OTTUMWA — Sunday is going to be hard on the soldiers of the 833rd and their families.

In fact, with about a year of service in a combat zone ahead of him, Sgt. Adam Bauer, Ottumwa, said “the leaving ceremony” is probably the toughest part of the deployment.

“We say goodbye and jump on the bus,” he said.

Before that, though, there is a lot of work to be done, both at the National Guard Armory and at home.

Bauer has been spending time making sure that he and his wife’s house is up to par; that everything, including locks on the door, work the way they should.

Some soldiers who don’t yet have a house end the lease on their rental unit and ask family to store their belongings.

As for where to keep a vehicle parked and what insurance to keep on it — a logistics question also faced by soldiers deploying for a year or more — Bauer solved that by selling his truck. He said money shouldn’t be much of a problem in his particular situation.

“My job has been really awesome” about working with me and seeing I have a few extra bucks, he said.

Between that and hazardous duty pay, he feels his family should be taken care of financially — as long as nothing suddenly crops up.

And things do crop up in that amount of time, not all of them bad. Last time Bauer was in the Middle East, his wife gave birth to their first child. He said he was lucky to be able to get some time to come home.

This time, he said, he may still be “in country” for the arrival of the next family member: He and his wife are expecting their second child this month.

So Bauer has prepared by doing his homework, checking with his commanding officer and the Red Cross so he knows what to do. He said if the unit is still in Wisconsin training at the military base, he should be able to get back to Iowa for a little while.

Military health insurance, Bauer has discovered, doesn’t kick into full coverage until the soldier has been active a month. So he and his wife will have to come up with 20 percent of the medical costs of delivering a baby. A few weeks later, he said, and nearly the whole thing would have been covered.

“Last weekend, we [in the 833rd] went up to Des Moines to fill out the paperwork for [military] health insurance,” he said.

But at least he knows how it works now, and he and his family have been making preparations. Yet as a noncommissioned officer, that’s not enough for Buaer. Because in addition to his civilian family, he has his military family to think about.