Deployment Wall

Though I am a seasoned Army wife that has been by my husband's side through 8 deployments, this upcoming one was a bit different for us... it was our first one with having children. In the past, I became a workaholic and survived on take out food and getting lost with my work but not this time. This time was different in many ways.

One of my husband's homecomings from before we had children

I started searching online to start preparing for a deployment with kids and found all sorts of amazing ideas. My favorite had to be pre-recording videos of my husband reading stories and saying "good morning" and "good night" messages to our children. I kinda wish I had him do one for me for some encouragement... maybe next time. Both my kid's LOVED watching their father read to them and wish them good night, especially when we would go days without hearing from him. 

Another great idea was a Deployment Wall. I have never heard of this before and was so excited to have a visual reminder of my husband and when he was coming home. My kid's loved moving the number cards on the countdown and seeing if Daddy left them a card in the mailbox.  

Here is a breakdown of our deployment wall and where I got everything:

-Clocks to show our time and Daddy's

-Patriotic Felt Garland

-Deployment Countdown

-Galvanized metal envelope

-Patriotic picture frame 

-American Flag 

-Iron Wall Basket and is full of wonderful books I HIGHLY recommend for children going though a deployment. 

Night Catch

Countdown til Daddy Comes Home

My Daddy Soldier

Hero Dad

It was a very long deployment and I pray we don't have to go through another one any time soon. We would do special activities to celebrate being a week closer to Daddy coming home, ice cream before dinner was always a favorite. Having a routine always helped. I got very involved with my local gym, church and also our FRG. 

 If you are going through a deployment, what has helped you and your children? 

Foyer Makeover ~ Board & Batten

When we first moved into our house I knew I wanted to put board & batten in our long boring hallway. It was a long dark hallway just screaming for something to be put on those walls.

Well... it took a long time to do and I am just kicking myself for not doing it any sooner. I first drew horizontal lines at the desired height but something happened and we had to put off the project for another time. So, I just painted a thick white line as a reminder to do the board and batten sometime in the future... not the best looking foyer, I know.

A few years later (yes, years! We moved and rented our house out for 4 years but are now back) we are ready to get this foyer done!

The most tedious task is to draw an even horizontal line but that was done a while ago so that part was easy. So the next part was to draw out where I wanted the vertical lines to go. I knew I wanted to avoid corners, outlets, light switches and anything else so I was sure to keep those areas in mind when spacing everything out. 

We used 1/4” lattice strips from Home Depot along with a 1”x1” Pine fore the top trim. Measuring everything took the longest. I wanted to be sure none of the vertical strips ran into any outlet or light switch covers. We did  14” between the vertical strips and 10.5” between the two horizontal ones. After using a finishing nail gun to hang up the strips, I spackled and painted 5 coats of Glidden paint and primer in white on white semi gloss. 

*UPDATE*

We painted the door white and put a fresh coat of paint on the wall above the board & batten.