Hello and Goodbye I

Well, it's been a month, and after a couple of days of flight delays, D's on his way back to Germany.  On the way to the airport, the optometrist’s office called to say his glasses were ready.  Great.  Okay, so something else to mail on Monday.  I check the mail when I get home and guess what's in there?  Yeah, his new driver's license.  DAMMIT    >.<  So Monday's already looking busy.

Classes are going okay, but I keep choking on the finals.  I've gotta figure that out, cause this is getting ridiculous.  So with D back in Germany in a matter of hours, the family's only real concern is getting S back to the bus station tomorrow, and whether or not D's going to be able to re-enlist.

He was supposed to go to a job fair this last week and completely forgot about it.  At least he was thinking ahead on what he's going to do if he can't re-enlist.  He's being smart about this, and I'm really proud of him.  He's pretty upset about being so far away for the amount of time he's got left in Germany, but I keep telling him “we've made it this long, we can make it this much longer standing on our heads!” 

He misses his kids...  The family misses him.  Honestly, what so many people don't realize is that we've got a generation of kids right now that losing at least one parent for at least a year at a time if not completely.  Regardless of how you feel about our country's foreign policy, you've gotta admit that this isn't healthy for marriages or kids.  But military families trudge along, dealing with separations, deployments, and homecomings.  I'm not going to say that the military deserves more compensation than they do – the economy's in the toilet, and military families are lucky to get what they do; what I AM saying is that those that say that military families get “too much” need to try the life of a military family, particularly the life of a family with at least one parent that's deployed and not yet at the rank of a higher non-commissioned officer. 

Why?  These families still qualify for government assistance, even with the “wealth” of allowances and benefits, while having to say goodbye to a spouse or parent more often than most would believe is fair.