Five Ways You Can Turn That Frown Upside Down This Deployment

1. Get creative with your FRG. Learn how these FRG leaders kept their members climbing uphill -- literally, on a climbing wall -- through their deployments.

2. Cook together -- so YOU don't have to cook every night! Some of these milspouses even throw monthly freezer cooking parties, then exchange frozen meals so they can skirt by a deployment without divvying dishes for one all 12 months long. Or hold a cooking co-op with four others -- you cook dinner for all of you one night a week and enjoy prep-free, dish-free duty the other four nights at their houses. Your friends keep you company and the once-a-meal prep plan keeps your life easy breezy.

3. Volunteer -- either as an individual or in a group of lonely-on-the-homefront spouses. Need some creative ways to put your skills to use for your community? Start by reading how Army wife Amy Wrightsman cake-cooked her way through her husband's most recent deployment -- and blessed more than 20 children who couldn't afford birthday cakes in the process. When you're meeting someone else's needs, somehow your own needs get met in the process.

4. Include your soldier in deployment -- the FLAT DADDY way. Check out this military family who laughed their way through deployment with a 2-dimensional, life-size cut-out of their soldier by their side. From the steak house to the opera house, their man in uniform was always there.

5. Choose to view this deployment as an opportunity, not an obstacle. Learn how here.