There were the "good-night" kisses missed by Ronald Jonas' only daughter, the first football game of the season gone by for one son without Dad in the stands.
There was leaving the perpetual "honey-do" list in the hands of his oldest son, the getting to know his baby boy over the Internet and not being with his family when the 14-year-old family dog, Duke, died last winter.
Jonas' children and tens of thousands like them have in recent years learned firsthand how hard life can be when a parent is deployed for long periods, sometimes multiple times. Seeing Dad or Mom go off into a combat theater like Iraq or Afghanistan only makes it harder for those children.
But Jonas, a major in the Utah National Guard, is home now, in time for Skyler's second football game of the season and to go shopping with Lacie, 14.
"He doesn't even know me," Jonas said Thursday about 19-month-old Blake as he saw his family for the first time in a year.
His oldest son has one idea on how to celebrate Dad's long-awaited homecoming.
"I'm hopefully just going to take a month off just to chill," said Justin, who at age 17 had taken on the "man of the house" role while his father was gone.
Jonas and about 100 members of his unit returned to Utah Thursday. The 42-year-old South Weber, Davis County, man was deployed last year to Afghanistan with the Utah Guard's 1st Corps Artillery unit.
"It's been a long, long year," Tammy Georgeson said about her husband, Sgt. Eric Georgeson, also a member of I Corps.
Some of the most difficult times, she said, were when one of her kids was sick. "It's just hard not having someone else to be there for backup," she said.
But when her husband switched missions (and locations) in Afghanistan from Jalalabad to Bagram, communication improved with Internet access almost every day for her husband and the family at home. "I think it helped relieve a lot of the stress," she said.
Donna Kibler is relieved she'll finally have someone else around, if only to tell their two girls, ages 12 and 16, what to do. At the Guard's air base this past week, she held up a sign, "My Man Is Home," to welcome her husband, Sgt. 1st Class Scott Kibler, who was deployed with Jonas. Kibler said her marriage will never be the same, but also that it has grown stronger.
The impact on Jonas' family while he was deployed is similar to a story just beginning to unfold about 50 miles south at the home of Sgt. Brian Cornwell in Herriman. Last month he left the country, his wife Carie and their four daughters for a one-year deployment in Iraq as a member of the Utah Guard's 116th Convoy Security Company.
"Everybody has to suck it up," Carie said recently while at the dentist's office with twin 7-year-old daughters Kayla and Kyley. "Everybody serves."
In general, the military agrees with Carie, and it has taken steps to alleviate the emotional pain and myriad challenges children go through while a parent is gone for long and sometimes multiple deployments overseas.
"We recognize that families and children have needs," said Utah National Guard spokesman Hank McIntire. "And we know we can do more."
Guard members who are returning home can take part in a "reunion workshop" called "Putting the Pieces Back Together." In a 40-page handout, soldiers and their families are guided through the coming-home process with questions that prompt them to begin thinking about things like how everyone has changed during deployment.
McIntire said some families also use the "flat daddy" approach, which employs the use of a life-sized cutout of a soldier or airman that remains in the home as at least some kind of a presence for the children.
While reservists and Guard members are actually deployed, or if they've been "severely" injured and need time and space to recover, the group Our Military Kids Inc. has a grant program to help children left behind afford to take part in youth sports, fine arts and tutoring programs. The group, using Department of Defense numbers, estimates there are 77,000 children eligible for its grant monies.
Over the past year, Denise Jonas took advantage of something called Utah National Guard Kids, which brings children of deployed parents together for activities and a chance to empathize.
But as McIntire pointed out, there's only so much the military can do to help families and, in particular, children, survive a deployment and its aftermath. In a larger sense, they're on their own.
Denise Jonas was fortunate, compared to the families of other soldiers in her husband's unit. She and her husband would talk on the phone more often than other couples, and at least once a month their children got to see their father over a Web camera.
"He feels bad for those who didn't have that kind of a situation," Jonas said about her husband. "He didn't live in terrible conditions — it's been very touchy for him."
But Justin, Lacie, Skyler, 12, and Blake managed to have what their mother described as a "wonderful" experience, partly because their father was able to be "positive" for the kids.
"They've had challenges," Ronald Jonas said. "I think they just kept going without me — that's a testament to her," he said, referring to his wife, during his unit's recent homecoming.
Instead of Justin being able to come and go more freely with his friends, they came to his house more often.
Skyler and his father had been looking for a new dog together on the Internet while in separate countries. Now he'll be able to hear his dad coaching him from the bleachers as he plays left outside linebacker in the South Ogden city football league.
After every football game, "He just comes up and says I did a good job and gives me a hug," Skyler said.
Mom describes Lacie as "daddy's girl," who thinks that Dad being gone has forced her to be more responsible and self-sufficient.
"I think it's a good thing," Lacie said about maybe maturing at a little faster pace this past year.
"I just missed him coming home every night, the good-night kisses, feeling that someone was there," she added. "Some nights I couldn't get to sleep because he wasn't there, because I worried about him, his safety, if he was doing the right things over there."
While Lacie says she and her father have a lot of catching up to do, her youngest brother will have to get used to Dad physically being around and not just inside a computer monitor. Now, he'll get to say "da-da-da" in person.
But a deployment to Afghanistan doesn't necessarily end with coming home — and that's the part that worries Denise Jonas.
She said that neither she nor her husband are certain of how his time in Afghanistan has changed him, whether he'll still love sports as much or if he'll be "resentful" of a Western lifestyle.
She and her children have already been warned not to take it personally if their returning soldier wants to — at least in the first few days or weeks — be among other soldiers more than at home.
"He might not want to talk about things that happened over there," she said, alternating between tears of happiness over his coming home and pain as she recalls the weeks and months her husband was gone. "You just don't know how he's going to feel, and we don't know how we're going to feel — even today, I'm just a mess."
For now, Carie Cornwell is at least outwardly tough about her husband, Brian, being away in Iraq. His job there is helping to provide safe travel for convoys that often encounter improvised explosive devices, the biggest killer of U.S. troops in Iraq since war began there in 2003.
"I think that all of the missions are dangerous," she said. "Anytime you step foot in a combat zone, it's dangerous."
Back at home, she will have to survive until June 2008 without her husband being at home for their four daughters, ages 13 and 12 and twins who are 7.
"So far, they're doing pretty good," she said.
But it's already been harder on the two older girls.
"It's a tender age," she said. "They need their dad, a father figure. They don't like Mom at that age — Dad's the hero. It's best to have both parents in the home."
Since her husband arrived last month in Iraq, he hasn't had any Internet access. And the few phone conversations they've had have been short. Carie chooses carefully what she says during those calls.
"He can't fix anything here right now," she said. "The only thing he needs to focus on right now is his mission. You just say everything you need to say and move on.
"You tell him that home is still here, and to know that he is loved and missed. Everybody has got their part in this war, my part, his — and we'll put all the parts back together and get through it when he gets home."
E-mail: sspeckman@desnews.com