So I talked to my sister-in-law on the phone tonight. Her husband is in the military and they live in Guam. They're expecting a baby this fall. There's a chance that her husband will have to be away on military training when the baby is due. We're just talking about this and she said something that for whatever reason caught my attention. She said - "At least he'll be in the same country." She wasn't being sarcastic or anything, she actually took solace in the fact that her husband would be somewhere in the US, other than with her, while their 4th baby is born.
This made me think for a minute about the real sacrifices military families make. We all can conceptualize the months of separations and the dangers of deployment, but I doubt that we really get it. I'm quite sure I don't. A couple of 2 day business trips do me and my wife in - I swear my kids all change in those couple of days. I've heard stuff about 18 month deployments for some troops. And the extent of the danger I face at work is a paper cut or the distant possibility of slipping on a restroom floor after the janitor recently mopped it. I get bugged when I get a bad parking spot. Anyway, I just wanna make the point that we should keep in mind the military wives & kids at home while we watch reports on the news. I guess we should also cherish just being together a bit more than we sometimes do.
We're expecting baby #4 in September, and I'll be lucky enough to be there. Thanks in no small part to military guys roughly my same age, with families a lot like mine, all over the world, making that possible. Empty as the gesture may seem (this is only a rarely read blog), . . . I say thank you.
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