Soldier's Wife, Crazy Life

Julie

See’s Candies for Soldiers Program and Giveaway

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S

I love it when a product I already love and enjoy supports the troops. I have been a big fan of See’s Candies from the time I was a little girl. I get so excited when someone sends us a box of treats. That is why I was happy to see that they have a great program for supporting the troops.

It is called See’s for Soldiers. Starting June 19 through July 5, See’s will provide materials in its shops for customers to write personal notes of gratitude to our troops. They will also donate a lollypop for every note written!

See’s associates will collect these notes and deliver to See’s for Soldiers along with the lollypops for inclusion in their care packages. Customers and fans who are unable to visit a shop before July 5 can show their support by visiting www.sees.com/gratitude and completing an online form with their personal messages.

I am also going to be giving away a $15 Gift Card to See’s Candies. Just enter the Rafflecopter below 🙂

a Rafflecopter giveaway

* Giftcard provide by See’s.

13 Marriage Tips for 13 Years of Marriage

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13 marriage Tips for 13 Years of Marriage

August 3, 2002 was the day I married my husband. My marriage is about to become a teenager. In some ways the last 13 years have gone by so quickly. In other ways it seems like a different world. It was before I became a Military wife and when I said I do I didn’t know that would be in my future. The Army was in his past and I thought that was all it would ever be for us.

I know there are a lot of marriage advice posts out there but I wanted to add my own based on 13 years of being married to my husband. I was only 23 when I married him and I am 36 now. We have been through a lot of different situations over the years. Having 3 boys, buying a house, 4 deployments, job changes, getting a dog, moving away from California, living in Germany and now trying to figure out are after active duty Army future.

13 Marriage Tips for 13 Years of Marriage

1. Remember that you are in it together. This is so important during the more stressful parts of your life. Remember you chose each other and you are in thismarriage together.

2. Have your own likes and dislikes. My husband and I have a lot of different likes and dislikes. In some ways we are quite opposite from one another. I think it is good to have your own interests. It is also good to have some things in common as well.

3. Spend time apart. I feel we spent too much time apart, but being without each other sometimes can be a good thing. I have learned more about myself since I have had to be without him at times.

4. Spend time together. Busy lives can make this hard but it is so important. Figure out when you can spend some quality time together and make it a regular thing. This can be a weekly, monthly or even quarterly date.

5. Sometimes the kids will need you more. I know there is advice about not putting your kids first but I see it differently. I don’t think it is about putting them first, at least not for me. It is about remembering that sometimes your kids do need you more than your husband does but that he can’t be ignored either. It can be hard in the early years to balance everything and maybe I see it differently since so much of that baby time was spent with a deployed husband. I didn’t have to work hard to focus on my husband because he wasn’t there.

6. Be honest with each other. If something is upsetting you, let them know. You don’t want to be the type to complain about every little thing but sometimes your spouse doesn’t understand why you could be upset about something and it could be helpful to talk about it.

7. Listen to one another. If your spouse brings up something important, listen to them. You don’t want to just go through life ignoring each other.

8. Invisible trust. We have had to have this during deployments. He has to be able to trust me when he is gone so he can focus on his work. Trust that I will be faithful, that I won’t waste all our money on things we don’t need and that I will be there for him. I also have to trust him in return. I see it as an invisible line connecting us that we just have to believe is there.

9. Keep learning about each other. My husband is almost 40 and he was 25 when I met him. A lot has changed and I still am learning about him. It is good to keep asking those questions and to learn more about your spouse.

10. Don’t let the bad stuff take over. Deployments, moves, money issues, problems with children, etc, all of these can really make life hard for you and your spouse. Don’t let it take over your lives. Remember you are walking through it together.

11. Enjoy those quiet nights. You don’t have to leave the house to have moments together. One of the things we like to do after the kids go to bed is find an interesting movie on Netflix and watch it together. It is something so simple but it bonds us and we don’t have to spend any extra money to do it.

12. Take photos of each other. When we were dating I was always having us take pictures together. Over the years I have tried to keep that up and I so enjoy looking back at them. Even if it feels like we are in a boring or uninteresting part of our lives, it is still nice to have so many couple photos of us.

13. Love each other. I know this one seems obvious but it is the most important. Treat each other like you love each other. Tell each other often that you do. Hold hands and always be there for one another.

How long have you been married?

Three Simple Ways to Grow Your Twitter Account

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Three Simple Ways to Grow Your Twitter Account

I love Twitter. I am not even sure why I first joined the social network in the first place but I am glad that I did. I joined in the summer of 2009 wanting to share my photography. When I started my blog in 2009 I figured that I should have an account for that too.

These days I just have one Twitter account that I update. I have almost 7,700 followers. I feel like I have worked hard to get there and have also made a few mistakes along the way.

If you are first starting out with a Twitter account you are probably overwhelmed with it. I have a lot of friends that don’t quite get Twitter at all. 140 characters? How does that even work? What in the world does RT mean? How do I get people to follow me? Is it rude to start chatting with other people who are in the middle of a discussion? What is the point of Twitter anyway?

Twitter is certainly a different animal then Facebook is. I see Facebook as a place where my friends are, where I can connect with them on a more personal level. I see Twitter as a place to make new friends, connect with others and share what I am doing.

If you have a blog or a business, it is a good idea to be on Twitter, even if it scares you or you don’t understand it. It is a great place to connect with others, find new blogs and promote your own. It is a great tool if you know how to use it and it shouldn’t be ignored.

So, how do you grow your Twitter account?

Here are three simple ways to do so:

Twitter Profiles#1 Make sure your information is filled out. I rarely follow back anyone who doesn’t have a profile filled out. I also never ever follow back people who have the default picture as their photo unless I know them in real life. So you have to make sure you at least change that. You don’t have to add a photo of you, it can be your logo, your dog, a flower or anything that works. Just make it something so you appear to be a real person and not just a bot. As for the profile, just write a little bit about yourself. You can see what I have written in the photo on the write. You want people to be able to find you based on what you are into.

#2 Add people daily. When you add other followers, a lot of them will add you back. You can find new followers using a few different methods. If you go to the Twitter website, it will give you some suggestions. I like to go there everyday and add a few people who I think I would like to follow. You can also do a search. If your blog is about knitting, you can go and search, “love to knit” or “knitting” and Twitter will give you a list of people with that in their profile as well as people who have talked about your keywords. You can also find some of your favorite, more popular people you follow on Twitter and see who are following them. This tells you that they like that person too so you probably have something in common. When you go ahead and add people daily, you will get new followers from the people who are adding you back.

#3 Interact. It is important that you interact with others on Twitter. You can do this by asking questions, making comments, replying to others and retweeting them. Favorites is also a nice way to tell other people who that you enjoy what they are posting.  You want a mix of interactive tweets with your promotional tweets. It is the best way to use Twitter and to get to know others. It also doesn’t have to take up a lot of time. You can go onto Twitter a few times a day and see what people are talking about.

Are you on twitter? I would love to connect with you there too 🙂

How have you gained Twitter followers?

When the Blogger Lost Her iphone

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When the Blogger Lost Her iphone

A few weeks ago we had a little situation with a pool. It was the first time we had been at the pool this summer and there were about five things I could have done differently to prevent what happened. Looking back, I am a little irritated with myself about it but you can’t change the past, only be smarter in the future.

We walked into the pool area and I just assumed my kids would be just fine around the pool. Looking back I should have not assumed that and I should have put the Puddle Jumper on my 4 year old before we got there.

As I looked for a place to put our stuff, my 4 year old decided to jump into the pool. Only, he can’t swim so he started freaking out. I noticed right away and even though I was wearing jeans, I went in to grab him. As I did this my 8 year old realized he could no longer touch and started freaking out. My thoughts were to go in a little further because my pants were already wet. I didn’t think about anything else. Once everyone was safe, I realized my phone had been in my pocket. I grabbed it just in time to see the Apple logo fade away and die.

Crap.

As soon as I got home I put it in rice. I asked for advice and that seemed to be the #1 answer. I heard stories of all types of phones being saved this way. It sat there for three days. I plugged it in and nothing. It was dead. My brother in law told me he had a phone come back to life a few months after the fact. I am not sure if that will happen to mine. I hope it does. I really do.

I went online to look at my options. I am about 18 months away from being able to upgrade with Verizon. They won’t let me do the Edge program either. My other option is to buy a phone outright. Which I can’t do at the moment. Even the cheapest iphone through them is over $300. I looked at other places like Groupon and you can get a iphone 4 for around $150. But really? I don’t want to spend much money on this. At least not right now.

My current solution was to hook up my old Droid for now. It pretty much sucks. It’s old, slow and has very little battery life. But it makes phone calls, I can get my email, text and even use Instagram. It will be okay for now. Until I figure something else out.

It has been an interesting two weeks since I lost my iphone. The photos I can take are pretty bad so I have not been reaching for my phone as often. It’s both good and bad. I would be using my DSLR more often except we have been at the pool most days. There have been a lot of memories made that no one else will ever see. In a lot of ways this is a good thing. I do feel sad that my family is going to miss some of these moments when before they would be able to see a picture of it. I don’t know. I like not feeling like I should take photos of every little thing but I miss it too.

I can get on social media on my phone but it is a pain because the apps run very very slow. So I don’t usually go on unless I am home. This is a change and a good one I think. Although I had hoped to do some social media when we were at the park or somewhere like that, I am okay with not really doing that anymore. In some ways it makes Twitter and Facebook a little more fun.

I don’t know what my smartphone future looks like. My husband and I just have to make fun of the one I am using. It’s so old it even has a Blockbuster app on it. Apple will come out with another phone in a few months and then maybe I will have more choices.

I learned a big lesson though, when around water, never ever keep your phone in your pocket.

Have you lost a phone you couldn’t replace? What did you do?

5 Reasons Why Summer Gets Difficult When You Are Solo Parenting

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5 Reasons Why Summer Gets Difficult When You Are Solo Parenting
I have spent many summers without my husband. I was thinking this morning of the different ways not having your husband home during the summer can make life more difficult than it normally would be. Since my husband is going to be home for a few days during the summer, I am reminded of what I am able to do just because here is here and what I have to do when he isn’t. I am reminded of deployment years and those summers and how difficult they became because I was solo parenting. I have learned to make the summer work as best I can but it still can get pretty hard when you are the only parent in the home during the months your children are out of school.

1) Grocery shopping. Normally I go grocery shopping when at least two of my kids if not all three are in school. No one is asking for extra foods. No one thinks we need to buy every little item of food that they like, no one is freaking out because they don’t want to be there. I can just go in with my list and be done with it. During the summer, I have to take at least two kids with me, if not all three. We always end up with extra stuff, it is always a little chaotic and I always miss those child-free shopping trips.

2) Appointments. Dentist appointments, doctor appointments, etc. I try not to schedule any during the summer but sometimes you have to go. So I have to either find a babysitter or take all the kids with me. This gets a little crazy sometimes. Doctors appointments mean waiting and even if you come prepared, if you have to wait a long time the kids just hit a point and it is pretty frustrating.

3) No time Off. During the school year I have a lot of time to myself. I can get work done, clean in peace or even go to lunch with my friends. During the summer I always have at least one kid with me. My alone time has to just get pushed aside which can get to you sometimes. Luckily, a lot of Military locations do have some sort of childcare for deployments. Here they have Super Saturdays where you can leave your kids with childcare workers from 9-5 on certain Saturdays. I tried to take advantage of this during our last deployment.

4) Later hours. My kids stay up later during the summer. It gets darker later, no need for them to get up as early. It just happens that way. I could stay up later too, after they go to bed. I could give myself more alone time but I get tired too. I usually go to sleep just an hour after they do. During the school year I have a little more time to myself after the boys’ bedtime.

5) No family trips. This is the hardest thing for me sometimes. When your husband is gone all summer long, you won’t be going on any family vacations together. You can take the kids and go on your own vacations but that isn’t always an option for everyone. You just have to wait the summer out and plan to take a vacation once your spouse gets home or has time off. If you are lucky, you might be able to plan R&R during the summer and get away somewhere nice.

What about you? Are you going through a deployment this summer? Does your husband work so much during the summer you never see him? What is the hardest thing about it for you?

How I Am Helping My Son With Asperger’s Through Summer

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Asperger's

Having a child with Asperger’s means summer can be quite a challenge. There will not be school and a regular routine so you have to make one. There are a lot of activities for kids but they might not be right for your child. It can be difficult to decide what to do.

I have come up with a few things to help this summer. My son is eight and if I let him he would spend the entire summer playing video games. I have to really try hard to get him interested in other things.

1) Pool time. He told me he loves the pool. So that was part of my reason for getting a pool pass this year. We can go whenever and stay for however long and it is fine. We can go almost everyday. He will also do swim lessons in July.

2) Daily chore. I require my boys to do a daily chore during the summer before they can play any video games. This works really well for my son with Asperger’s and he is usually the only one of my three to ask about the chore vs me telling him. I base the chores on what needs to be done around the house. Does the living room need to be picked up? Can you help me with the dishes?

3) Snacks. My son is a very picky eater and I learned that I need to make sure I have a snack for him that he will eat. While my other two will pretty much gobble anything down that I pack I have to make sure to include something he will actually eat. If I don’t, he gets a little grumpy. Not full on meltdown mode but still. It just makes things easier. I pack snacks and drinks every morning so we always have something on hand when we go places.

4) Days at home. This is a hard one. He craves a full day at home when he doesn’t have one for a while. I get it, I really do. I somtimes need that downtime as well. I am trying to balance that one out with daily activities outside of the house. I think my plan is to stay home on some days when we don’t have plans and the weather is bad. This will help him and help me handle him a little better.

5) Listening. As you probably know, when someone has Asperger’s, they tend to talk about what they are into all of the time. I am really trying to listen to my son this summer because he gets really excited about certain things and I want him to know that I care. It’s hard sometimes because I am not always interested in what he is interested in but I am trying my best to listen and hear what he has to say. I also ask him how he is feeling about the week. It gives me a good idea of how he is doing and what type of mood he is in depending on the types of activities we did.

What about you? Do you have a special needs child home for the summer? What are you doing to help them during their time off from school?

Military Spouses Serve Their Country Too

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Military Spouses Serve Their Country Too

There is a debate going on about whether Military Spouses serve too. The question is, serve what?

Serve in the Military? No, unless they too have actually enlisted.

Serve their country? Yes, totally.

When your spouse is in the Military, it is not just a job but also a lifestyle.

Maybe this is because my first duty station as an Army wife was in Germany. Overseas things are a little different then stateside. People can’t live as separate of a life as they can in the states. When you have to depend on the local Military post for American foods, your mail, your car, etc, it is a lot harder to stay away from the Military as a whole. Stateside you don’t have to depend on the Military post for as much.

When my husband re-enlisted in 2005, everything changed. I realized this right away when I had zero control about what was going to happen to us. He went over to Germany and I had to wait behind in the states until the Army finished all the paperwork that needed to be done for me to join him. At the time I thought I had some control but I found out that I didn’t. If someone who was supposed to sign our paperwork went on a two-week vacation, we just had to wait.

Deployments

You can’t control those either. Sometimes things can happen such as a soldier staying behind because you are having a baby. That was part of the reason my husband didn’t leave for his third deployment earlier, I was due one month after his year at home was over. We were not so lucky with baby #2 because he had to leave when I was 25 weeks pregnant and came home for R&R when he was born, missing the birth by 3 days. It really just depends on the Command and what they want to allow you to do.

I have been the wife of a soldier and the wife of someone working a regular job and there is a world a difference.

So back to the question, does the Military spouse serve her country?

If you are serving your country, you can do so in different ways. Standing by your Military spouse is one way to do that. Being there for them whether they are deployed or at home. When orders say it is time to move across the country, you do it. Understanding that the Military comes first and they can’t just call their boss to change things around. The Military is the one pillar in your life you have to work around. It isn’t flexible and if your spouse is making it a career, you have to figure out how you can handle it for the long haul.

Some years will be easier than others. Some deployments will be easier than others. Some duty stations will be easier than others.

Spouses serve in so many different ways. It’s a different type of serving than those who are serving IN the Military. We don’t have to see any battles, we don’t have to put on a uniform, we don’t have to say goodbye to our families for months at a time. We don’t have to put our lives in danger.

We serve in different ways. We serve our families and our communities. We strive to make things better, even in the simple ways. We are the support our spouse needs when they are home and away. We help make it possible for those with families to keep serving their country and it is nice to acknowledge that.

What do you think? Does it bother you if someone thanks you for serving too?

 

 

John Shaw’s Guide to Digital Nature Photography Book Review

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digital photography book

*I received a free copy of this book in hope of a review on my blog! This post includes affiliate links!

 

I was given the chance to review, John Shaw’s Guide to Digital Nature Photography. It is such a pretty book all about one of my favorite topics, taking pictures.

From Amazon… “Photography legend John Shaw returns with his much-anticipated guide to digital nature photography, complete with more than 250 extraordinarily beautiful photographs.

For over four decades, John Shaw’s authentic voice and trusted advice has helped photographers achieve impressive shots in the great outdoors. In his first-ever book on digital photography, Shaw provides in-depth advice on everything from equipment and lenses to thorough coverage of digital topics including how to use the histogram. In addition, he offers inspirational and frank insight that goes far beyond the nuts and bolts of photography, explaining that successful photos come from having a vision, practicing, and then acquiring the equipment needed to accomplish the intention. Easily digestible and useful for every type of photographer, and complete with more than 250 jaw-dropping images, John Shaw’s Guide to Digital Nature Photography is the one book you’ll need to beautifully capture the world around you.”

What I really liked about this photography book was all the photos that were included and all the good information he had. I have found that when you are explaining photography you must have a photo to show the reader what you are talking about. It makes it a lot easier to understand. You can also learn a lot about photography based on reading the information about the phone, which he has included.

I am also so glad he included Chapter Six: The Photographer at Work because it shows the reader what he personally uses and what life is really like working in the field. The other chapters are 1) Gear 2) Getting Started 3) Lenses 4) Composition 5) Close-Ups.

Whether you just bought your very first DSLR or you have had one for a while, you can get a lot out of this book. So check it out, it should help you along your photography journey.