Soldier's Wife, Crazy Life

Motherhood

Do Military Spouses Have To Be SAHMs?

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Visit any military community and you are going to find plenty of SAHMs. From women that have always wanted to be one to those that simply can’t find a job in their field or can’t find a job that would pay enough for child care. With the busy schedule that comes with the career of someone in the military, it only makes sense to be a stay at home mom, right? If you marry someone in the military, you need to give up your own career to stay home with your children, right?

Wrong.

Do Military Spouses Have To Be SAHMs?

Although there are a lot of SAHMs military spouses and I have been one of them, not all military spouses want to be SAHMs or have ever been one. They have careers and work hard to bring in their own income. Some spouses work from home in order to have the flexibility to move their career around with them.

Some spouses work hard to find the right job at every duty station. Other spouses are in school, planning for when military life is over. And others take on their role as an SAHM and do wonderful things with it.

No, military spouses do not have to be SAHMs, even though some of them are. Yes, they can work outside the home or at home and create their own careers. As a spouse, you need to figure out what you want and what is going to work best for your situation.

You know your family and what you can personally handle. Some people thrive leaving the house at 7am and getting home at 6pm after a day at work, other people would fall apart if they had to have that type of schedule.

If you are a SAHM spouse and you enjoy it, keep going. You are doing great things.

If you are a SAHM spouse and wish you were doing something else, start looking for what that is today. Look into college classes and job openings and WAHM ideas. Think about what you like to do and what you are good at and go from there. You might end up in a field you would never have thought about.

If you need to be a SAHM for a small period of time, do it. If you want to work outside the home and can’t seem to find a job in your field, don’t give up. Keep looking and find resources to help you find the job that you want. Here are some links that can point you in the right direction:

Being married to someone in the military requires sacrifice and sometimes that means the spouse’s career. That does not mean a spouse has to give up who they are what they want to do. It just might look a little different than it would otherwise.

I am in such awe of what I have heard other military spouses do with their careers while married to a member of the military. From starting home businesses to continuing their law or teaching careers even though they are moving state to state. Military spouses can be anything, do anything, they just have to figure out what will work best for their own situation.

What about you? Are you a SAHM? Do you have a different goal? What are you working on right now?

How To Survive The Election When You And Your Friends Don’t Agree

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How To Survive The Election When You And Your Friends Don't Agree

Whether you like it or not, election season is here. Soon, it will be time to vote and with that comes more campaign ads, debates and an increase of political Facebook posts. If you are into politics, this is an exciting time. If you are not, well, sorry, you just have to put up with it.

But what happens when you and your friends really don’t agree politically? How do you survive the next year? What can you do about it?

In person

Offline you can avoid political talk when you get together. This isn’t always easy and sometimes it comes up anyway. If you simply don’t want to go there with that person, try to change the subject. Sometimes it is nice to get together and discuss politics with those you don’t agree with but only if both sides can be respectful. If someone starts off with badmouthing your political party it can be hard to want to continue talking politics with them.

On Facebook

Facebook can be a hard place to be during political season when you know a lot of people with different political beliefs. Luckily, there are some things you can do to protect your friendship and keep the peace. You don’t have to unfriend, which isn’t always the best solution.

Unfollow Pages

Did you know you could do this? You can make it so you don’t see shares from certain pages. This is great for being able to follow your friends without seeing their political posts. You can do this by clicking on the top right part of the post and you should see an option for “Unfollow Page Name.” You can also do this as well as refollow pages when you click on “News Feed Preferences.”

Post Positive

When it comes to sharing political stuff yourself, stick to positive posts about the people you like or the things you stand for. Tearing down the other side just creates a lot of tension and can also hurt feelings. Sticking to positives can help others who believe differently than you to try to understand why you believe the way you do. If I am on my Facebook feed and I see a positive political post I will be more likely to read it vs when I see a negative one.

Unfollow People Temporary

If you know one of your friends or family members is going to post a lot of political stuff you can’t stand to see, you might have to unfollow them for a time. There are a few issues I feel strongly about and if I see someone keeps posting negative things about them, I have to unfollow them, at least for a time. I don’t want to unfriend this person because overall they are special to me but I just can’t personally handle seeing certain things in my feed.

Find a Safe Space

I have a few places I can go to talk politics that are safe. I can discuss things with others without worrying about hurting someone on the other side. I can talk with those who get it and it allows me to not feel so alone in my beliefs. So while I do sometimes share political things on Facebook, I usually post in those groups instead.

Unfollow Pages On Your Side

Another thing I did recently was unfollow some pages that support my point of view. Why did I do this? Because I can only take so much of that type of thing. I love how Facebook allows you to make your feed the way you want by telling them who you want to see first and who you don’t want to see at all. If going on Facebook gets me upset when I don’t want to be, I will make changes to see more of what makes me happy, makes me think about things or makes me feel connected to the people I love.

Politics can get nasty and the things that are said can hurt feelings. I want to try my best to avoid being stuck in that during this upcoming political season.

What do you do to survive elections when you and your friends don’t agree politically?

 

The Truth About Parenting

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The Truth about parenting

Want to know the truth about parenting?

I have been a mom for almost 11.5 years now and it has been quite the journey. It has been nothing like I thought it would be.

Back in junior high, high school and college, I babysat a lot. I watched a lot of kids over those years. I thought I had it figured out.

And maybe I did have the basics figured out. That you needed to make sure they were fed, changed, dressed and loved. That you could make them laugh and that you could help them grow up. What I didn’t fully understand was how much being a parent was going to be the hardest thing I have ever done and that parenting would always  be that way, whether my children were babies or whether they were all grown up and out of the house.

When you only have little babies you have to figure out how you are going to mother them. Should you let them cry it out? How long should you breastfeed for? Does it really matter what toys they play with? You always have to wonder if you are doing parenting right.

Then they become toddlers and you enter a whole new world. I remember the moment when my sweet little boy hit that new stage and threw a sippy cup at me because he was mad he had to go to bed. Say what? Who is this child and where did they come from?

I didn’t know that the threes would be much harder than the twos. That potty training would drive me to the edge of insanity. That having two in diapers really wasn’t as hard as people said it was going to be. That I would struggle so much with the spanking issue, that I would have to do a lot of solo parenting or that I would only raise all boys.

Parenting is full of a lot of surprises.

Before I had kids I had some ideas about parenting but over time those ideas have shifted and while some things have always been important to me, other views got lost somewhere between the midnight feedings and fit throwing toddlers.

I didn’t think I would ever use a stroller. HA! What was I thinking? A stroller saved my life when I had a 3 and 1-year-old. I am not sure how I could have lived without it.

As I look back over the last 11 years I can tell you some stages in parenting are much harder than others. Did I mention potty training??? UH! Glad we are done with that.

But as I look ahead I see those teenage years and puberty and getting into colleges and I wonder how those years are going to go. Will they stress me out as much as toddlerhood did? Is that even possible? Will I be able to make the right decisions? What if I make a big mistake?

I know that you can read all the parenting books your library has and still not quite understand your kid.

And even if you did, here comes the next kid. This one very different from the first kid and he or she will make you throw everything you know about children out the window.

Children are complex and what works for one won’t work for another. Throw special needs into the mix and you have added another layer to try to figure out.

After my boys go to bed and the house is quiet I sometimes think about where I am in my life. I was the one who wrote “Mommy” as a child when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I am living my dream. Three healthy boys to love and to raise. However, it is sometimes hard to sit back and enjoy it when you are going from kid to kid to dog to house to business and it all seems a little too much.

But in those quiet moments, I can think about my boys and what they mean to me. The ways they made me laugh that day instead of the ways they made me cry. I can think about who they are today and who they are going to be in the future. I see myself in them. I see my husband in them. These children that we created.

The truth about parenting is that it is unexpected, it can throw you for a loop, it can make you laugh and make your cry, all in the same afternoon. Parenting can cause you to swell with pride when you are having a good day and make you rethink everything on a bad one. It’s fulfilling and it isn’t. It is everything and yet just a part of who I am.

The truth about parenting is that you really have to take it one day at a time because otherwise it will overwhelm you in a way nothing else ever could. But at the end of the day, every minute, every hard and difficult minute is worth everything.

the truth about parenting

How many children do you have? How old are they???

 

Want to connect with other moms who get parenting? Head on over to Hello Mamas to connect 🙂

 

On Buying Christmas Gifts For Your Children

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On Buying Christmas Gifts For Your ChildrenOn Buying Christmas Gifts For Your Children

Tis the season for buying Christmas gifts for your children. The stores are having sales, your kids are making Christmas lists and it is easy to feel overwhelmed by it all. You remember Christmas as a kid and you want to make Christmas for your kid just as special as you remember your childhood Christmases being. In some cases you might want to be doing more since you might not have the best memories when you were growing up.

How do you decide what to give your kids? How do you make Christmas special without going overboard? Should you stick to the 4 presents rule that is going around social media? Should you have a firm limit? What do you do if your kid asks Santa for something you simply can’t afford?

There is a lot to think about when it comes to buying Christmas gifts for your children.

There are a few things you can do to get more organized and to come up with a good plan so that they can have a good Christmas and you can feel good about what you buy them.

Stick to a plan

This is a must. If you just walk into toy stores buying random gifts, you are going to go overboard. Start with your budget. Talk it over with your spouse and think about how much you want or you can spend on each child. Start writing down ideas. Have your kids make their Christmas lists too. That helps a lot with figuring out what would be best and what you can afford to get them. I usually start sometime in November and start putting things into Amazon. I put them in my cart and then hit “Save for later.” When I do that, every time I go to my cart Amazon will give me an updated list of prices and then I pretty much stock the site to try to grab the gifts when they go down in price. It also allows me to have a place where I can organize what I will be getting them. I have done this for years and it is a great way to stay organized.

Play Santa

I love Santa, I always have and we have never had anything but good memories from him coming to our house. This year we only have one little boy who still believes but I know the magic will still be there. His brothers know not to let him in on the secret so I hope they stick to that. As for the Santa gifts, what I have always done is just wrap up everything and put “to” on the gift and no “from” if it is something that is either from us or from Santa. I know this won’t work for every child. Some kids will want to know why it doesn’t say who it is from. But my kids? They don’t seem to mind so it works for us. To them, Santa comes on Christmas and leaves a few gifts. The rest are from mom, dad or other family members. I do use different types of wrapping paper as well.

Talk with them about Christmas giving

I think it can be great to talk with your children about why we give presents in the first place, why we celebrate Christmas, the story of the birth of Jesus or anything else that can go beyond just making a Christmas list for their favorite toys. It is good for them to see why there is a Santa in the first place, why families give each other gifts and what we can do to help others during this time. I think it you can do this it won’t matter as much what you actually give them. I also tell them that just because it is on their Christmas list does not mean they are going to get it. The Christmas list is not a genie in a bottle, it is there to help others know what they are into that year and what they might like to see under the tree.

Try not to stress

At the end of the day your Christmas has to look like your Christmas. You know your own kids, you know what works and you know what you can give to them. See what you can buy your kids from their lists, shop sales and look for deals. One year, all my son wanted was a Darth Fader Lego Figure. At the time I thought the only way to get it was by buying a $100+ Lego set and that wasn’t going to happen. I looked and I looked and finally I found the Lego watch that came with a figure too. It took some time to figure that out and it wasn’t the first thing I thought of but it was great to see his face on Christmas morning. Other years we have not been able to get them their #1 toy. It happens. I remember always wanting a Cricket doll and I never got one. Kids get over it. So when you are busy looking for those gifts, try not to stress if you can’t make one happen. There are other things they might enjoy and you can work towards buying those instead. If you do have a disappointed kid on Christmas, use it as a time to talk about others, gift giving and how some children don’t get anything at all. There are ways to use that to help them understand more about other people.

Do you do anything specific when you are buying Christmas gifts for your children? Any great ideas you have come up with over the years?

 

 

How To Find New Mom Friends

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How To Find New Mom Friends

How To Find New Mom Friends

In the last 11 years, I have lived in five different cities. Each time I have moved I have had to make new friends. This can be a hard task and one that seems a bit overwhelming. There is usually a long period of time where I don’t have any new friends in my new city and that can get lonely.

Staying home with young children can be hard when you don’t have a local support system. It so great to have a group of friends to get together with, make playdates with and just depend on during the week. Especially when you have small children that need so much from you. You can have people who get what it is like, that understand why you might have hard days and people you can relate to about potty training, preschool choices and how many kids you really want to have.

The difficult part is finding a good group of other moms to become friends with. It’s hard because of the different ways we parent, different personalities and just being unsure if someone really likes us or not. I have found that the best thing to do is focus on fun things to do with my children and hope to meet other moms while we are going to these events.

When we moved to Kentucky I found a group of moms who met at a center that helped moms with their births. It wasn’t a birth center but it did a lot of the extra things that birth centers do like offering breastfeeding and birthing classes. I noticed that they had a playgroup once a week so I started taking my son who was a baby at the time. We all sat around on the floor and let the kids play. I started making friends there and I still connect with some of them on Facebook even though I have not seen them in person in about ten years.

When we moved to Germany I was lucky enough to meet some of the other wives in the FRG right away. That helped me feel more at home. I then started taking my son to what they called “play mornings.” They were held in a gym and the kids got to play while the moms chatted. At first, no one would really talk to me and it was hard to connect. I told myself that we would go for my son and if I made a friend there, that would be an added benefit. That took a little bit of the pressure off and within a few months, I did start making some friends there too.

There are a lot of different places to make mom friends these days and the internet makes it even easier. A lot of communities have Facebook pages and sometimes friends set them up for playdate groups. If you are new to an area or would like to make some new local friends, that is a good place to start. You can also visit Hello Mamas and look for other moms in your area. Finding other mom friends to connect with can be difficult but a good friendship makes it worth it.

How do you find your mom friends???

 

 

When Your Youngest Child Turns Five

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When Your Youngest Child Turns Five

Today my youngest son turns 5! If you have been with my blog for a while you might remember that I got pregnant with him right after we moved back to the US after four years in Germany. In some ways I just can’t believe we are here. My youngest child is now five years old! I feel like I hit a bit milestone there.

When your oldest child turns 5, there is celebration. There is something about that number that means your child is no longer a preschooler. They are a regular kid, getting ready to start kindergarten. As each of my kids have hit 5 I have felt that we have graduated to a new stage of parenting. But now that the “baby” is five, it is a really big deal.

When your youngest child turns five you feel like one big part of your parenting is over for good. Diapers and baby food and preschool choices and long sleepless nights are very much in the past. You think back to those years and wonder how you got through them. You see friends going through those years and want to tell them that they will get though them too. But you are not experiencing that time of life anymore. You have graduated. You are in high school looking back at your junior high years.

When Your Youngest Child Turns Five

When your youngest child turns five you think about how will never be the mom of the “littlest ones” anymore. Soon all of your children will be school aged and you will be away from them during the school day. You won’t have a mid-week lunch playdate, you won’t have to fill all those hours that used to be consumed with taking care of a child. It’s different and there is no going back.

When your youngest child turns five you remember when motherhood started and all the different challenges and phases you have been through. You think about how you used to have to rock your sweet baby to sleep and how you couldn’t decide whether to start them on food at five months or six. You remember worrying about what car seat you need to buy and whether your child would learn how to use the bathroom. Through learning to walk, talk and potty training has been replaced with other “big kid” skills that you know your children need to learn.

In some ways it is strange to be in this place. Kids grow up. I know this but to see our family shifting yet again seems so strange sometimes. To know that in about six months we will have all school aged kids and be passed the preschool years forever. It’s a strange feeling because it does not seem like that long ago that I was putting a 1 and 3-year-old in a double stroller and heading to the Commissary. It doesn’t seem like that long ago that I was waking up a few times a night feeding my small baby. It really doesn’t.

When Your Youngest Child Turns Five

As I look ahead I am excited. Every year brings a little bit more independence from my kids. Every year they get closer to the men they are going to be. I never wanted to rush that and I don’t think I have. Every year brings with it good things as well as challenges, some harder than others.

When your youngest child turns five you are reminded of everything you have done as a mom and think about everything you will do. You see your kids as children and not babies and yet still remember them that way as well. It’s an interesting feeling.

As I look at my sweet boys who are now 5, 8 and 11 and think about where we are in life and I just smile. We made it. Through the baby years, through the toddler years and through the preschool ones. We are now raising three boys, ready to take on the world in their own special way.

Did you feel similar when your youngest turned five???

 

 

 

On Simplifying and Realizing I Can’t Do It All

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On Simplifying and Realizing I Can't Do It All

On Simplifying and Realizing I Can’t Do It All

I can’t believe it is going to be 2016 very very soon. 2015 has been an interesting year for me. It’s been a hard year. It’s be frustrating. But now it is almost over.
As I think ahead to 2016 a word keeps coming to mind…

Simplify

I know a lot of people pick a word for the year and I think mine is going to be “simplify” for 2016.

I have recently come to the conclusion that I can’t possibly do it all. Not all at the same time anyway. There is a lot going on in my life. I have a lot to do each and everyday. I am also one of those people who needs to have some downtime too. If I don’t get it, I get extremely anxious and frustrated. So I have to be careful about my scheduling.

I have three boys, 11, 8 and almost 5. I want them to be able to do what they want to do but within reason. My oldest two are not too big into sports but they do like swimming. My youngest will probably be starting soccer too. There is also homework to think about. Also, my 8-year-old with Asperger’s has a hard time when his after school time is not spent the way it normally is.

I have a husband who is gone a lot of the time so I don’t have that extra help. Most days I do all the cooking, homework time, bedtime and any cleaning that needs to be done. My boys have chores which helps but there is still a lot to do in the house.

I work from home as a writer and blogger and while I love this very much, balancing everything can be difficult at times. I have to make sure I keep up on what I need to do each day even when the boys have a day off or a long weekend.

I want to work on decluttering my home more than I did in 2015. We hope to move in the next few years and it will be easier to do with less stuff. I have already gone through a lot of my clothes but the toys could use another purge as well as random things we don’t even use anymore.

I want to focus on paying down debt because the less debt you have the simpler life becomes. I have been listening to the Enjoying Life on a Budget podcast and they have been really inspiring to me as they have been able to pay off a lot of debt and learn to live a simplier life.

I also plan to focus more on my writing, blogging and social media work as that is where my heart is. I feel like there have been some distractions and I need to let them go. This will be hard but it is something I have thought about for a long time now and I think 2016 is the year to focus and move forward in the direction I need to be going.  In the fall I will have all three boys in full-time school so that will help with my work hours.

I want to find ways to simplify my everyday life. I know there are things we can do and change to make this happen. It might take some work but it will be for the best.

As I think about all the things I want to do in my life I have to remember I can do some of them later. I don’t have to do them all right now, in the phase of life that I am in. It would just be too difficult to make it happen. I can do a lot, I do more than some but I can’t do it all and recognizing that is a big deal.

What about you? Do you ever feel like you are trying to do too much? What ways can you find to slow down and simplify your life a little bit?

Am I A Different Person Then I Was Five Years Ago?

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Am I A Different Person Then I Was Five Years Ago?

I just finished the book Wild by Cheryl Strayed. In it she talks about her 1,000 mile journey along the Pacific Crest Trail. She went on this trip to help her deal with the death of her mother and her recent divorce. It is also a movie with Reese Witherspoon, one of my favorite actresses. We also saw the movie a few weeks ago.

The book and the movie touched me greatly. I have not gone through a divorce or the loss of a parent but I feel like the last few years have been a journey of some kind. A lot has happened and things have been hard. I had my third baby, my husband got out of the Army, joined the National Guard and is working at a job I am not happy about. It’s a job that takes him away from us too and I thought we were pretty much done with that.

These are the hard years.

The years of day after day of solo parenting, doing the best I can, crying and hoping that things will get better, praying that everything we are doing now will help in the long run and trying to enjoy the family time we do have together. There was a time I didn’t see my husband for 11 whole months in a row. This is so much better than that.

I was thinking about the person I was five years ago. The one that was pregnant with her third little boy. The one that had been through two long deployments. The one that thought that everything would work out and I see that I have changed.

Through the last few years I have become a different person…

My faith has changed a little bit, the way I view the world has changed, the way I view how to plan my life and how things are supposed to work has changed. Five years ago I didn’t know I had a son with Autism. I didn’t know my husband would deploy two more times. I didn’t know how anxious I would become over the little things or how hard that 4th deployment would make me feel.

I assumed that if we followed the path we were on it would end up in a good place but that isn’t exactly what happened. Somedays I think my husband never should have left Active Duty Army but then I remind myself that if he hadn’t, we would probably would be in the middle of another deployment right now. And that to me is unbearable to think about.

People told us that life after the Army is a long and hard process. It might take a while to get to where we can say that things are good again. This is true. We are about 18 months out and still trying to figure it out. My husband has about 18 months left of being in the National Guard and then that part of our life will be over too. I have a lot of anxiety about all of this. I just don’t know what is going to happen or what I can personally do about our future. I feel lost and scared sometimes.

I am almost 37, shouldn’t I have my life figured out by now?

Then I tell myself, life is a journey, no matter how old you are.

I don’t think I would ever be able to hike 1,000 miles by myself but I envy the process that Cheryl Strayed went through during her journey. It was something she needed to go through to heal.

I know in my heart that everything changes. What is bothering me today won’t be the case in the future. I have seen my life change dramatically in just one day. I know it can happen.

When I can take a step back and look of who I was at 31 and who I am now, I see that life is about changing and growing. I hope that these hard years will allow me to grow and change in a good way and make me a better person. I hope to learn from them. In some ways they are my 1,000 mile journey.

How have you changed in the last five years?

 

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