Stop!

I can seriously feel the summer slipping through my fingers already...I can't believe how quickly the days and weeks are speeding by. Steve is just finishing up two weeks of training, and we are getting ready for a two-week vacation to Maine this month. It will be so nice to have the four of us together for two whole weeks, with spotty cell-phone coverage (i.e., the Army cell phone won't be ringing as much!). After Maine, we have the entire month of July with minimal interruption, then we'll be heading into August where things will really get crazy. The deployment will be here before we know it, so we are going to concentrate on enjoying the here and now.

The boys are doing well. Surprisingly, it is Griffin who is asking the most questions about the deployment. He will randomly make statements out of the blue, such as, "Mummy, when Daddy goes away to Iraq, we won't see him for a long, long time." He has been making that statement, and similar statements about three times per day for the past few days. Hard for me to hear, but on the same token it tells me he is grasping some of this.

Not many pictures to share for the next little bit, as my laptop battery has died, and all of my pictures are stored there. For now, I'm using a clunky old desktop that doesn't have any photo sharing software. Drats!

The Talk

So. Today I finally talked to the boys about the fact that Steve will be deploying at the end of the summer. It has been harder and harder to shield them from other people's questions about the deployment, and the opportunity presented itself, so I just went with it. Our concern hasn't been that we don't want people to talk about it around them; it is more that it seems the general public seems to approach the topic with such gloom and doom - - little guys pick up on this, and that isn't what we want to convey to them. The conversation was very brief and very simple, but it was a start. I'm pretty sure that Griffin didn't really grasp what I was saying, but that was kind of what I was expecting. Camden was very matter-of-fact about it, but did have quite a few questions, such as, "how long is a year?" and "will Daddy get to come home for dinner at night?" (can you hear the sound of my heart breaking for these little guys?) Our conversation then kind of transitioned into discussing what we can do while Daddy is gone, like send him packages, write him letters, etc. I have been dreading this day since we found out Steve would be deploying again, but now that the first step has been made, I feel a huge sense of relief.