Deployment Freebies

We went this morning (Gunner had a 4 day weekend--I am loving them being off on Tuesday now instead of Friday!) to get Junior's daycare arranged at the center. While there I showed his deployment orders and they told me about all the free things we get starting now.

Junior gets a 20% discount on his full time daycare bill and this will carry over to the girls too when they need to go to the summer camp because I have class all summer. That saves me about $600 this summer! WOOHOO!

Each of the kids gets 16 free hours of daycare a month. They have Friday and Saturday getaways. This also applies for the girls for after school care, so I can use it when Abs starts her biofeedback and I was stressing about what to do with Em during that time.

Each child gets to play 2 sports a year for free. (It cost us $66+ to register the girls for soccer.)

They also get 4 free Skies Unlimited classes (up to 8 weeks long) for free.

Re-enrolling the kids will be free, so that's a $40 savings.

10 free hours of daycare per child during R&R.

There are also several emergency provisions in place, which I will hopefully never have to move and I do have my mom as a backup as well.

The lady who got me setup with all this stuff was great, but when I asked who was footing the bill for this, she said eventually it will come back to bite us. I'm sure it will as that is a huge source of revenue that is now being depleted. Apparently it is not the same at every installation, but since Fort Hood is the largest they are able to do this. I can't imagine that I will be using everything as I like to hang out with my children, but it is nice to know the options are there in case an emergency arises.