We have two wonderful little ones our little man is 5 and our princess is 3. They just completed their first military move back in July and have had to go through quite a few changes over the last few months. We are at our second deployable unit since meeting however, our son doesn't remember the first one and our daughter was born after he left that type of unit. Our current duty station is deployable unit and it has been a struggle on everyone especially them. My daughter believes that Daddy lives at the airport and keeps asking when we can go pick him up. It makes me laugh and yet makes me sad at the same time because she really does miss her daddy. My son can be emotional at times and is still struggling with verbalizing his feelings. Some days he is OK and then others he breaks down over the smallest of things. He misses his daddy and has a hard time expressing that.
A big thing in our family is routine and trying to stick to that routine whether daddy is home or not. If I allow things to change when daddy is home it makes it harder when he leaves. Another is because of the frequency of him coming and going we try not to depend on him to much such as allowing him to take over thing I normally do myself (baths, cooking, running the kids to practices). If I allow him to take over my duties it becomes hard to get back into them. We have become a skype family finally, which did take me a long time to breakdown and do. I really was not into someone seeing me a hot mess sitting on the couch (that is just my craziness coming out). I wonder is there other ways to help them cope besides trying to explain it and just sticking to our routine. We still have a few more years before my husbands retirement and I wonder can we find a way to deal with his deployment better when it comes to the kids.
So I put it out to the blogger world and hopes that someone out there has some creative ideas of how they explain it to their little ones?
I was a one of those little one's once. My father served for a long time in the Navy, and my mother always used to just say that dad is out protecting everyone. She would say that when he was home he could obviously only protect us, and that's why he had to leave, so that he could be a hero and protect everyone including us. Being able to idolize him as a hero really changed my out look onto the whole thing when he wasn't around.
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