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Helping Your Kids When Military Life Hurts
Sometimes, military life hurts. I’ve cried a lion’s share of tears waving at white buses carrying my soldier away or moving away from treasured friends. But today, it wasn’t my heart that hurt. Thankfully, our family is past most of the ways military life hurts. We’ve faced and survived our last deployment. We’ve posed for pictures at his retirement ceremony. For all intents and purposes, we’re civilians now. Except, we didn’t leave our military community. And it’s PCS season. For my non-military readers, PCS stands for permanent change of station. It isn’t really permanent, but means for the length of your orders you will be stationed at one base. PCS…
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Which job is right for me? Ask Away Thursday
I’ve been invited to join a tribe of women bloggers in Ask Away Thursday. A couple of Thursdays a month, we’ll take a reader question and each answer it from our unique perspectives. Today’s question comes from Texas. My husband is transitioning from his career in the military, but isn't working yet. We need a supplemental income, so we've decided that I look for work while he pursues changing career paths. We have a 5yo in kindergarten, a 3 yo and an infant. I've been offered two jobs. One is full-time at minimum wage at a child development center working in the infant room. I would be able to have…
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How to Save your Marriage When War Comes Home
When a soldier comes home, War comes home, too. When my husband came home last time, it was our hardest yet. He came home to a stressed-out wife starting her next school year and a toddler daughter he barely knew. Reintegration was going to be tougher than it had ever been on top of the extreme stress of cumulative deployments. Reintegration means readjusting, remembering things we took for granted: Where is my place? What is my role? How do we do this together? For me, a small positive of deployments is getting to organize my house to my little OCD heart’s content. I get to color code and label. And…
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Beautifully Taken for Granted: Building Trust in Marriage
Who WANTS to be taken for granted? You’d probably have thought there was something wrong with me if you had walked into my kitchen two years ago late at night after a long day and found me giggling. I was giggling to myself over a sink full of dirty dishes because after 9 years of marriage, countless hours of diligent sacrifice, my husband finally, beautifully, had taken me for granted. I worked really hard to be taken for granted. (this site uses Affiliate links-purchases support our ministry through a small referral fee that never affects your cost.) That sounds really crazy, I know, but the reality is I never saw…
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Fairy Tale Proposal and Happily Ever After
It didn’t start as a fairy tale proposal! It started with a traffic stop. April 6, 2006, I got pulled over by the sheriff. Alarmed, I couldn’t imagine then how this event would change my life. But it did. In 2016, I was so excited to sit in the very spot of this momentous encounter with our sheriff with my daughter and watch this video of her daddy’s surprise return from Iraq which had a bigger twist than I realized. I was stunned. I had no idea what was happening. Until I watched the reply, I wasn’t even sure what I said – on NBC, MSNBC and now YouTube! Now…
