of my son and husband building "Daddy Bear"

Who wants cake? They all want cake!

A few months ago, my friend posted a photo on her facebook page of some cake jars she had made to send to her deployed husband.  They looked delicious, and it was such a great concept.  Cake in a sealed jar to maintain freshness for weeks to come!! I immediately looked up the directions and ran to walmart for supplies.  After baking and sealing the cakes in a jar, I covered them with holiday themed material, surrounded them in bubble wrap, boxed them in a flat rate, tossed in some icing and plastic forks and shipped them to the hubby.  I couldn't wait for his reaction.  It was a success! He loved them.  I just sent him a few more this past week, this time tossing in a pack of candles.  His birthday is next week, and you better bet my husband is going to have cake on his birthday!

What's with that name??

I am an old fashioned southern gal, with the mindset of a 50's something housewife.  I bake, clean, take care of my husband, child and home.  Let me point out that by no means am I pushing an anti-feminism ideology on anyone, this is just what works for me.  But back to my point, when my husband and I were first married, I still had those "my husband wears a uniform" stars in my eyes (which by the way I still get those butterflies in my tummy when he puts on the full battle rattle). So everything in my home had somehow been touched by Uncle Sam's decorator.  If it wasn't red, white, and blue, it was covered in camo.  I was also very gitty with the idea of being a new wife.  I wanted to do everything right, really make grandma proud.  Though my cooking skills were pretty horrific to begin with, I made up for it in the baking department.  I always had cookies, pies, cupcakes, or some sweet treat cooling on my glass cake platter, and before long all my husband's battle buddies started noticing.  On the rare occasions where one would stop by and there wasn't a sweet treat on the counter or in the oven, they would ask, "Hey, where's the dessert?"  I loved it!  I was starting to fill the homemaker role I desired.  But I was missing something...my apron!  Every good housewife needs an apron!  And of course, mine just HAD to be patriotic.  Luckily, I had some digi camo material lying around my house (leftover from the Christmas stockings of course), and so I went to work.  I wasn't much of a seamstress yet, but I figured I'd give it a shot.   It looked terrible, but I wore it proudly for 4 years.  Luckily, over those last 4 years, I'd like to think my sewing skills have drastically improved...so I decided to use the last of my camo material (I still had some laying around), and give the apron another shot.  This time, it came out perfect and I've since retired the old apron.  Many of my friends have requested I make them their own camo apron...and I would, if only I could find more of that darn material.  But anyways, now you know the meaning to the blog name.  Yes, it obviously represents the apron itself, but it's also a metaphor, duh. Camo= Army, Apron=Wife.  So there ya go.  Here's the inspiration in photo form: