First Citrus had a high fever for five days, then Elysia. And I managed to get pink eye. Am refraining from posting pictures, although I suppose I could create quite an eye gallery with the post-retina surgery photos from a few years back that I took during 6 weeks of percocet.

Goodbye July!

Here is the challenge:

What is a good, short, name for “civilian husband married to a woman in the military?”

Orange card men?
Hommes sans chapeaux?

* The ID card for military dependents is orange.

Brainstorm away in the comments or email me.

First prize for coining the best term is a t-shirt I got in the goodie bag at a spouse symposium in Virginia Beach:

Front: Every Woman Counts
Back: Lifetime

Extra credit if you are a guy and post the comments you get when wearing it.

We had Citrus’s birthday party today at a nearby regional park next to a carousel and miniature steam locomotive.  It all went pretty well except for the train derailment, but no kids were lost.

Planning for this party introduced me to a whole new world.  I guess I had never been to a true party planning store with everything under the sun that you might want and probably don’t need. 

It is ridiculous that it is possible to provide a child with a 24-hour relationship with a cartoon character. From the moment they wake up to going to sleep, there is a branded product for every activity and bodily function.  So it did amuse me to see that you could buy branded pinatas and have your child beat the living daylights out of Dora The Explorer, Spongebob, Wall-E, or Elmo.

We skipped a pinata, however, and settled with Pin the Tail on the Bunny.  Elysia drew a donkey and a bunny, and the bunny was better so with a bit of construction paper we had a party game.  This was, of course, after my idea of Pin the Tail on Flat Mommy was rejected.  When it was her turn, Citrus refused to wear the blindfold and still put the cottontail near the shoulders.

Naturally, our daughter requested a Hello Kitty cake.  I would never stay up until 3am decorating a cake painstakingly filling in an icon of multinational corporations with a #14 tip.

Our daughter was born three years ago today, July 24th, and she has thrilled us every moment since.

These pictures were taken at about 3 days old and about 3 years old.  Click for larger versions.

And yes, we got rid of the pacifier last week after she had become quite capable of elaborate arguments and negotiating the terms and hours of the day she was allowed to use it.

Driving home the other day from an ice cream shop, we found ourselves behind Matthew Lesko, who lives a few miles from us.  He was riding a scooter and was wearing a question mark suit.

We left him in peace.  What would you have done?

I am not sure what is wrong with me, but I seem to be back in the grind of studying.  I see part of it as being useful to my current employment, and then there is the part of me that feels it never hurts to have a Plan B. 

One major downside of being a military spouse is that employment can be feast or famine largely because of the constant moves.  According to a RAND study about 10 years ago, 1 in 4 military families move across county lines in a given year, compared to 1 in 12 civilian families.  

For military wives, the implications can pretty much be summed up by the report’s heading “Fewer Hours Worked and Dollars Earned.”  And as for civilian husbands like me, the findings are usually summed up with “husbands were not studied because there were too few observations.”

I really cannot complain much.  Back when we found out that Elysia was going to move to Norfolk at 7 months pregnant, I shared a little self-pity at a hail and farewell party.  A Colonel quickly reminded me that a geobachelor tour was not a hardship compared to what other families were facing. 

And he was right.  After all, it was my choice not to move to Norfolk.  It was almost guaranteed I would be unemployed, or underemployed, only to quite possibly move back to DC later for another round of job searching.  So we made the sacrifice of living apart for two years so as not to repeat my experience in Seattle:  five months of being unemployed and then moving to Washington DC eleven months ahead of Elysia.  Undoubtedly, other military spouses would say “so what”.  Such circumstances are quite common.

Speaking of observing civilian husbands, here I am in our little Seattle apartment on Capitol Hill reading the help wanted ads.  As you can see, I no longer bothered to get fully dressed after 12 job interviews and four months of looking.  Some may argue nothing has changed eight years later despite being gainfully employed.

About nine months ago I cut down my work hours from full-time to a 60 percent position.  I now get to spend more time with our daughter and have also enrolled in two certificate courses:  The more rigorous one is to be a Certified Financial Planner ™ professional, and the other is a military spouse fellowship to become an Accredited Financial Counselor. 

My primary goal is to volunteer in the military community, where unbiased financial counseling is very much needed, but it should also give me some good experience working with individual clients.  Ideally I will ultimately combine my strategic planning background with this experience.  If this story has a Washington DC ending, I will eventually earn $300,000 per year talking about how the other half lives.  I hope things turn out more exciting than that.

Worst case scenario, I have my cake decorating skills to fall back on.

Living near Washington DC means you get to hear a lot of radio ads lobbying members of Congress and their staffs for various pet interests. Recently Northrop Grumman has been running ads boasting about an air tanker they have available, and criticizing their competitor for the contract. The ads often get very specific and are not of much interest to people who do not work on Capitol Hill.

Last week I heard a long ad assuring listeners that Citgo stations are owned by people in the community and help people in their community.  Giving and Community was mentioned a lot.  Of course, this is to counter complaints that Citgo gas is supplied by Venezuela.

Citgo gas stations are on many military installations, but we noticed during our last trip to the Little Creek base in Norfolk that the Citgo sign is gone and has been replaced by a NEX (Navy Exchange) logo.  Does this mean that Citgo has been thrown off base?  Not exactly.

It turns out that the contracts do not expire until about 2009 or 2010.  Only the signs are being replaced, presumably wherever customers have complained the most.

You may wonder, just how does a Navy JAG keep her family entertained through the winter months or keep herself amused through a deployment?

Besides knowing Cantonese and Mandarin and having a goofy husband, what ability gives Elysia a special edge over her peers?

The secret lies in her teeth.

One of my goals, and it is not a particularly impressive one, is to come up with Halloween ideas in advance of the holiday instead of after it.  As a kid, I am not sure that my brother and I ever did that, leading to very random costumes comprised of whatever was handy:  Picture lederhosen, Groucho Marx nose and eyebrows, and glasses with the eyeballs hanging out by springs.

As a father, I have an opportunity to do better.  A responsibility.

For Citrus’s first Halloween we got a nice little chicken outfit for her.  I was a box of Tamiflu.  And Elysia was Miss Influenza 2005.  It was a year of SARS, so dressing our daughter as the avian flu seemed like the right thing to do.  As it turned out, we weren’t the only ones.

Elysia googled avian flu Halloween and discovered a guy named Mark Maynard who had contemplated doing the same thing with his daughter that year, only his wife vetoed the idea.  And then it got strange.  

 
Mark’s daughter has the same name as ours, and she is one year older.  Her father is white and her mother is Chinese-American.  It was like finding a parallel universe, and discovering that it was located in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

The following year it was my turn to be vetoed — it was a silent, deadly veto — after I started to mention Mark Karr and JonBenet.  Instead, I was an entomologist and Citrus was a ladybug, which worked out pretty well.

Last year my grand plans failed when Citrus refused to put on her costume.  I was soy sauce, Elysia was going to be frozen vegetables, and Citrus was supposed to wear a white pillow.  We were going to be fried rice. 

Something tells me my ideas will soon lose out to a princess costume.  But just in case, I’m open to your suggestions.

The Navy is testing new service dress khakis, reminiscent of World War II uniforms.  Elysia now has about $4,500 worth of polyester, and apparently more to come.

On the car ride home today, Citrus announced that she was going ”get a pink uniform, with stars and stripes and ribbons, so that I can go to work.”

I think she was referring to this prototype for our Lady Sailors.

Elysia says that the khakis sometimes make her look like a brown paper bag.  Perhaps she would prefer to be sherbet?