Daddy Kisses

So Ryan is deployed. Watching him leave this time just about broke my heart. Daddy and Avery are best buddies and I guess I hurt more for him than anything else. I know it would kill me to be apart from my little girl for almost five months. I would not want to be in his shoes; when he returns from this deployment he will have been gone 9 out of 21 months of Avery's life...including her birth. I get so worked up and sad when I really start thinking about the impact of Ryan's military career and how the story of our life will be told. The Air Force has provided a wonderful life for us, yet Ryan will watch and know his child through stories over the phone, pictures, mailed video clips on a disk and time delayed moments on Skype. I know families have done this for years and "back in the day" had to wait on mail to arrive a month later but this is MY family and MY struggle. Ryan and I spoke tonight and I raced to tell everything Avery had done in the last three days before we ran out of time: Avery is totally obsessed with stickers and coloring, she tried to do a forward flip on the carpet - where she learned that I will never know, she ate dog food today, she tried to shave my legs today after watching me do it once in the shower earlier in the week, she found a panty liner in the bathroom cabinet and tried for 15 minutes to stick it to a body part saying "boo boo!," Avery got a new toybox in the mail today, she finds five day old, scabbed over "boo boos" and immediately goes into hysterics all over again, she is way smarter than we give her credit for, she is wearing me out! Ahhhhhh exhale. And Ryan is not the only one we are apart from because of his job. We live hundreds of miles from any other family member. They miss out on all kinds of special moments and everyday goodness because of the distance. I am so thankful for Ryan and people like Ryan who sacrifice...I just wish the sacrifice weren't so hard on my family.

The daddy kisses jar and a little hang begging for more!

While Ryan is away Avery Beth gets a "Daddy Kiss" everyday. The jar of kisses started with 135 kisses and when the kisses are all gone daddy will be home...and our child will have a serious chocolate addiction. She gets SO excited and insists on opening these kisses all by herself; one tiny little shred of aluminum foil at a time. I love that she has a connection with daddy and something that makes her so happy.