Care Packages During Deployments

 Do you ever wonder the best way to send a care package to a deployed service member?  Or wonder what to send?  I don't necessary know about other branches but with deployed sailors in the US Navy the answer is simple...AMAZON PRIME!  

Last time my husband deployed I did  great job of sending a flat rate box full of goodies every month.  I took joy in making trips to the store to pick out items to send, decorating and filling the box, and going to the post office to drop it in the mail.  The USPS does a great job of making sending care packages as easy as possible, they even have a great kit you can order delivered straight to your house of shipping supplies. You can even order the kit here it comes with boxes, tape, address labels, and even customs forms.  

But here's the thing, this deployment I had a new baby, traveled to help take care of my mom after she had surgery, and then COVID-19 struck and I tried to avoid unnecessary trips to public places...so Amazon became my saving grace as a wife.  

Here are the perks of using Amazon to send your deployment care packages:

1. Free Shipping
2. Ability to send exactly what your service member needs without pressure to fill a specific size box
3. Flat rate boxes are all the same size and shape and therefore stack nicely, meaning they are usually bundled on the same pallet.  If a mail drop gets cut short guess which pallets have to wait until the next mail drop, that's right the ones that are nothing but flat rate boxes of care packages
4. If an order doesn't arrive in a reasonable amount of time Amazon will give you your money back, one of my orders for my husband (that I ordered in February) was split into two packages.  One package arrived in late March, the second package was just delivered to his office this week.  Amazon refunded the purchase price of the items in the second package in April when I submitted a claim that it wasn't delivered.  While flat rate boxes do include insurance the filing process with the USPS for your insurance claim is probably a little more difficult than just clicking a button in your Amazon account.

So all in all I realized that I did not totally fail as a wife this deployment with the care packages and hopefully others will take this to know that it's ok if you just use the ease of online shopping to send your loved ones the things they need.  Service members love getting cards from their kids and things from home but sometimes when they ask for a specific brand of granola bars it really is better to spend the extra $2 from Amazon and just order it on the spot. 

I have a 1 year old

How in the world has it already been a year since I had my sweet Little Dude.   The past year has truly been a crazy ride but overall I am loving motherhood.  

Little Dude has been through a lot in his short life; but hopefully that means he will be a resilient adult who is able to roll with things when life decides to punch him in the face.  Here is a brief overview of what Little Dude has been through in the past year:

-A very dramatic entrance into this world followed by a 4 day stay in the NICU

-Coming home to a house with 3 puppies who love to bark whenever someone walks on the porch and scare the poor baby

-Daddy being deployed for almost 8 months

-A flight to Kentucky followed by a road trip to Indiana and Illinois with a flight back to Virginia from Kentucky to meet all of mommy and daddy's friends and family members

-Daycare

-Another flight to Kentucky

-A week hanging out in the lobby of a hospital with a constant rotation of people watching him so mommy could take care of grandma

-5 weeks at a different daycare in the middle of rural Kentucky while mommy continued helping grandma and tried to work from grandmas house

-5 more flights to/from Virginia/Kentucky while at Grandmas

-A 12+ hour one way roadtrip from Virginia to Kentucky then back again at the end of the stay at Grandmas with 3 dogs in the car

-Going back to his first daycare

-The start of a global pandemic and hanging out with mommy while she tries to work from home for approximently 2 months

-A third daycare, still during a global pandemic but with lots of extra cleaning and safety precautions

-Daddy coming home from daycare

But at least now we get to have cake!!!

And this sweet boy even gave me a gift for his birthday and slept through the night last night for the first time!!!!

Real Talk

So I was under the crazy idea that once I had our Little Dude that I would get back into the blogging habit because I would have something interesting to talk about...
What I failed to consider is that I wouldn't have time to sit down for five minutes to write it all down.
Then I thought I would get back into it when my husband left on deployment, but out of an abundance of caution I didn't want to talk about my husband being deployed while I was home alone with little dude.  (He's still gone, but will be home soon)
Then I thought I would complete the Home Organization Challenge with A Bowl Full of Lemons this year and blog about that...but less than 1/2 way through (and only 1 blog post in) I had to go home to Kentucky to help my mom because she was having surgery.
After about 6 weeks going back and forth between Kentucky and Virginia with an infant and working remotely while I was at my moms I made it back to Virginia full time just in time to work a full week in my office before we started shutting down and sending people home to work remotely due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Now after 70+days at home Little Dude will be returning to daycare (a new daycare, but more on that later) on Monday while I remain working from home.
Sending Little Dude back to daycare wasn't a decision I reached lightly.  COVID-19 is still a very real virus and the new mutation that hits small children so hard is very scary.  Also Little Dude was on a ventilator in the NICU for a few hours when he was first born so I do have concerns about potential respiratory problems.  However I had to weigh those risks against what was necessary for my sanity and our combined health.
The daycare Little Dude will be attending is very clean and taking precautions also I feel confident that the health system in our area has taken the necessary steps to be able to properly care for patients even if there is a second spike.
On the flip side it is almost impossible to be productive all day with a 10 month old requiring constant care.   Little Dude is crawling and climbing and constantly discovering new things.  Every day it is something different and I can't imagine how much harder it is going to get as he gets more and more mobil and more and more curious.
In the end my friend Sara and I have developed a shared mantra when it comes to the pandemic and parenting - we are living in a world with no right answers and very few wrong ones, a world full of grey and it is harder than ever to know what the right choice for your family and your kids is.  We are all doing the best we can, but dammit we are doing it. 
So to all the other mom's out there - you're doing great.

Back to the "real" Navy

Today my husband returns to the "real" Navy.  Not surprisingly, this blog is also returning to its roots of being a milspouse blog in a lot of ways.   

For the past 4ish years hubby has been on shore duty in an office building and exempt from overnight watch.  This means that for 4+ years I have had my husband home every night, usually at a fairly reasonable hour AND not had any concerns about deployments or underways to deal with.  

All of that changes today.  Approximately 53 days before I have our first child my dear sweet hubby is back on a boat, back to the real navy, and preparing to go underway.  Luckily he should be home for the birth of our son but we are looking at a deployment in the near future.   

Here's to adjusting to being a mom, and being a single mom, and having a deployed husband all at the same time - it's the roller coaster we signed up for!  Wish me luck :) 

The Power of a Praying Wife

For my first focus of the Lenten season I am reading The Power of a Praying Wife by Stormie Omartian.  My intention is to read one chapter per day, so today I will be reading chapter 4.   I am very impressed by Stormie's straightforward approach and the way she speaks straight to the reader, be they the wife of a devout Christian or of an Atheist.   I find myself relating to a lot of the points she makes (who hasn't prayed for their husband to change and start putting his socks in the laundry basket on his own, or spoken to him out of anger instead of love?) and am going to make a concentrated effort to pray for him in the right way and let God bless our marriage in the way he intends for it to be blessed.   I'm really excited to finish the book and may even read ahead.

Here is an image of the book cover/link to it on Amazon if you are interested:


There is also an edition specifically for military wives, be they the wives of AD service members or service members themselves which is available for free through many military chaplains.

St Patricks Day, deployment style

Happy St Patrick’s Day!

So apparently my hubby had fun on St Patricks Day. Before he left we bought this stupid hat at WalMart and he claimed he would wear it all day. I rolled my eyes but it was only $3 so I bought it for him expecting him to forget it was even in his rack or leave it at home. Yesterday I got this picture from him. Apparently he really did wear it all day Sorry for the poor quality, since his name showed and some other guys were in it i had to open it in paint brush from my work computer to edit slightly don’t want to be posting peoples pics on my blog without their permission!

Love letters

Do you write real true to goodness letters? Not emails, not cards, REAL pen to paper, pour out your heart, letters?

I actually do from time to time. My grandma has email but who doesn’t love getting a letter in the mail every now and then? So sometimes—even though my handwriting is horrible-I will sit down and send her a letter. She has never mentioned them to me directly but apparently every time she gets a letter she calls my mom and goes on and on about how much they enjoy getting letters from me. I don’t send them nearly enough but about 3-4 times a year I sit down and for no reason other than because I know they will appreciate it, I write my grandparents a letter.

But what about love letters, I have no idea how to write a proper love letter but I do love my husband very much, and I do send him letters on a regular basis.

Let me start at the beginning:

When my husband went to boot camp I wasn’t sure what to expect. I didn’t know how often he would have access to email, and I knew how many spam emails he received so I didn’t want to risk him missing my quick notes to him buried in the spam. So instead I started writing him letters. I knew he would get mail on a regular basis so I wrote him a letter every day (almost) and mailed them at least 3X per week. He said between me and a few old ladies from the church he received some sort of letter or card almost every day at mail call. These notes and letters helped keep him from getting as homesick and made the time pass a little faster.

My husband also sent me letters while he was in boot camp, and boy oh boy did I LIVE for those letters. He usually mailed them once a week(ish) and if I hadn’t received one by the time the mail man came on Thursday I was pretty antsy at work on Friday knowing there should be a letter waiting on me when I got home. There was something about seeing his handwriting that just made the separation a little easier. I carried the letters around with me in my purse and would read them over and over again.

After my husband graduated from boot camp I took all of the letters from boot camp and created three binders full of letters, notes and cards in page protectors so that in 20 years we can look back on that time and remember (or in 100 years our great-great grandkids can talk about how funny cursive handwriting looks!) One binder is letters from me to hubby, one is letters from him to me and the third is all of the other notes and cards and letters he received from friends and family. I did my best to arrange the binders in chronological order but of course not everyone dates ever card/letter so the third binder is arranged more by person than time line.

Now my husband is gone on his first deployment. We are lucky because his job gives him constant access to internet (as long as they aren’t in River City) and therefore we can send and receive emails throughout the day. However there is still something special about a written letter, so I have once again started the practice of writing a letter every day. I hope that they mean as much to him as they do to me and he keeps them again so that I can add them to the collection. I’m also anxious to see if he sends me real letters again, I hope so because I did love them so much during boot camp.

But the question still stands…How does one write a proper love letter? In my head I envision myself writing flowery prose about how my heart flutters at the sound of his name like something from Jane Austen, in practice I when I reread my letters they sound more like a note passed across a kindergarten classroom, do you like me check yes or no. In reality I am sure I fall somewhere in the middle…so how about you? Do you write love letters to your significant other? Any tips on how I can make my letters something that would make Jane Austen proud and a Nora Roberts blush without being embarrassing? I promise to share any secrets I come up with over the next XX months while hubby is gone.