Kimber's Navy Family

If you read my last blog post, "Military spouses," you know I am no longer writing here. I've started a new blog with a different voice at Kimber's Five . Follow the link or check me out at  http://kimbersfive.blogspot.com/ . Thank you to all my blog followers and everyone who has emailed me supporting me since shutting down Kimber's Navy Family. All the best, Kimber

I started this blog before my twins were a year old, 7 years ago. We were a growing military family. We had PCS'd together 3 times by then. I felt like when I talked to other parents of multiples that there was a marked difference in our family mentality. They all had a long view-- neighborhoods they planned on living in for their children's entire childhoods, or sending their kids to schools that they themselves had gone to or all their previous children had gone to. As a military family, our focus is much more on the present. The time we have together today. Where we are living right now. My husband's schedule that week. We have to approach our plans with an open hand. Because I have found that I make plans and hold on to them with a tight fist and, like sand, they slip through my fingers. The military is always changing the game on us. Our orders were revoked before we moved to this duty station. Granted, they came through a week or so later, but at that point in time ...

I just wrote a blog post on how to support yourself through deployment ( "Supporting yourself during deployment" ) and how to support the military spouses in your life through deployment ( "Supporting military spouses through deployment" ), so the next post in this series should naturally be about how to support your children through a deployment. Nearing the end of our second sea tour, I can say that going through deployment with an infant and going through a deployment with a 3rd grader are vastly different, just as going through deployment with one child compared to multiple children has also been very different. So my disclaimer for this post is that this is a general guide for getting through deployment with kids. I would love to hear about how you get your children through deployment at their ages and stages! My oldest, as I write this post, is 9-years old in 3rd grade. We also have twin 6-year olds, a 3-year old, and a 1-year old. 1. Familiar routines Th...

I recently posted my top 10 ways to help a military spouse through deployment in my blog post " Supporting military spouses through deployment. " It can be really hard to know exactly what to do to help a friend or neighbor or whoever the military spouse in your life is when they are navigating the deployment of their spouse. But how can you, as the military spouse, help yourself through a deployment? Help comes in various ways and sometimes the help you need is abundant and everywhere you look and sometimes you can't catch a break and feel completely on your own. So what are things that you can do to make your life just a liiiiitle bit easier? 1. Deployment pre-planning To quote Monty Python, "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition." Before deployment, before you are navigating the emergency situation on your own, make a list of every phone number you could possibly need. It sounds ludicrous, but when you start making this list and you struggle through th...