Kimber's Navy Family

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...

Recently on one of my submarine spouse groups, a spouse asked what kind of support is given to the military families while the service member is deployed. Several people answered, but here's the bottom line: no support is guaranteed. Your boat might not have an active FRG (Family Readiness Group). Or Wardroom (for officer spouses). Or you might be geo-bacheloring and nowhere near any of the military support. Or maybe you haven't connected at that particular duty station or you just moved there or you live across country from all of your friends and family or maybe you are going through a hard time: mentally or physically. But here is the great news! Support for military families can come from anywhere: your neighbors, the military community, your friends and family, your existing support networks and social circles, your church, your gym, your kids' schools, long distance, your FRG, your Wardroom, your military base and the programs offered there. Even better, ...

You know what never gets easier? Breakfast. And heading out to school in the morning just makes the mornings even CRAZIER. One of the biggest problems that I have with my children at mealtimes (outside of the kid that can make mealtime a 10 hour event) is that they suddenly will STOP eating something. Why? I don't know. We will go weeks with all 5 of our kids eating breakfast well and then suddenly breakfast is a battle ground again! For instance, for awhile our boys really enjoyed eating cereal in the morning. Then I started having the problem that halfway through a bowl of cereal, one of them would burst into tears saying he didn't want Captain Crunch, he wanted Mini Wheats. Or one of our boys would eat a whole bowl of cereal, ask for a second, eat two bites out of it, then say he was done. So here are my tips to make breakfast a little less crazy. 1. Establish routines During the week when I have to get 5 children out the door in the morning for school or daycare, I ...

I love my parents. Not even a little bit, like, a lot. As I've grown up, they have gone from being the World's Best Parents to The World's Best Parents AND My Closest Friends. They are so supportive of our Navy family and welcome us with open arms and an open door anytime we want to visit or even move in with them in between duty stations or during deployments. However, as great as they are, living with family can be a sticky situation even with the closest and most understanding families so I wanted to write this blog post to air some of my complaints that I have with my family publicly without consulting them first (best way to handle family drama, right?). 1. My mom always has laundry for me to put away. She comes around to all of our rooms, finds and collects the dirty laundry we have stashed in corners, washes, dries, and folds it and then puts these HUGE piles of clean, folded laundry at the foot of my bed for ME to put away. Like I have ALL THIS TIME to put away l...

I go through phases in regards to house cleaning, where I can't function without a housekeeper and our bathrooms are covered in toothpaste and our floors with dirt clots, dragged in from muddy boots, and there is a layer of crumbs on every surface. Other times, having a housekeeper is more of an inconvenience-- making sure to have the house tidy on a certain day at a certain time, keeping the children out of her way, and possibly getting out of the house while she's here. Plus the expense. Currently, we are in the latter category. So, for the time being, we are back to cleaning our house, 5 kids and all. So how do you clean with 5 kids? Well, our youngest is an infant, so I don't have much to worry about with her, save for feedings and naps interfering. I tend to do loud cleaning, like vacuuming, right after she wakes up from nap. That way she's happy and content to bounce in her Excersaucer. For the in depth cleaning, like the bathrooms, I try to do that when she...