How to Celebrate Mother's Day when Mom is Deployed

Being in the military is hard enough in itself, without adding the trials of being a mother on top of it. However, the responsibilities a mom may have as a military service member may not always allow her to be there in person with her children. It is hard on the children, and it is hard on mom to try to be both a service member and a mother all at once. This Mother's Day, though, there are things that you can do to bridge the gap that deployment has caused physically between a military mom and her children so that they can in a sense celebrate Mother's Day together.

For those who are caring for the children, whether it is the father or a family member this is for you.

You are going to need a camera so that you can take pictures of the kids doing what Mom would have gotten to see had she been able to be home for the days leading up to Mother's Day. Take pictures of the kids when they come home from school with the Mother's Day gifts that they had created. Have them hold the gifts up for the picture so their military mom will get a chance to see.

Next, you will want to have the kids create some lovely cards and crafts for Mom. Take pictures of the children while they are creating these gifts. Just start snapping random pictures of the kids throughout the whole process. When each card and craft is completed, take a final picture of the child with that card or craft.

Once you have the pictures developed, you will want to create a scrapbook for the pictures. This gives the pictures an added touch as well as a treasured gift for Mom. Go with whatever theme you think she would like or let the children come up with some nice themes for each page of the scrapbook.

Add a letter in there to Mom asking her to have a fellow service member take pictures of her with the cards and gifts. These pictures she can send back to the children so that they can see how Mom reacted to their gifts. If she has time, she can include a note to the kids telling them how much she loved their gifts. However, being deployed sometimes does not give the chance to write even a short note. The pictures though will be enough for the kids to visually see how much Mom loved their gifts.

Once all of this is done you can box it all up and ship it to Mom. Remember though that before you box gets overseas to Mom, that it will be handled very roughly. I was always told that when anything gets shipped overseas to a deployed soldier that it should be wrapped up as if Godzilla himself was going to handle it. So keep that in mind when preparing the box of treasured Mother's Day cards and crafts.