As I prepard to move across the country, the fact my kids will have to start school one month late, and that Monster will have one less month to familiarize himself with his educational assistant, with a new school, with new rules and environment, has certainly reminded me that there is always the one extra little complicated factor and for some of us, it’s our Special Needs kids at posting season. So today, I have Meg from Milkids Education Consulting to give us some insight on how you can make the most of education for your special needs child. Moving is challenging under the best of circumstances, but add in moving with a child with special needs and things can be complicated. And moving with the military AND a kiddo with special education services…woooo boy! Before you move The first thing that you should do is to contact your current school office to let them know about the upcoming move. It is best to contact them several ways: phone, email, and in person. This way they have lots of notice about the change in educational placement, and you are making sure that your concerns are not overlooked. The end, or beginning, of a school year is especially busy and stressful with new enrollments and disenrollments occurring daily. When you contact the school, you should request copies of the following items: ● IEP/IPP, current and updated ● all formal evaluations, including district, provincial, and national assessments ● all report cards/progress reports for the last academic year ● all medical records, if any exist You might also want to contact your child’s team of teachers and specialists. Let them know how much they have helped you over the last year(s), and that you will be sad to leave…
I get asked frequently for ‘lists’. Which is funny because I am a terrible list maker and you guys have way more faith in me than anyone should. I frequently grocery shop without a list (gasp!). I make lists and forget where I put them. I don’t complete them. I don’t even write them. All of the above. But, well, I have done the Deployment mambo more than a few times, and I’ve learned from trial and error that there are some things you just DO before they’re gone to make your life 110% easier. Did that life experience remind me to winterize his motorcycle when he left on an immediate reaction deployment for 6 months last fall? No. Ask the mechanic who just charged me my firstborn to fix Dh’s motorbike this spring. Sometimes, shit happens and you can’t get everything done. You don’t have time to evaluate what you need to finish before they are gone. They just leave. This is why many of these things should be talked about now, if not yesterday. Life happens and it pays to be ready for it. But many times you have some warning. Or, if they are posted to a High Readiness unit, or their unit goes on Immediate Reaction, you can just get stuff done as a ‘just in case’. That is usually our scenario. Not that any of that saved the Virago’s carburetor. Either way, this is me giving you what you were looking for, the best way I know how: Before you read this, you should go to your MFRC. Or call them. Ask if they already have one of these. I’m sure theirs is…
Today I had planned to post something funny about deployment checklists. Then yesterday, my Facebook feed changed. And Regimental crests with black bands replaced profile pictures as the tributes started. There were meet ups for drinks and quiet beers at homes and bars across the country where glasses clinked and memories spilled into the silence. Where soldiers sat and processed what it feels like when the goodbye comes suddenly and long after the firefight. I came home late from work and Dh had our dehumidifier in pieces on the counter, focused purposely intently on the job in front of him. I walked up silently and hugged him and he shrugged away. “not until the kids are in bed.” When the house was quiet we opened a couple drinks and sat on the couch, giving a wordless toast in front of mindless TV that served as a distraction from all the “if only I…” This isn’t the first time. There’s a lot of yellow ribbons out there. Far more so when we are fighting, even among those who argue the latest wars there are few who would say they don’t support our troops. Since the beginning of the war in 2002, more Canadian Forces personnel have died at their own hand than were killed in combat. We are quick to respond to the death of those in the line duty -whether they be military, police, firefighters, paramedics, etc – with pretty ribbons on our cars and our clothes and our social media. And that’s sometimes the best way we can see in grief to show our loss is felt. I challenge myself and anyone else to put our money where our ribbons are. And our time. And…
Today I cleaned the kitchen. This isn’t *that* shocking, I keep a relatively clean house, only because when my house is cluttered my head feels cluttered. But this morning, I had no intention of cleaning. When you live apart for half a year, or, say, more than half of the past 3 years, or huge chunks of an entire 14 year marriage, sometimes big things happen. Sometimes a couple grows apart, someone is unfaithful, someone wants to leave, can’t wait anymore or is just plain done. But other times, other times none of those things happen. You are still very much in love. You’ve never had the time, energy or even the smallest interest in an affair. You’re in this for life Instead something else creeps up when you don’t expect it. Turns out I got really comfortable alone. I made my own choices, my own decisions. If I wanted to leave at 8pm and go shopping, or skip the gym in the morning, or make grilled cheese for dinner all week, no one was there to say anything. Then he is home and I resent it. He is in my space. He has a voice in my decisions. He speaks up and sometimes he says things I don’t want to know or make judgements I am not interested in hearing. So things are tense. Adjusting is hard. I’m not fun to live with, and sometimes that means neither is he. Fuses are short. Sometimes one of us pushes it too far. This morning it was Dh, but that doesn’t mean it’s never me. It just wasn’t me this time. When both of us went to work this morning neither…
This week, Dh gets a new medal. It’s one every soldier gets, just for showing up for 12 years. Dh has 15.5 years in, but I just assumed it was like high school, it just takes some people a little longer to get there. Okay, no it’s actually just the army who occasionally forgets about things. Especially if no one reminds them…. but it’s more fun to explain it the other way. Now, if I was to give you a detailed list of the people who care about Dh’s medals, it would look like this: 1. Me. …. I know. It’s extensive. The truth is, Dh doesn’t much concern himself with what medals he has. It doesn’t bother him that with 4 deployments, he has a total of 2 medals on his chest. It doesn’t bother him that he’s less than 2 weeks from that 2nd bar on his Afghanistan medal, so he will forever look like he’s done less time there than he has. Or that he’s been home months from his 4th deployment and isn’t holding his breath that he’ll see that medal anytime soon. And when he stands on Remembrance Day next to a soldier who commands all the civilian attention due to a rack of medals that actually points to much less experience than Dh has, instead of bitter he’s mostly just happy he’s deflected any attention. In fact, he completely laughed it off when on his 3rd deployment to Afghanistan they gave him a camera to take pictures of the medals ceremony, because he already had the medal and they had…
When I was young, my parents would drag me in the early morning on November 11th to the Legion, where we would sit for the Remembrance Day ceremony. At the beginning of the service, they would dim the lights and play a soundtrack of a battle. You’d hear the bombing, the whistle of incoming fire, the yelling of orders and the screams of pain. As a child it was both sobering and terrifying. As I grew I felt like I understood. I respected and appreciated the battles that had been fought for my freedom. I couldn’t have known then that I would marry a man who would deploy over and over to his own generation’s war. But I certainly felt that I grasped as best a civilian can, the reality that those before had fought and died for eveything I took for granted here. But that understanding, it felt far removed from any real life person. Though I had 3 grandparents who enlisted and served during WWII, I didn’t really connect who they were with what I knew had been experienced. I definately never equated a war veteran with the man who told us jokes, bounced us on his knee and stuck out his teeth at us. This is my Poppa. He was born in Montreal to British immigrants on May 31st, 1920. At age 15 he got a job with United Shoe Machinery. He worked there for 46 years, volunteering to take 4 years off in 1941 to go fight as a Gunner for the Allies in WWII. As a child it was hard to see my Poppa as a veteran. But this week as I prepared his memorial service, I spent my evenings reading histories of his war and his…
(Before we start here, I just want to mention that this is me, being honest. It’s my narrative. My voice in my head that, like many women, tells me what it doesn’t like about me. It’s not a judgement on anyone else, and it’s not meant to give a standard to anyone. My guess in writing it is that, regardless of our different sizes, many woman have this same conversation with themselves. This is mine.) This deployment I put on some weight. I ate more than usual. I had to change gyms and with that my routine for exercise changed. I was working on top of parenting and I didn’t make the time for meal prep and planning as I usually do. All those excuses to say that these last 6 months I just didn’t make exercise and healthy eating as much of a priority as I have before. So even though I usually lose weight when he is away, I gained. Not a lot, but enough that I look a little different. So for the last month or so, that’s been all I’ve seen. In fact, in my eyes, that’s been all I’ve accomplished. I look at the little muffin top and that’s all I have used to sum up months and months of my life. I didn’t get it together enough to keep that under control. I failed. I have measured the success of my accomplishments this deployment on the size of my stomach roll and nothing else. I’ve looked at pictures where I’ve been speaking or working and all I…
Here in my house, pity parties are not allowed to last the night. Sure, it’s okay sometimes to sit with your glass of wine and your bag ‘o chocolate and moan because you’re doing it on your own again, or because you’re little family won’t be complete at Christmas, or because not one child will have dad home for their birthday this year….. but then you pick your bloated, wine filled ass off that couch and you pull yourself together. Life moves on. And sometimes pulling yourself together just involves enough energy for yoga pants and wiping the grime from the toilet before someone thinks there’s a frat house using your bathroom. But it’s still progress. In my house, we move forward because experience has taught me nothing gets better if you’re waiting for the ideal moment to try. So last fall when Dh left I decided we wouldn’t be sitting on our butt waiting for community to magically appear and make this 4th deployment easier. We were going to make community. Inspired by Sarah Smiley and her book, we started our Invitations Deployment Project. Each Sunday, we invite someone new for dinner. Each Sunday, we have a new chance to expand our community. Tonight’s dinner was on the road. It was getting harder to book things when our house is on the market, and so we decided to go somewhere that we knew we couldn’t get them to come to us: the firehall! After a few emails they agreed to let the crazy lady and her kids bring ham dinner over, and so after cleaning up for a showing and leaving the place smelling like the ham I had in the slow cooker, we packed it all…
A few weeks, maybe days after Dh left I found these bowls. My kitchenware is eclectic. I don’t have a set, instead I have bowls and plates and mugs that I chose separately. For Dh’s sake I chose all the same bowls, all the same plates… but the mugs don’t match the dinner plates, and nothing matches the desert bowls. So I’m always on the hunt for ones that I like. And back in October, I found these ones. Dark colored with a big red flower on each, they match the colors of my great room and so I added them to the collection. That was 6 months ago. They are now part of my routine, they hold my breakfast oatmeal and soup for dinner. They have a place in the cupboard. They fit in here now. It’s down to days/weeks now before Dh will return. It occurs to me this morning he’s never seen these bowls. And I have never told him about them. Why would I? Occasional rushed phone calls and emails that share the more important information over 6 months, it’s just one of those things that doesn’t come up. And yet how strange it must be to return home and see them there, in a space they weren’t before, part of a routine that is no longer familiar. The media often paints reintegration as a terrifying balance of happiness and rage, shows like Homeland reach to the extreme and other movies with returning soldiers often focus on panic attacks,anger, fear. There’s huge issues that certainly happen, confronting infidelity, financial misuse, PTSD, traumatic physical injury. Dramatic scenes play out on the soldier’s…
April is the month of the Military Child. I mean, there’s a month for everything, right? So why not one for them? Let me start off by saying that kids in any circumstance, are special. Farmer’s kids are amazingly resilient at sleeping in combine’s come harvest time. First Responder’s kids spend nights worrying about dad every time they hear a siren. Pastor’s kids get dragged to every single church potluck and hugged by strangers. And kids who’s parent’s work in banks, in fertilizer plants, in prisons and in offices, they have all learned very special ways to adapt to their own life. But I have Military Kids. So that’s what this is about. When April comes around, I see quite a few posts going around the social media world, and they start like this: ‘Your average military brat…..’. And I think… Is there an average military child? Some kids, like my husband, will move 5 or 10 times in their life. Across the country and across the world, they will watch the trucks pack up their life and they will make new friends and learn what TV shows are cool in which crowds. They will adapt to different playgrounds and different teachers. Sometimes they will even adapt to a different language. And other military kids, they will only move once. Or not at all. Some military kids will say ‘See You Later’ and watch dad’s ship sail out of sight. Some will say goodbye in a cramped room and watch the bus pull away. Some will say goodbye while dad heads to war. Some will say goodbye when mom heads on training exercise. Some will…
