One month down

We have one month under our belt with our first deployment.  Overall, it’s been MUCH easier than I was anticipating.  Moving home wasn’t too bad, living with my parents is easier than I thought it was going to be and we’re coping better than I thought we would.
I get to talk to Mark, usually on gmail video chat or on Facetime, once a day.  He’s pretty good about calling and we coordinate a time to talk the next day during all our conversations.  It REALLY helps me to be able to see him and hear him daily.  Those iPhones we spent a bunch of money on are worth their weight in gold since he can call me and we can Facetime no matter where I am.  Mark put some program on my phone before he left that tricks our phones into thinking they’re on wireless connections, even if they’re on the 3G network, and it works great!

My parents have been a huge help with Abbie, which is good since sometimes it literally takes all 3 of us to keep up with her.  She has her good days and her bad days, but luckily her bad days are few and far between.  My mom had a huge life-sized cut out of Mark printed and she hung it on the back of Abbie’s door, so Abbie likes to give her daddy picture kisses every night before she goes to bed.  There are multiple slobber marks on there now as a result.  And that thing STILL makes me jump half the time when I’m not expecting to turn around and see a person standing there.  Good thing it’s a picture of my husband and not someone else…
Of course I miss Mark a lot, and I know Abbie does too, but we’re doing so much better than I was expecting.  I always wondered how people coped with having their husbands deployed.  I would see pictures of friends skyping with their husbands and I would cry.  I wondered how they managed to keep it together enough to talk and carry on a conversation and how they could even manage to look happy.  It seriously was a mystery to me because just looking at those pictures or thinking about being in that scenario made me cry.  But now that I’m in that situation, and this is my reality, I realize that it’s really not that bad.  You just get into a routine and you go on with life and you look forward to the next phone call.  And you count the days until your other half returns.