Traditions and Candy Counts

     Deployments make everything harder on families. They make it difficult to follow family traditions and schedules. They make it difficult to make plans more than a week in advance. They kill vacation plans. Deployments are particularly hard on children. My little family experienced many of these and a few more. Keeping in touch with my spouse was even difficult at times. I could always email him and tell him what was going on with us at home, but sometimes it would take days to get a reply back, and even then the content of the message was limited. My spouse was on a very secret ship that had not been introduced to the rest of the world yet, and for that reason we were never allowed to know his exact whereabouts. The kids would always ask "Where's daddy?" and all I could say is "Somewhere at sea Sweetie, he will be back before you know it." Sometimes though he wouldn't be. Sometimes he would be gone 3-6 months at a time, and 3-6 months in kid time was an eternity. So one night after actually HEARING from my husband, we discussed this issue at length and came up with a nifty little band-aid for our children's most common question.
We decided that every time he would pull into a port (sometimes this was the only time they would have internet) he could shoot us an email telling us how much candy he had left in his stash. I know many of you are puzzled by the relevance of his candy stash in an email. NO it wasn't because he wanted us to send him anything, or because he needed to buy more. It was because the numbers he would give would be his coordinates on a map. For example, if he said I still have 20 lollipops  and 105 pieces of bubble gum left in my stash, I could look the numbers up on our map we had posted on the dining room wall and see that he was in Puerto Vallarta. But because he wasn't allow to tell us where he was, it was our own little code and no one else would know any different. It wasn't so I could go tell all the other spouses, but rather just for our little ones to have something to look at and say "My daddy is right THERE!" It was a comfort thing, even if it was just a thumb tack on a map.

 I can't wait to tell the kids this story someday. Someday when they have forgotten and the remembrance of the memory will not only make them smile, but remember just how much they were loved and though of as children. Their smiles, both then and now, are what make my world a whole lot better and brighter.