The Baby and the Home Stretch

It's been a long year. A few months before I deployed, my wife, Jennifer, and I found out we were expecting a baby. I think it's safe to say this deployment has been harder for her than it has been for me. But she's a good, strong woman. She went through 9 months of pregnancy and never complained about the fact that I wasn't around to help her. Then, On 1/11/11 our daughter, Olivia was born. Even though I couldn't be there, I was lucky enough to be able to watch the whole thing on skype. It was against the hospital's policy to allow that, but her doctor was good enough to pretend like he didn't see the laptop displaying the video of the soldier with the big goofy grin on his face. And he didn't complain when my sister-in-law, Debra, was running around the room carrying the laptop so I could get a front-row seat of the action. I'll never forget that day. All at once I was happier than I've ever been, but in a way, it was the saddest day of my life, sitting there in a room full of people, any one of which could have walked by and seen our special, private moment on the screen. I nearly broke down and cried watching everybody in the room with my wife get to hold my daughter and i could only sit there, on the other side of the world and watch. My mother-in-law, Sandy, brought her over and held her so that she could see my face on the screen and she looked right at me.....and I finally lost it and leaked (real men don't cry).

Two weeks later I went home for 15 days of R&R. It was the best 2 weeks of my life. Jen and me took turns getting up with her at night, but every morning at 4am when she would wake up, I would get up with her and take her into the living room for some daddy-daughter time. I'd just sit there on the couch and hold her till she fell asleep. Or, if she felt like crying I'd walk her up and down the hallway. I know most people don't like the sound of a screaming baby, but I don't think I've ever heard or will ever hear a better sound. Two weeks went by as if it were two hours. Before I had time to get tired of changing diapers, I was back in the desert.

Now it's April 4th and I'm scheduled to fly home in just a little over 2 months. I can't stop thinking about how much she's grown in just the last couple of months. She's already playing with toys. She has a little dinosaur that she likes to play with, and in the videos Jen sends me, it's the funniest thing to watch her concentrate on just holding her T-rex. We're trying to decide where we're going to live when I get out of the Army (there's no way I'm doing this crap again) and it feels good to know that pretty soon we're going to be just a normal family.