In the Field

Eric has been in the field training all of this week. His command and our FRG set up a BBQ so any wives who wanted to could convoy out to the field and observe some of the training and spend a little quality time with our soldiers.

By the way, there was a time in my life when I would have called a group of cars all headed to the same destination a caravan, but those days are over now. Now it is a convoy. :)

We have missed him a lot this week, and we were really excited to spend time with him. We looked forward to it all week. Once we got to the base the training site was on, we had to drive out on some dirt roads through the woods. It was definitely what you would call "out in the middle of nowhere". But it was really, really beautiful nowhere. Driving on the dirt roads was pretty interesting. I was the second to the last car in a pretty long line, and the cars in front of me were kicking up quite the dirt cloud. It was pretty much driving blind, following the outline of the road in front of me, and hoping nothing dangerous materialized.

We made it safely, and when we got out there we got to watch a demonstration of what they have been training on this week. We saw them shoot their M4's and the weapons on the strykers. I won't pretend I actually understood what was going on, but it was still really impressive to watch. I know one thing: I wouldn't want to be on their bad side. That is for sure!

After the demonstration, we were told we could go find our soldiers, so I started looking around for mine. He turned out to be still on the range with his stryker crew, and they pulled up a few minutes later. The boys were so excited to run and see their daddy after he'd been gone all week. I got this sweet picture of it. I love how they are running to him. It gives me a lump in my throat, though, because it makes me think about them running to hug him when he comes back from a year-long deployment. That will be a happy time, of course, but we will go through a lot of pain to get there.

It was so good to see him! I am so proud of him and everything that he does. He is selfless and hard-working, and I couldn't have asked for a better man to be my husband.

Today's List of Three

Here is my list of things that I found particularly joyful today. :)

1. Eric and I spent some time helping friends clean the house they're moving out of. I enjoyed us being able to do that together.

2. Having a big group of friends over to say goodbye to a sweet family that is leaving Alaska. Bittersweet time. It was so much fun to have our friends over and all hang out and talk. I know that there are going to be so many times that I have to hang out with friends without Eric, so I want to really enjoy the times that he is able to be there with me. The "bitter" part is because these friends that are leaving are just really good friends, and I am going to miss them HUGELY.

3. We just put the boys to bed, and now we are going to hang out alone together. That is joyful for many reasons ;)

Tomorrow's list should be good! We are going to church in the morning, where we will see our good friends dedicate their brand new baby boy. Then, we are going to use the $40 gift certificate our realtor gave us to Pagoda ( a Chinese restaurant in North Pole), and take a nice, long drive out really far somewhere to enjoy the beautiful scenery of Alaska as a family. The alone time will be nice, because Eric is about to start training a lot, and will be gone for a good portion of the rest of the summer.

Counseling

So, maybe this isn't something that I should be "public" about, but I'm going to anyway:

Eric and I go to marriage counseling.

I won't go into why, since it's a pretty long story, but I will say that it's not because our marriage is in jeopardy. Mostly, we are looking for ways to keep our relationship strong under the strains of military life. Those strains, by the way, have become more and more difficult to deal with than I ever thought they could be. The closer we get to the deployment, the more they pronounce themselves.

The biggest issue that we have these days is my fear and anxiety about the upcoming deployment, and the ways that it impacts our family and marriage. Which are many, I might add!

Lately, I have been having trouble focusing my thoughts, because there is so much going through my mind all the time, and I jump from one worried thought to another at an almost frantic pace. Sometimes it even takes my breath away. It causes problems for me when I'm trying to cook, clean, or sleep. Cooking and cleaning because I just can't seem to focus on the task, and sleeping for obvious reasons.

The counselor has given me a strategy to help when my thoughts start racing like that. He says for me to sit down and write out what I am worried about to force my brain to slow down and process it. I have always liked to write, and when he told me to do that, I realized that writing is a strategy I have actually used in the past, just for different reasons. Mostly when I have a big project I'm working on, or a lot going on in a particular week, and I start to feel overwhelmed. I will sit down and write out everything I can think of that is important about that project or week, and when I'm finished, I feel much more able to focus and be productive. And I'm more able to keep a clear picture in my mind of what I need to do. So in applying a writing strategy to my speed-worrying, I can not only slow my thoughts down to the speed that I can write, but I can also get a more focused picture of just what it is that I'm worried about, and what I can do about it.

I've tried it a few times, and I have to say it's working pretty well so far. I did it last night before I went to bed, and I slept much better than I have been lately.

The counselor also says that he wants to help me come up with ways to shove the worry to the side and focus on cherishing the time we have left together before deployment. He gave me the assignment of writing down three things each day that really gave me joy. He asked me to come up with a few during the session, and I was shocked at how hard it was. Not because there are not countless blessings in my life that I find immeasurable joy in, but because the fear of losing Eric is so intense that it just hurts to think of all the good things in life that would go with him if he died. It just hurts.

But I want to conquer that, so I'm going to do my best. Here is today's list of three things that gave me joy:

1. Nate wearing his Buzz Lightyear costume all morning, and Caleb calling him "Buzz" because he knows it makes him happy.

2. Playing peek-a-boo with Sam in the den after the big boys went to bed. He smiles so big at me when I do that, and sometimes I even get a giggle out of him.

3. Listening to Eric laugh at something on t.v. It was a "real" laugh, and one that I don't hear every day. I love it.

This one's for Grace...

I was just sitting here alone because my husband got called at 11:20 to come in to work "immediately", and I thought I would look at my blog for a sec.

I should really update it more.

So, it turns out he was called in to look for this 9-year-old kid who went missing a couple of hours ago. Except by the time he got to post, the gate guards were telling people they had found him in the movie theater. This news was all over facebook. Apparently, the gate guards had been stopping everybody going through the gate to check their cars, too.

So, there are two positives that come out of this. Well, no, three.

1. Most important-the little boy is safe.

2. Eric gets to go in at 8 tomorrow instead of 5:30.

3. It's pretty cool to know that if one of my kids were ever missing, this entire post would mobilize to find him. That is just so very cool. It's times like these when I am really proud to be part of a military family!