Army Countdowns

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!