About Amber & her Blog
Amber is a winner of Top 25 Military Moms - 2012
What do you love about being a military mom?
Being a military mom isn't much different than being any other type of mom, we have our hardships just like any other family. For many of us military life is all our kids have known.
I do love that my kids will be able to say that their daddy is a soldier, that he fought for our country and did so with a very elite group of soldiers. I hope we are able to instill in them the cost of war (in an age appropriate way) and tell them about the friends we've lost so that we all can enjoy our freedom.
What advice would you give to moms on how to build a new support circle after a move?
Oh boy, that's a hard one and something I struggle with myself. You just need to get involved in some way. Check our the FRG, a MOPS group, story time...anything that looks like it would be fun for you and your kids.
When you get there introduce yourself! The hard thing about being the new girl is breaking into already established groups, if you are sitting alone in a corner avoiding eye contact you will be much harder to approach. Odds are that there will be someone that you have a past duty station in common with and go from there.
What's a tip for helping kids cope with a parent's absence?
Communication, communication, communication! Doc hasn't deployed since we've had kids (he was injured on his final deployment a month before TC was born) but he's been on several TDYs, most recently he was gone for the month of July. My two year old asked some questions and I assured her that daddy had to go away for work. I tried to call him when she asked for him but was careful not to make any promises, if he wasn't available I didn't want to deal with a disappointed two year old.
She acted up more while he was away and I did my best to acknowledge that she was missing her daddy and that it was alright to miss him but we needed to find other ways to show that we miss him.
Kids are smarter than we know, TC needed to tell herself something that she could understand so about halfway through the month she told me that Daddy was with the Red Sox. In her head she decided that her father was away playing baseball which is something he loves and I guess a way for her to pretend she could see him each night when we watched the games. I went with it, it seemed to make her happy and wasn't harming anyone. I am still waiting for that big check from the MLB though...
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