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May 27, 2007

The 3-year old unrolled his blanket and stared in rapt silence at the green and khaki squares of material, taking almost a minute to notice his daddy's image staring back

at him.

The baby rolled on hers almost immediately and happily drooled on a corner of

it as she traced a lining of red satin thread with a ragged

fingernail.

My eldest unwrapped hers in the car after a middle school dance, looking quietly with a small smile at the squares as she recalled places and times that took her back to when each photo was taken.

One blanket for each child. One blanket that captures the images, impressions and memories of what amounts to a child's entire lifetime with a deployed parent. One blanket per child, thanks to Alaska's Operation Kid Comfort.

I first learned of Operation Kid Comfort (OKC), a program offered by the Armed Services YMCA, when I was checking out a preschool for my toddler earlier this year. A lady stopped by the preschool to drop off a quilt she had just made for a student at the school, a student whose daddy was in Iraq. She proudly showed me this incredible patchwork quilt she had created with pictures of the little boy and his daddy interspersed throughout the

blanket.

I was envious, I admit it freely.

When this woman learned that I, too, had a husband in Iraq and children at home, she told me about OKC. She sent me an e-mail later that afternoon with some contact information and encouraged me to send off some photos of the children with their father so that they, too, could have what I called their &#8220Daddy Blankets.”

I received the finished products only a few days ago, and still cannot believe the results.

The blankets are beautiful: the quilter who made the blankets studied each photo of my children and their father intently for clues about what they might like.

As a result of her study, my son was elated to discover the entire back of his quilt was covered with Pittsburgh Steelers fleece. My son eats, sleeps and breathes the Steelers, thanks to his daddy.

My stepdaughter is very much into anything soft, dainty and feminine. Her entire quilt is done in different shades of pink, with a gorgeous soft pink fleece on the back.

The quilter had no idea pink was her absolute favorite color.

My baby girl's blanket uses red roses as a theme, the bright, cheerful, beautiful blooms interspersed throughout the material. The quilter had no idea my daughter's middle name is Rose.

These blankets, and the insights into our lives that they provide, made tears come to my eyes.

My son looked at each picture carefully with me, and told me about when each one was taken.

&#8220That's me and my daddy throwing football,” he told me intently after showing me one square. &#8220And that's my daddy and me laughing,” he said after showing me another picture from his blanket of the two of them in hysterics, jaws agape, posing for the camera. &#8220And that's when I was really mad,” he told me, indicating the picture taken almost the minute he was born, right after his had cut his umbilical cord.

His scrunched up red face and open mouth do indicate a small degree of frustration, now that I think of it.

My son spread his blanket like a cape across the back of an easy chair and looked at it like a book, standing beside it and pointing as if he were a teacher. I think he thinks he needs a yardstick to be more forceful.

He is so excited by this blanket, and is thrilled to have pictures of his daddy beside him when he sleeps at night.

When I went to check on him the night he got the blanket, a few hours after he had been in bed, I discovered him sound asleep, with the blanket wrapped loosely around his arm. His fingers were rubbing the blanket as he slept, tracing a light pattern across the fabric of a Blackhawk helicopter and part of his daddy's nose.

The baby had a different reaction. Just the air of gaiety in the house excited her when the blankets arrived, about her naptime as it happened.

She enthusiastically flung herself on the floor to examine her bright new quilt, and immediately touched her daddy's face and said, &#8220Boo-Baa.” This means either &#8220brother” or &#8220bottle” or &#8220I would now like to discuss whether Freud truly articulated and refined the concepts of the subconscious and unconscious as a radical new therapeutic frame of reference for the human understanding of multiple manifestations of psychoanalysis.”

My baby talks big.

After crawling and slobbering over almost every inch of her blanket and her brother's, the baby fell sound asleep on her tummy on a corner of her new quilt.

In retrospect, her slobber may have been why her brother now insists his blanket be hung up aside the chair.

And my stepdaughter, just finishing with her first year of middle school, was touched and whimsical about her blanket. She looked over the photos that adorned her quilt, from her early toddler years leading up to just before her father deployed last fall.

Each photo depicts a moment locked in time with her and her father. She laughed over the picture of her and her daddy wearing comical noses and fake moustaches, and smiled almost sadly at the one of her sound asleep over her father's shoulders after a busy day at an amusement park almost a half decade ago.

I think she lightly traced that photo with the thought that she can no longer fit on those strong shoulders of her daddy anymore.

I hate to be the one to break it to her, but it's my guess that when he sees her again next month during his leave that she is going to be unable to leave those shoulders, and that she will also find that pose entirely undignified and possibly childish.

Her daddy won't care, though.

I watched my stepdaughter as she carefully laid her quilt over her bed before she fell asleep that evening, and I realized that she had arranged the blanket so that it appeared to almost be hugging her lithe form.

I realized then that the OKC program gave us so much more than just a blanket. They let my children have their father with them, even if just on fabric.

OKC allowed my children's daddy to hug them, even from thousands of miles away. I don't know if they will ever realize what that means to my children, or to me.

Anyone interested in volunteering to assist in making quilts or who knows a child who would benefit from a blanket can contact Kim Seay at: kimberly.seay @akasymca.org

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.