America's North Shore Journal

I’ve noted this before, at US bases. Our fierce friends to our north are not to be outdone, eh?

CNEWS

They’re jokingly called “tour babies” – the crop of children that seems to appear during and after military tours of duty overseas.

Agencies that support military families across Canada say they’ve noticed signs of a baby boom in the wake of major deployments to Afghanistan – a rising demand for infant care and swelling numbers of pregnant women joining support groups on the home bases.

“I’ve seen lots of new little babies in the last little while,” said Beth Corey, executive director of the Military Family Resource Centre at CFB Gagetown, N.B., home to about 4,000 soldiers.

Groups of five or six military wives, many of them pregnant, have regularly gathered for coffee over the summer to talk about their spouses’ deployment to Afghanistan and to compare notes on their due dates.

“They were all about a month or two apart from each other,” Corey said an interview Tuesday.

Soldiers from Gagetown trained at CFB Wainwright in Alberta last fall for this year’s Afghanistan mission, and that’s when Corey began to notice a lot of pregnant women.

“We kind of joked around and called them the ‘Wainwright babies,’ “she said.

Many of the Gagetown soldiers are young, just starting their families, so that could also help account for a boom in pregnancies.

Return ceremonies, which began at Gagetown in July and just wrapped up on Saturday, routinely saw wives bringing babies born during the deployment to meet their daddies for the first time.

“There’s something about that reunion stuff,” Corey said. “Absence certainly makes the heart grow fonder.”