Soon.

Soon my husband will be deploying to Afghanistan, commanding his firefighter company. This picture is from the deployment ceremony today.

Soon the kids and I will have to miss our favorite guy for an entire year. Soon he will be in a country far away, shouldering intense responsibility, seeing and facing things most of us will likely only ever imagine, if that's even possible for us.

Soon the equipment will ship out and we'll update our wills, get special powers of attorneys, contact our bank and credit cards about the deployment, complete last minute tasks around the house, and do all the things we have to do as a family and as a couple to be ready for this deployment.

Soon we'll have two precious weeks of block leave (vacation) together. We will take many, many pictures and smile many, many smiles and enjoy every minute of it.

Soon the kids will get clingy and sad. Soon they will each get a calendar so that they can count down the days of deployment and they will break out their letter writing kits. Soon they will need to creep into the bed I'm sleeping in alone to snuggle more and more. They will help me fill boxes for their dad, filled with colored pictures and notes and photos and small trinkets they want to share with him. We will all go the post office, fill out the overseas shipping forms, tape the box up, and send it very far away. We will imagine the sand in that very old place, wonder how the air smells there.

Soon I will cook smaller dinners. And frankly, probably get Subway more often. Soon, in the stress of the final few weeks, I will wish he would just leave already, so we can get on with getting by and waiting for him to come home. I will call my fellow army wives, my very dear friends, and they will know exactly what I mean and how I feel. Because they are feeling it or have felt it too. We will go to the gym together and joke about how the junk in our trunk will look SO HOT when the guys get back. We will split a bottle of wine. I will remember again and again why I am so grateful to have them in my life, why if anyone asks for my advice, I always tell them not to move home for deployments. You can't get this back in your civilian hometown.

Soon what I put in this blog will feel more like a love letter. A letter to my husband far away, sharing parts of our days and hoping he feels part of them. A letter to my kids, remembering all those little moments that fly by so quickly. A letter to myself, being present in the fresh page of every day. A letter to anyone else reading, because what we share always has a way of meaning something to someone else.

Soon.