militarymoms

As I wrote this morning on one of my other blogs, 23 years ago today I married my husband.  It was a record-setting hot day, and our reception location didn’t have air conditioning, but I honestly don’t recall feeling warm.  We’d planned a very special wedding, and it was everything I wanted it to be.  I was having too much fun to worry about the heat.

Today, 23 years later, I wonder where the time has gone and why I still haven’t figured out a way to make time for personal fitness, something I haven’t dedicated enough time to since our first duty station, way back when VCRs were still pretty new and no one had ever heard of Game Boys or Brangelina.  Time really does fly, ever more quickly.

This is a rare summer for us - no weddings, baby announcements or graduations - and so I have no shower gifts to buy.  It’s too bad, because I just read a really great book, Married to the Military, written by Meredith Leyva.

If you’ve been invited to a bridal shower for a military bride-to-be, this book would be a perfect gift.  I sure could have used it 23 years ago.  Not only does it have real nuts-and-bolts information anyone can use - how to decipher an LES, how to decode rank insignia, and so on - it also has tips for decorating your base house, advice for surviving deployments and moves and real, wife-to-wife “war stories,”  humorous anecdotes about military life.

Perhaps you’re new to military life yourself.  My local library has a copy of Married to the Military (that’s how I happened to read it), and yours may, too.  Request the book and give it a try.  You’ll learn a lot about career planning - yours and his - as well as finances, military marriages and parenting through deployments.  Definitely worth your time.