129 Days Is...

...a really long time. It is...

• 129 links on our paper chain
  
• 3096 hours / 185,760 minutes / 11,145,600 seconds
• 9% of Jack's life
  
• 385 meals (minus a few when we were sick)
• 800 Emails (from Jay--I probably sent more)
• 1225.5 phone minutes (approximately)
• $80.55 in postage (not counting stamps)
• 10.5 hours of the smoke alarm beeping
• 9 birthday parties
• 3 hospitalizations
• 2 deaths
• 1 funeral
• 148 blog entries
• Season 1 of "Dexter"
• Season 1 of "Moonlighting"
• Season 3 of "The Office"
• Countless episodes of "Frasier"
• Countless hours of Tuesday night chats with the FIAR girls
  
• A giant bottle of Excedrin
• Valentine's Day, Easter, Mother's Day, and our anniversary
• Jack learning how to write his name
• Learning how to say "Z" and "orange" (Jack again, not me.)
• Being able to instantly figure out the 8 hour time difference between OK and Kuwait
• Learning how to mow the lawn, fix the toilet, figure out the new digital camera, and take screen shots
  

I was fortunate that several of my friends had husbands deployed at the same time, so that made it seem a little bit less strange for Jack since lots of his friends had dads on trips, too. And I was fortunate that I have parents who will drive through a rainstorm to pick you up at 7:00 am because you spent the last 14 hours vomiting and you can't take care of your child anymore. And I was fortunate to have a husband who did everything he could to call home every day and make sure that even though he was more than 7,000 miles away we all still felt close.

Jay has been back for almost two weeks now; it took about 2 hours for us all to fall back into our old routines. And tonight he is out of town and Jack and I switched back into the deployment routine pretty seamlessly, including him yelling every time the phone rang and me being in my pjs by 6:00. So I guess if nothing else, we have become very flexible. Hopefully that will serve us well in the next couple of years!