- I am married to a hundred percent disabled combat veteran who spent 23 years in the Army and completed seven tours to Afghanistan. Right now we have one little girl who's 12 living in our household, although together we have six children.

- I'm a caregiver for my wife. My wife served in the army. She got injured in basic training. She has a TBI and spinal cord injury. So, I get up about five o'clock in the morning. I get her medications, I get her breakfast, her coffee. Once she's set up, I go downstairs and I homeschool my daughter.

- I get woken up around two o'clock in the morning 'cause my husband does not sleep well. He suffered a TBI, a traumatic brain injury and he has short-term memory loss. By 6:30 I have to be up to get my daughter ready for school.

- If a service member is injured, you don't think, "Oh gosh, looks like I'm going to be a caregiver today." We take on this role of caregiving automatically. Oftentimes, unconsciously. We just care. Caregivers on the home front programs are based on the mental health and wellness of the family member. Those family members who oftentimes don't get to talk about what their feeling inside, those feelings may be situated around what's going on in the house because there's a wounded or ill or injured veteran. But because we're so in tune to caregiving, we don't get to talk about what is hurting us inside.

- Shawn and I both have an experience in being a veteran caregiver. We're able to relate to our caregivers that we work with and our participants and they know what we're going through and then we also have that professional piece as licensed master social workers. I feel like we build trust faster than most organizations or programs, because we do have that personal story behind us.

- Opening up with your art and explaining your feelings is a very vulnerable place. Not only do you have feelings about what you've created, the meanings behind it are sometimes even more intense and the arts can just allow that freedom with no judgment. When you put in in a group setting of like-minded people, you have others around you supporting you. There's a comradery and and you feed off of each other. That starts to create like a healing energy because you're sharing and you're vulnerable at the same time.

- Creative expression allows me to just take a a pause on everything that's going on around me. It actually relieve some stress because at that moment I'm just thinking about what I'm trying to create.

- There are 2.3 million military and veteran kids living in caregiving homes where there is care being provided to a veteran. These kids are taking on these caregiving roles at a very young age. The term that we use to describe these kids are hidden helpers. We oftentimes don't realize that these kids in the homes are becoming secondary caregivers. That's why bringing art for these kids is so important as well. A holistic approach to making sure our entire veteran family units are healing.

- There's just a lot of like what ifs and you don't really know what's gonna happen next. Is today gonna be a good day or is it gonna be like an anxious, stressful day?

- We did a tie dye project. We were making huge messes. The kids had dye all over their arms and clothes and hands and table, and one of the kids who she's 12 years old, I said, "Wow, what a mess." And she said, "Yeah, but life's messy." I was like, "Wow." She gets it.

- I made a pillowcase tie dye and mine was rainbow. And we like talked about like some stuff that described our art. I made a shirt and a pillowcase and I used like a whole bunch of colors, like blue and green and pink and red and orange.

- I like it and it's fun to talk to other kids and stuff and see art, and it made me feel happy.

- Resilience in the military space is a word we hear all the time, but I also think this word doesn't then allow us to be vulnerable. I think there's a balance that we have to find to make it okay to stand up and go, yes, "I know I'm a resilient military kid, but I've got a lot of stuff going on around me and I don't feel really resilient today." We need to make that okay. Veteran families are oftentimes not seen. We've got to make it easier for these family members to get the help they need. Healing is utilizing a piece of art to get out your true feelings, expression. Maybe even without saying a thing, we've gotta put it somewhere. Putting it down on a piece of canvas is a lot better than spewing angry words at maybe the cashier at the grocery store or your kids or your loved one that you're caring for. The most important thing for us as caregivers is to understand a caregiver. That's a role. It is not who we are. Caregiving is honorable and needed, yet they are so much more and that's what we wanna make sure that we're bringing back to them.