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.