Our little family is on the tail end of my husband's year long deployment to Iraq, LORD willing. I must say that it has been both harder and easier than I though, and that having low expectations of what things might look like with young children is very important. I got a Daddy doll (
www.hugahero.com), like the other responders here, and that has been a great encouragement for my 3 year old. We also had some videos of Daddy with the children which my 3 y.o loves to watch. I have 2 young children and the easiest thing for us was phone calls, whenever they were. I couldn't seem to make a regular video date to skype work for us, which was somewhat disappointing, but I kept reminding myself that it was counterproductive to be stressed out by trying to be encouraged by a video chat!