R&R babies

There's a picture circulating the internet these past few days of a pregnant military wife welcoming her husband home from a 15 month deployment. Everyone is saying how nasty that is, and how that baby couldn't possibly be his, and stuff like that. This rubs me the wrong way big time.

See, I was that pregnant wife welcoming my husband home from a 15 month deployment almost exactly three years ago. It didn't occur to me until well after the fact how that probably looked to people. Sure, you figure on explaining this to people with absolutely no knowledge of the military (like the ones who are shocked to find out that the war doesn't take a break for Christmas). You patiently tell them when they ask, "Yeah, Thak came home for 18 days 11.5 months into the deployment. Yes, every soldier gets to do that. It's called EML, better known as, R&R. This baby is very much his." Of course we expected some ribbing from the guys in his unit when he arrived back to his FOB after finding out that we were expecting, when he called from the Baghdad Airport. His friends were congratulatory, of course, and never said anything stupid, but the typical wise asses, and people who don't like us, of course had plenty to say. We expected that. I'm sure the wife in the picture, and her husband had the same experience, and they probably figured it was par for the course as well. Most people do. No, what surprised me was the reaction of military wives to this. Like, really? Doesn't everybody know somebody who's had an R&R baby? In the case of the people I'm referring to, yes, they know AT LEAST one person. They know me! That's why it surprised me that a picture of a pregnant wife at a homecoming ceremony raised such a stir. When I saw it, my reaction was, "Oh, another R&R baby!" It was no big deal. I was like, "What am I supposed to be seeing here?"

A lot of people assert that the odds are just so slim that you can have an R&R baby, that the odds are actually greater that a wife who's pregnant at homecoming was, in fact, cheating during the deployment. Of course that's total crap. So I'm going to tell you how to have an R&R baby. This is what we did. It won't work for everybody, but the 2-year-old on my lap is proof that it works for some people.

1) Be ridiculously fertile. Yes, this is luck of the draw. Some people are, though. While there's little that can be done to influence this in a lot of cases, there are things you can do to somewhat boost your chances. Get to a normal body mass index, eat plenty of superfoods (Acai, pommegranate, goji, etc), and plenty of calcium. Have your husband get plenty of zinc. No drinking or smoking for either of you. OK, maybe not NONE... Thak drank a couple beers a day over R&R and we still conceived fine. Just keep it moderate with the drinking.

2) Chart cycles. Get a couple calendars and a highlighter for this. You'll need them. You will need to know your body VERY well if you're going to conceive a baby with your husband home for only two weeks out of an entire year. You only get one chance, so you absolutely must know your body. Some people like the book Taking Charge of Your Fertility. If you're unsure about how reproduction works, definitely read it.

3) Be married to someone with enough influence in the unit to choose his R&R dates, and be reasonably sure they stick. Thak chose our dates after three months of tracking cycles, and using a projection of what days we would best conceive in the 12th month of the deployment. Then he requested those dates, and was approved. Not a lot of people will say no to a three tour guy. It helps if your husband has a lot of combat experience, and everyone knows it, before you try something like this.

4) Have someone on deck to switch dates if your cycle does something stupid and the dates you pick out won't work. We had a scare like that, and there was a kind Lieutenant who said she would switch with Thak if necessary. It didn't become necessary, but it was good to have that option just in case it did.

5) Hope for the best. Because really, even with the best possible circumstances, there's still a shit load of luck involved.


But there you have it. That's how we had an R&R baby. It was really the only way to have babies at Ft. Stewart between the years of 2003 and 2010, when the deployment schedule was so constant, and getting orders out of there was the nearest to impossible. That is, unless you're ok with giving birth alone, which I absolutely am not. (That is seriously the ONE Army experience I refuse to have any part of. It is a total deal breaker.) Thak and I realized, after a few years, that there was never going to be a time when he would be home long enough to go through a whole pregnancy, be there for the birth, and spend any time at all with the baby, if we didn't conceive over R&R, so that's what we did. We're very lucky. We know not everybody is. The fact is, though, it's not just random chance. Orren might just be one of the most planned babies there ever was. Every day of our lives for over a year (because we had decided to do this before he left for his 3rd tour), we did something that related to planning for Orren. We didn't just happen into this. The fact is, anyone who goes to the lengths we went to, to make sure everything was just right and we had the best chances, should have a better than average chance of getting their very own R&R baby.

If you do have an R&R baby, I promise I won't say anything nasty about you being pregnant at your husband's homecoming. ;-)