The first signs of fall are beginning to appear in the form of back to school shopping sales. A new semester means new book bags, pencils and a new college blogger!

Please help us welcome Sandra Moyer to our roll of talented military spouse writers.

Sandra emailed me after seeing our ad for new writers. When I checked out her musings of life and the universe on her personal blog at http://contemplationsofanarmywife.blogspot.com, I knew we had a winner.

When we began chatting via email and Facebook, I knew I had myself a new best friend. As military spouses well know, you have to make friends fast in this world because you never know how fast you’re going to move away again. Sandra instantly captivated me with her wit, charm and humor.

The mom of three is expecting a baby this fall and served for seven years in the Army. She has been to the front in both Iraq and Afghanistan and is now busy holding down the homefront and attending school full time while her Army husband does the deploying.

Sandra’s first blog appeared Wednesday and can be found each month on our Wednesday blog rotation. I hope you will find her insight and writing as charming as I do. Welcome Sandra, we are happy to have you!

I hope the days come easy and the moments pass slow

And each road leads you where you want to go

And if you're faced with the choice and you have to choose

I hope you choose the one that means the most to you

And if one door opens to another door closed

I hope you keep on walkin' ‘til you find the window

If it's cold outside, show the world the warmth of your smile

But more than anything, more than anything

My wish for you

Is that this life becomes all that you want it to

Your dreams stay big, your worries stay small

You never need to carry more than you can hold

And while you're out there gettin' where you're gettin' to

I hope you know somebody loves you

And wants the same things too

Yeah, this is my wish

Yesterday, I received an email from my sweet friend and editor that read, "It was just a little all over the place ...". And that really caused me to look at myself. When my writing is disjointed, typically, my heart and my head are disjointed too.

After taking a long hard look in the mirror, I realized that I was looking for encouragement, but I had not been giving any to others. Uh oh.

Life as I know it is difficult. Having a spouse who works a lot and can't help as much as you like is hard. Not feeling like you have the money to do exactly what you want (or what your friends are doing) is hard. Raising three kids is hard. Finding a job is hard.

However, deciding to have a cheerful disposition is easy. Encouraging others is easy. Doing the best you can with what you have is easy. You’ve just get out there and do it. It is a choice, plain and simple.

My last half marathon was hard. I had to get up at 3 a.m. to drive two hours to run this race by myself and then drive home. The course was hard. The race before had been a personal best for me. This race was not.

But during the last mile, just when I didn't think I would ever get to the finish and an EMT asked me if I was okay, it was easy to smile and give her the thumbs up. It was easy to smile at others who were running past me, even though I thought I might die! It was super easy to give a huge hug to a member of my twitter family that finished that race as her first half marathon!

So it is time for me to get back to the root of this column and that root is to be an encouragement. That is what I love about writing it. Military life is not easy, but together, encouraging one another, it is a little easier and a lot more fun.

Give me a shout out on Twitter or Facebook and tell me where you need some encouragement! We are all in this together!

Strength and Courage ... sby

It was a cold, rainy and all around crappy day at work when my husband asked me what was - in his mind - a relatively simple question: 

            "When we PCS, why don't you go to school?" 

Having grown exhausted with the job search at our upcoming duty station, I agreed. 

In April, we (along with our 2-year-old son) arrived at our new duty station. In May, I enrolled in our local community college. In June, we said goodbye as my husband left for a yearlong deployment. In those first few months, a few things became very apparent:  

1. Being a parent, a spouse, a solo homemaker and a full-time student can be very rewarding ... but they are also very grueling. 
2. Gone were the nights of studying in a dark, silent library until 3 a.m. and then surviving the next day on Red Bull and youth. Replacing them are the days filled with academia, hugs from tiny arms, exhaustion and what can only be described as tireless devotion.   

Cut to me, standing in a room while everyone else sits, wondering who the heck I am, or why what I'm about to say is important: 

My name is Sandra. I am a 31-year-old mother, Army wife, and full-time student. 

Please, feel free to gasp or shake your head sadly for me. Feel free to judge me. It's cool. We don't have to be friends. In fact, we can part ways here.

But, if you didn't gasp, or you didn't shake your head, stick around. If anything about my journey strikes a chord with you, whether you empathize with my plight or are interested in starting down your own back-to-school path, spend some time with me.    

Our Favorite Blog of the Month: http://www.widowofawoundedmarine.com/

There are a lot of military bloggers. A lot.

Moms, dads, kids, in-laws, spouses, cousins – you get the picture.

And then there are the women who blog about our greatest fear, being a military widow. And unfortunately, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have created a lot of potential widow bloggers.

Like many of you, my husband has deployed to the front lines multiple times. I am not certain that I could maintain my professional composure or even calm myself long enough to write eloquently or even form a basic sentence about life after his death. I am thankful he has returned home safely each time.

The military spouse blogger we highlight this month has the strength and wisdom that most of us could only hope for.

An Army wife, she was 20-years-old when her husband was hit by an IED in Iraq. The couple spent four years struggling with his recovery, including amputation, PTSD and TBI, before he died after an accidental overdose of pain medication while he was hospitalized for PTSD.

Nothing I have ever experienced can compare to the hell this woman must have endured. The mere thought of what those four years must have been like for her brings tears to my eyes.

She blogged nearly all of it: the ups, the downs, the recovery. And she is amazing.

Her writing, while it obviously touches the raw emotion of the difficult times, is so uplifting. She is unleashed, honest and witty. Reading her blog feels almost like sitting across the table from her and listening as she speaks. Her words are, alive.

I encourage everyone, not just military spouses, but everyone to take a look at her blog and be encouraged, humbled and awed by her strength and character.

So often we shun that which we fear the most, the death of our soldier. This blogger doesn’t just bring her readers through the bad times, she also lets them tag along with her on her journey to live.

This is the big PCS move year in Hawaii. Our entire street has nearly emptied. Most of my friends have already packed and flown.

There are just a handful of us left, all with only a year or less to go before our boxes are shipped too. And as new families move in around us, and jumpstart their adventures in this new duty station, it’s terrible to admit, I’m just not interested.

And I’m not alone.

My friend Meg turned to me one day and sighed, “I just don’t want to make new friends that I’m going to leave again. I’m done here.”

At PCS time everyone focuses on how tough the transition is for military kids. Turns out, the move is tough on grownups too.

Every social organization we belong to has practically turned over its entire membership. We have new neighbors in every direction. We didn’t even invite friends over for a 4^th of July barbecue because frankly, there was no one left to invite.

Normally, when we are new to an area our family jumps in with both feet and chats up anyone who will listen until we’ve filled our dance cards with a roster of great friends.

Now, as we eyeball the closets that need cleaned, the four years worth of stuff that needs organized and mentally catalog all the tasks that need completed in the coming months before we can move on, making time to grow and foster new friendships just seems, exhausting. Self-defeating, perhaps, but exhausting.

So, for now, the last of us still standing on this rock in the Pacific will band together between packing and prepping to blow to the four corners of the world.

I’ll nod and smile at my new neighbors and make polite chit chat at school drop-off. They will be nice, I’m certain, and at some point I’m also certain that I’ll wish we were better friends. And then I’ll rush off to pack and organize yet another closet and remember just what direction we’re headed: outbound.

To my dear future friends, I can’t wait to see you. It’s going to be a long couple of lonely months.

So I drew a deep breath and I clicked "submit." With that small keystroke, my life could change dramatically or it could not change at all. I don't know about you, but that thought scares me to death! I put my heart and soul into a resume, a cover letter, and thoughtful answers to a bevy of electronic questions that may or may not get me to the next level: the interview.

So now, I wait. I second guess. I run. I lift weights. I annoy my family with my lunacy. And then I realize that at this point there is nothing I can do except wait - patiently.

My worry has officially been interrupted by the official duties of military life.

It is PCS season, which means it is also change of command season. This brings new commanders into the unit as well as new Family Readiness Group leaders.

Last week I attended the first steering committee for my husband’s unit with our new leadership. Though I was attending as a spouse, and not the FRG leader, I was quickly reminded of my days serving as the FRG leader. 

Being an FRG leader can be challenging but it can also be immensely rewarding. If you are a new FRG leader, new to the unit or new to being a leader, remember to do a lot of listening! Ask your members what they need, what they like and how they define success. Don't forget to ask the commander the same questions! After all, it is his or her program.

If you are an outgoing leader, or you are staying onboard to help, remember that just because things haven't worked in the past doesn't mean they won't work with new people. You should give the wisdom of your experience without killing the spirit of the new people.

And remember that the new combination of people and personalities may just be the lynchpin that holds all of the hinges together.

So for now, "I throw my hands up in the air sometimes. Sayin ayo. Gotta let go."

Strength and Courage ... sby

I’m not just the mother of boys. During the summer months I’m also the mom of a teenage girl. My stepdaughter is fantastic. She’s kind and beautiful, smart and feisty. I may be biased, but hey, I’ve loved her since she was 2 ½. She was the best wedding present I could have been given.

Parenting stepchildren during deployment is a very different task, especially when that child is raised away from a military community. This year, my daughter wore her father’s unit shirt to school.  At the time, we were in Gunman Company, and the front read, “Gunman Girl.”  The back had an apache (my husband’s dirty mistress) and read our company motto, “Guns for Hire.”  She was asked to remove it at her rural Pennsylvania school, because it “promoted violence.”  She stood her ground and won her case, but dealing with a military child during deployment wasn’t exactly something that school district was used to. 

My sons have never been asked to remove a company t-shirt at their school. There’s sensitivity in our schools which are around military bases often attended by children of deployed soldiers. My second son attends a deployment group at school where he can talk about his feelings, put together a “write-to-daddy” kit and meet with other kiddos going through the same thing. 

My daughter doesn’t have that luxury, and no one around her understands what she’s going through.  When she was terrified of two uniformed soldiers in her principal’s office, no one understood why. The adults knew that those soldiers were there for recruiting. However, my daughter’s first thought was that they were there to notify her of her worst nightmare.  But no one understood. How could they when the military is so foreign to them?  The military might not be a part of my daughter’s daily life, but it certainly is part of her daily thoughts and worries. 

Though the pressures of deployment weigh differently on her than my boys, in some ways lighter, and in others, not, she’s still experiencing the same torturous time we are, but without the physical support of our military family.

This is our fourth deployment and I’ve always taken my daughter for her summer visitation, even when my husband isn’t here. The way I look at it, there are seven members of this family. So even if one is missing, she’s still part of the 6/7 not deployed. It’s not just her dad she’s visiting, but her brothers and me.

When she’s here, she asks tons of questions, some innocent, some rather macabre, and I answer for her as honestly as I can. I know that during the rest of the year, there’s no one near her to answer these, so if I get inundated with her inquiries while she’s here, I’m okay with that. It’s what she needs. 

I’ve heard people say, in regards to stepchildren, “It’s not the same for them, because they’re not here.  They don’t live this day to day, so it’s easier.”  Maybe in some ways, it is.  Maybe out-sight-out-of-mind applies to our stepchildren, but they also deal with a lack of understanding and people who aren’t prepared to deal with the special needs of a military kid enduring deployment.  It doesn’t matter if they’re in the house or not, their parent is still deployed, and they’re still going to worry. 

Stepchildren, especially those raised away from our military world, need a little more love, support, and understanding from us during deployments. We give her the best opportunities to communicate with her dad, expose her to other military kids, bring her on base and make sure she knows she fits in here.  We give her as much support as we can during the summer, because we know that even though we’re only a phone call away in winter, it’s just not the same. 

Here’s to military stepchildren. Hug ‘em if you got ‘em, folks. I know I do.

Effective Aug. 1, all service members must serve four more years before they are eligible to transfer benefits of the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill to their spouse or children.

Currently, most service members must serve four years before they can transfer the benefits. However, in 2009 when the transfer was offered as an incentive for recruiting and retention, troops near retirement age were allowed to transfer the benefits based on their retirement eligibility date. Some service members served no additional time in uniform before making the transfer while others served up to an additional three years.

That waiver officially expires at the end of July.

For service members who are considering retiring in the coming months, or even years, the change may put a dent in their plans. Anyone retiring before the 2014 graduations, just in time to use the benefit for their newly minted college freshman, will be out of luck. Stars and Stripes covered the topic with Keith Davis, chief of education and training at the Ramstein Air Base education office.

“It’s across the board. Effective Aug. 1, all members of the military, regardless of branch, will be required to serve a four-year active-duty service commitment at the time they elect to transfer benefits to a family member.”

The four years of service begins the moment they transfer the benefits but doesn’t necessarily mean they have to re-enlist for another four years. Here’s what Davis told Stars and Stripes:

 “You have to give the military four years from the day you execute the transfer. If you have two years left and you transfer (benefits), you would have to extend for an additional two years to satisfy the requirement.”

The change mostly affects senior officers and enlisted personnel who are nearing retirement.

To be eligible to transfer Post-9/11 G.I. benefits, a service member must have a minimum of six years in the military. To be eligible to receive those military for education benefits, their spouse or child must be enrolled in the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System (DEERS) computerized database.

Military members can transfer the benefit back to themselves to fund their own education for up to 15 years after leaving the service, but cannot transfer the benefits to their dependents after retiring. The transfer must be made while the military member is on active duty.

Sometimes, I get the rare opportunity to send something to my sailor.

A “mail-drop,” we call it.

But basically, it’s just a ton of stuff shoved into a Ziploc bag labeled with his name. 

I always add pictures of our girls, gum, snacks and lots of other silly things you grow to appreciate when you’re stuck underwater for months on end.

Nothing fancy, by any means.

But thanks to Pinterest and Facebook, I always feel a little shame that his mail-drop packages aren’t as creative, crafty or special as the ones other wives send. Sure, I let my daughter scribble all over paper and send him her “art-work,” which he hangs up in his bunk, but it’s not picture-perfect decoupage, topped off with a little love sonnet written just for him, as I’ve seen some wives do.

So imagine my glee and surprise when I found one of those Hallmark cards that allow you to record your voice, set to play when the card is opened.

That’s perfect for the craft-challenged like me.

I just knew this would be my military-wife moment.  He’d open that card, hear his adorable toddler yell “Hi, Daddy!” and a single tear would fall from his eye, just like in the commercial.

I bought it and waited till the next day to elicit the aforementioned toddler’s help.

While the baby was sleeping, I locked my 2-year-old into her high-chair, bribed her with a bowl of raisins, and made her practice her line with me a few times, “Hi, Daddy! I love you!”

It took a few minutes, but we finally had it down pat, until I opened the card.

She wouldn’t talk.  She wouldn’t even grunt.

Then, as soon as I closed the card, she tried to snatch it out of my hand with her new favorite phrase, “Mine!”

I sighed, exasperated.

We continued that dog-and-pony show for quite awhile.

Open card.  No words. Close card. “Mine!” Sigh.

Thirty minutes later, I was sweating.  We had to do this. We couldn’t send Daddy a card with our most current recording: her screeching at the top of her lungs when I gently tried to keep her from tearing the card in half.

I had all but given up hope.

Until the 274^th time we tried it, and she said it.

Or, rather, she said something.

It was close, it really was.  All save one, lone word. 

“Hi, Daddy! I love poo!”

And that word made all the difference.

Not quite the loving message I intended to send him as he floats 20,000 leagues under the sea, but it definitely gave him a pretty good picture of our home-life right about now.

So away it went, poo and all.

Not quite the military-wife moment I’d hoped for, but it’s definitely one both of us will remember for a long time to come.

Follow Brittany at http://www.brittsbeat.com/

PCS season - a time to say goodbye to old friends, miss seeing their smiling faces and time to snap up their slots at preschool, swimming class and that shady parking spot under the tree!

I'm going to miss my friends. However, with being a military spouse come certain expectations - friends will eventually move. There also come certain opportunities, to grab everything they have left behind!

In Hawaii we are experiencing a massive PCS exodus this year. Every house on our street has received a new family, save for three. Once upon a time on-street parking was cramped and the arguments over coveted spots escalated into full blown neighborhood wars. Now the avenue is clear and it is time to make your spot known!

Preschools near military bases often have long waiting lists. Families who are fortunate enough to nab a spot usually rotate all their children through that coveted spot for years until they pack out. A larger PCS turnover means there are spots available at even the best preschools in town. I found slots for both of my toddlers this fall, at the same preschool. Score!

Hot programs like swim class are also impossible to sign up for with a full complement of families on base. All my kids are on the rolls for the next swim class, it’s the first time in three years of living here that we have secured any spots.

Even the commissary and exchange seem slightly less crowded during massive PCS seasons. The line on payday only stretches to the ice cream rather than all the way to the eggs in the back of the store.

It’s been a tough PCS season. It feels like we are saying goodbye to dear friends nearly every week. My kids have been left without friends to play with in the neighborhood. My nearest and dearest friends, who I spoke with on a daily basis, are now accessible only by Facebook as they settle in, three time zones away.

With the ebb and the flow, come a few small gifts. With all the difficulty of this PCS season, it’s been nice to be on the receiving end of some of the perks of being one of the few left behind. Worry not new friends, we will be leaving two open spots at preschool next spring. Line up now ladies!