Counting
Down
Originally
posted on my
blog - you can leave comments by visiting the link.
If
there's one thing that every Army wife is a pro at...its at learning
how to do a countdown. Ever since my husband joined the Army, I feel
like I am always on countdown until something.
Countdown
until he left for basic...
...until
graduation...
...until
we PCS'd the first time...
...until
he deployed...
...until
he returned from deployment...
...until
he deployed...
Well
you get the idea. I have one of the fancy countdowns in an Excel
spreadsheet. At any given moment, I could tell you how many months,
weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds it would be until I saw him
again. Well based on my best educated guess - which was of course
always wrong but it was close (sometimes!). I particularly liked
watching the seconds disappear as it didn't take too long for
100,000 seconds to go by or even a million. While in reality its not
that long, it sure sounds longer than saying one day down!
I
always seem to have several ways of counting down going on at once.
Every time I do a once a week or once a month task, I'm always
saying in my head...I only have to do this X more times and he'll be
home. Again that makes it more manageable. As it gets closer to his
return, I start counting down by days. Such as only three more
Friday nights by myself. Three! That seems like such a small and
manageable number!
Then
there's the way I also countdown when I'm doing exercise tapes. The
main DVD I do is 30 minutes long so as I'm watching the timer I'm
motivating myself. After 1 minute down, I say I only have to do what
I've already done 29 more times. Two minutes down, only 15 more
times. Three minutes down, only 10 more times! The numbers drop so
quickly, its motivating to me. I do the same thing during his
deployments.
I
know some people who countdown by putting a specific number of
candies in a jar and eating one each day...slowly watching the candy
diminish as more days go by. That method would never work for me as
I could see myself having a bad day and grabbing several handfuls
out just to make the jar less full and make myself feel better!
I
suppose one day, all of these countdowns will end. I really can't
imagine paying rent and not thinking about how many more times I
have to do this before the next big event occurs. What a life that
will be!
