My husband left just a week before Thanksgiving. It was hard that he left so close to the holidays and wasn't able to celebrate them with us. In my not-so-infinite wisdom, I didn't think about celebrating the holidays while he was home until the day before he left, and at that time, there was no time to do it. I wanted to put up the Christmas tree early so he could be here to do it with us. I also realized that having a family Thanksgiving while he was home would have been a great idea. Why I didn't think about it sooner is beyond me and I truly do regret it. I know R&R is only 2 weeks long, and we fit a lot of things into it, but still, I really wish we would have celebrated what we could while he was here.
Since I was not so smart and didn't decorate while Ian was here, I decided to wait to have the kids decorate the Christmas tree until this morning. Ian got on Skype this morning and watched us decorate the tree. It was pretty fun because he was commenting the whole time to the kids about how great they were doing. The kids also showed him the ornaments as they were hanging them up and we talked about what each ornament meant. Our Christmas tree is a bunch of different ornaments with no real theme. Some are handmade by the kids or myself and some are one we got in various places we have been and lived. Ian seemed to really enjoy it and it was the next best thing to him actually being here.
It is the theme of this deployment for us... Involved. We are trying so hard to keep each other involved in our lives while we are separated. I think that is why we are handling the deployment as well as we are, because we are determined to stay connected and involved. He tries to be there for the big things, if he can, even getting up at 2 am if needed to be at a birthday party. I tell him about the mundane every day things and let him know what is going on. It helps. It works for us. I think if we didn't do this, we would both be having a harder time at this deployment because, as I have stated before, not being involved or communicating with each other is not the way our marriage works. So, even though decorating the tree was not a super huge event, it was something that was important for him, for the kids, and for me to be able to do together. We are luckier than some that he had the time today to do this, and we take it when we can get it because we never know when he is going to be out of communication for a while.
Every day that goes by, I don't think of it as just another day we have spent apart, I think of it as us being another day closer to being together. That makes it more bearable.
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