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.