Anyone remember who plowed my driveway last year?

The first group of soldiers from my husband’s brigade came home this past week.

The newly returned soldiers and their families have been all over the newspaper and the television lately, talking about their excitement at finally seeing their loved ones and their homes after a deployment lasting more than a year.

I am thrilled for all of those who are home. They are back in Alaska in time for Thanksgiving, the first major snowfall and the subsequent driveway shoveling that will result from the aforementioned snowfall. I have to admit it — as happy as I am for all those who are home, I am still a teensy bit jealous.

I am still going to have to shovel the driveway by myself for the next several weeks.

OK, so make that a lot jealous. Every time I see a picture of a euphoric soldier embracing a thrilled child I get choked up and have to blink back tears. The happiness I have seen all over the broadcast mediums has been almost palpable. I can feel the excitement of the families and their complete joy and delight that their families are together again.

I know that mine will not be complete until December.

I completely understand the logistics. It took weeks to get 3,500 soldiers from Alaska to Iraq and it will take weeks to get them all back home. They are arriving in waves, hundreds at a time. Some of the first to come back were the first to leave last fall, so they absolutely deserve to come home on the earliest flights available.

But that still doesn’t mean I can’t envy them and sigh as I look outside at the snow coming down and realize just how much shoveling I am going to have to do this week.

It will still be easier than last year’s shoveling, however.

Last year at this time my bouncing-off-the-walls brown-haired bundle of energy and excitement 18-month-old was still working out the basic of drooling and spitting Gerber sweet potatoes onto mommy’s white blouse. My pre-schooler was 2 and hadn’t mastered the art of coming to mommy when she calls, especially when everything else everywhere in the entire world had to be more interesting that whatever mommy wanted.

So, when the driveway needed shoveling I squished an unhappy baby into a backpack carrier slung over my back and seriously considered a small kennel or harness for the toddler. Every time I would bend down to lift up a shovel full of snow the baby would screech in dismay, convinced she was going to fall out of her backpack.

She screeched extremely loud too. My eardrums still have not recovered.

After the second or third (OK, it was the first) snowfall, I gave up shoveling for good. It was just impossible to get it done while chasing after the kids and trying to keep my eardrums intact.

I ended up calling a snow removal company to have my driveway shoveled; however, I could never remember which snow removal company I’d called from week to week, so I ended up using several of them throughout the winter. I always felt I was cheating on whomever had done it last when I called a new company, but my memory wasn’t the best at this time last year.

This year I have vowed things will be different. The baby is old enough to play delightedly in the snow while I work on the driveway and my now 3-year-old still hasn’t mastered the art of coming to mommy when she calls, especially when everything else everywhere in the entire world has to be more interesting that whatever mommy wants. But he’s learning. Three-year-olds are a constant work in progress, I’ve discovered.

Then again, so are 1-year-olds. And husbands.

Listening skills not withstanding, I confidently have no plans to call any snow removal services this year. I have high hopes that I, and not the snow, will win this go-around. That’s partly because I know shoveling the driveway should be easier to get done this year with the kids being older, but mostly because my neighbor bought a new snowblower last year and offered to snowblow my driveway whenever he did his.

It still would be nice to have my husband back home to share the experience with. I would even offer him the baby backpack — and some ear plugs.

Tiffany Horvath is the mother of two and the stepmother of one. Her husband, Drew, is deployed to Iraq. She writes every Sunday abut life at home for the wife of a deployed soldier.