Monday, May 16, 2011

The long, slow goodbye...

Our deployment doesn't begin for almost 2 months, yet we are already beginning the drawn-out goodbye process I hate so much. This weekend we celebrated our last family time in a while by spending time with the kids at the park, playing outside, savoring ice cream, and eating dinner all together on the deck. Hubby is "here" this week, but working strange and long hours, so that the kids won't even see him unless I keep them up late. Then Saturday he leaves for a month of training. Then he'll be back, but just for a brief leave period, and then the 7-month deployment will finally start. I find this stage very frustrating, because it seem way too early to get into deployment mode, yet for all practical purposes (especially from the kids' perspective) he is already gone. Most of our official deployment preparations are done--legal paperwork, important decisions, financial conversations, etc. So even though I am grateful he is still sleeping here for the next few nights, and able to make phone calls during the next month, part of me wants to kick him out the door and just get this deployment started so we can get through it already! Is that a terrible thing to say? Drawing it out another month or 2 is not helping anything!

Does anyone else find themselves frustrated by the in-between stage of training and work-ups? How do you handle this period that is not technically a deployment, but might as well be?

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