We went to the National Zoo on Mother’s Day with three other families from our classroom at the base Child Development Center.  Pictures are here for friends and family — all others can skip unless you want to look at The Most Adorable Children on the Planet.

Oh, and one picture of a panda and another of an exhibit of his poo, which I only note because they have to keep it chained down so no one takes it. Now that Citrus is potty-trained, let’s hope she doesn’t want her own display.

Three of the kids, including Citrus, are the same age and are Eurasian with mothers who are Asian-American officers.  What are the odds? 

Only about 15-20 percent of all servicemembers are women — 201,575 in 2006.  Of those, about one third are officers.  And only about 2.3-4.7 percent of Air Force and Navy officers are of Asian descent. 

Now playing a little loose with the numbers because the real ones are hard to come by, if we assume that the number of Asian female officers mirrors the percentage of all female officers
. . . my guess is that 3.3 percent of Navy/Air Force officers are Asian-American women.  And 3 of the 685 were at the zoo. 

All of this means one thing:  I should have gone to bed rather than be doing these sort of calculations.  Still, Elysia and I thought it was kind of interesting.

On a whim, I just signed up for the Military Officers Association of America’s Spouse Symposium in June.  It is taking place in Virginia Beach, so we are likely to make a mini-vacation out of it and visit the place we called home in 2005-2006. 

I can’t really explain why I am going other than I find the subculture to be fascinating and somewhat alien.  No offense intended to any milspouses reading this.  Take me to your leader, I come in peace.  

I wonder if there is a hazing ritual.

A few weeks ago Citrus got a pink poodle balloon at the Blessing of the Fleets ceremony. In his short life, he met SEALs and Seabees and sat in an armored Humvee. Now here he is deflated, the life drained out of him, but still very much loved.

He meets his fate tonight. 

Today was Military Spouse Appreciation Day.  A few days ago the President honored six recipients of the President’s Volunteer Service Awards, and it was nice to see that one of the six is an Air Force husband who has done a lot of fundraising for military family programs.

I found it noticeable that the White House ceremony included a male, civilian husband, because I know there are others out there even if they seem to be rare in the milspouse community.  After all, more than 200,000 active-duty servicemembers are women and they aren’t all single or dual-military!  Or are they?

If you look on the web, you would hardly know that there are civilian husbands of servicemembers. Take a look at the images on the Military Spouse website, for an example. Whether in the civilian news media or the many websites serving the military community, about the only place “spouse” always includes men is on the official DoD websites or in the President’s proclamation. Actually, to be fair, the National Military Family Association (which was originally formed as the Military Wives Association) does a good job of being inclusive. Still, there are others who think that using “spouse” is political correctness run amok and long for the old days.

But what does the data show?  Several papers on military marriages do not include female servicemembers or dual-military couples because the sample sizes are too small for whatever statistical analysis they are trying to do.  Everything I have read suggests that civilian husbands are extremely rare, and definitely more so than dual-military couples.

And then I uncovered this:  About half of all officers are married, and 39 percent of those couples are dual-military (42% and 49% for enlisted).  If you want to see something very interesting, look at the number of male servicemembers who are married to another servicemember.  [The full research paper, based on 2002 data, is here.] 

The data suggests why I have run into other civilian husbands — whether at work or when buying a Christmas tree from a volunteer firefighter — despite my thinking that I am the oddity.  Roughly speaking, I’m estimating that there are just over 42,000 civilian husbands out there. Very few compared to the number of civilian wives, but enough to get at least one or two loads of laundry done.

I definitely need more practice, but here is my first rose and rosebud cake, which I did this evening. We are going to a 2-kid birthday party in early June and I have offered to do both cakes. Have to figure out how to make farm animals. Sheep seem like they should be relatively easy to make but I think I’ll need more than that.

For the first time, we took a week of vacation and did not travel anywhere. It was pretty good, although you know you’re getting old when the week’s highlights involved getting a new vacuum cleaner (and being excited about getting a deal on one), looking at bathroom fixtures, and installing shelving.  The house breaks first, the residents are next. So far so good.

Elysia is usually the one who tackles the home repair projects without hesitation. The Navy sends her to Norfolk when she’s 7 months pregnant and the next thing you know she’s standing on top of a cat condo with a drill. Today, however, I did a little drywall repair.  If you ever want to live inside a gingerbread house, cake decorating tip #19 works well with joint compound.

I am up to the sixth cake in a cake decorating class.  Last night we did a clown cake.  It did not scare Citrus. In fact, I have never seen anyone else so excited over a cake.  I think she knows the important reason why she was born a human being and not a chair.

Army Specialist Jeremy Hall’s lawsuit made headlines in the past few days. He was deployed in Iraq and his being an atheist upset an officer and other soldiers to the point where the Army sent him home because his safety could not be guaranteed. 

When he was a gunner and his Humvee was under fire, a commander later asked him if he believed in God.  Apparently Hall responded “No, but I believe in Plexiglas.”  Later he organized a meeting of atheists, which was interrupted by an officer who told him

People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!”

And back in the United States,

Hall currently has a no-contact order with a sergeant who, without provocation, threatened to ‘bust him in the mouth.’ Another sergeant allegedly told Specialist Hall that as an atheist, he was not entitled to religious freedom because he had no religion.

I can see why the Army removed him from his original unit if cohesion of the team was threatened, but wonder why they didn’t just put him somewhere else in Iraq.  Or maybe being an atheist can be the new way to get out of a deployment!

Meanwhile, an officer apparently deployed to Afghanistan in 2005 for the purpose of converting Muslims and other soldiers to Christianity.  Our local paper in Silver Spring, Maryland just did a profile on a new evangelical preacher in the area who recently retired after 23 years in the Navy.

 . . . But then, ‘‘God called me to preach.” The next year, he was shipped to Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar province in a support role with coalition troops. There, he followed his calling, preaching to military personnel on the base where he lived and venturing out to hand out Christian literature and, through interpreters, talk to local Afghans about Jesus.

He violated orders, used interpreters, and didn’t get sent home?  When you compare the experience of Hall to the preacher, it gives credence to claims of religious bias in the armed forces regardless of official policy. 

In any case, it irritates me to no end to think of friends being deployed and meanwhile you have someone who puts their mission ahead of everyone else there.  One day this guy in uniform is handing out Christian literature to the local Muslims, the next day someone like my wife shows up to do her job, wearing the same uniform.  The Gazette is a small paper, so I imagine they’ll print my response:

The profile of the new pastor and his path to Sligo Baptist Church was interesting, but I found his prosyletizing while serving as a naval officer disturbing (“Former naval officer hopes to revitalize Sligo Baptist Church as new pastor,” 4/23/2008).

While Corrigan’s service to his nation is admirable, it is widely known among service members that U.S. Central Command’s General Order No. 1A prohibits “proselytizing of any religion, faith or practice.”  Yet the Gazette reports how Corrigan “followed his calling” to preach, deploying to southern Afghanistan to support coalition troops in 2005, where he was “venturing out to hand out Christian literature and, through interpreters, talk to local Afghans about Jesus.” 

As an officer serving in Afghanistan, Corrigan would have been subject to that order even if he was serving in support of coalition troops. The primary reason behind that prohibition is that any attempt to convert a Muslim to another religion is illegal in Afghanistan. 

Additionally, as a policy matter, the U.S. and its allies want to avoid any appearances that our presence in that country is a pretext to convert Muslims to Christianity.  This is already a highly sensitive issue among the populations of many Muslim countries.

What does a lawyer do with her rifle and pistol marksmanship training? 

Sometimes you just need to protect your family from giant corn and squid, or win a flower for your husband at a German carnival.

Today was the annual celebration for the Month of the Military Child at the Child Development Center on base. 

As you would expect, the daycare was covered with red, white and blue bunting, flags, pendants, streamers and balloons.  There was vanilla ice cream with blueberries and strawberries, and you could take home a little cup of soil to plant red, white or blue flowers.  I think we forgot our soil somewhere near the ice cream when Citrus went back for seconds.

The Fleet and Family Support Center had an information table set up but I was not asked if I was a military spouse, unlike the wives.  Ah well.  We got our tchotchkes anyway.

There are about 1.2 million military kids in the U.S., and about half have had a parent deployed. The hundred or so toddlers running around today have a lot more in common than they realize.