She wears it always, night and day, tied around her waist.

She wears it even though the strips of camouflage-colored fleece - shaped like arms, with hand and finger shapes on the ends - tend to drop into the paint can when she paints. Or into the toilet. Or sometimes the "hands" get stuck when she closes the dishwasher or the clothes dryer, which stops her short.

But Victoria Friese, 37, says there's no chance she will get impatient and take off this 24-7 accessory. It's one of the closest things she has to having the physical presence of her husband while he's away in Iraq.

Friese said Wednesday that her husband, Sgt. 1st Class Lee Friese of the 141st Engineer Combat Battalion, made the "arms." He thought of the idea sometime around Christmas 2003, a couple days before he was to be deployed. He had held the younger of his two daughters, Shianne, 2, most of Christmas Day as she was coming down with Influenza A. She ended up being hospitalized.

He decided his girls needed "daddy hugs" while he was gone. So he went to his mom's house and lay on the floor while she, a seamstress, traced his arms and hands and fingers and cut out the shape from camouflage-colored fleece.

The girls, Shianne, now 3, and Meghan, 6, now have one of daddy's creations wound around a bedpost on the bed they share in their north Bismarck home. On those restless or bad-dream nights, they will take their daddy's "arms" and wrap them around them, Victoria Friese said.

The other set of "arms," Victoria Friese decided she needed and wrapped it around her waist. And there it stays.

People have stopped her to ask about it, guessing it must be symbolic of something. A neighbor of the Frieses, Maj. Darcie Handt, of the North Dakota National Guard's Joint Force Headquarters, said it's good for the neighborhood to see it. "You get into your own routine," he said. But when he sees the "arms" around Victoria Friese's waist, "it's a good reminder of Lee," reminds people what Lee Friese and his family are sacrificing.

Life changed Dec. 27, 2003, at the Friese house when Lee Friese, head of Bismarck State College's transportation and construction department, left Bismarck for soldiering duties.

He left behind crosses on his daughters' and wife's beds. And big chocolate kisses for each to be eaten on his return.

Victoria Friese has left everything the same. Everything that can be.

The lamp on his side of the bed remains on since the day he left and will stay that way until he comes home, she said. It has a five-year light bulb. She kisses his pictures taped on the headboard before she goes to bed and first thing when she wakes up. She hasn't washed his pillow and sleeps with it.

His washcloth and towel from his Dec. 27 morning shower remain where he left them. And his dirty laundry, shirts and pants and such, haven't been washed. She goes into the laundry room sometimes just to open the built-in wooden bin that holds his clothes so she can smell his "outdoorsy" smell. She has seen her daughters in the room doing the same thing.

Meghan and Shianne were waking up crying, having nightmares, about four times each a night after daddy left. For Victoria, that meant being up about every hour, which made it hard to get up in the morning and take care of her home daycare business. But a 141st support group for children and counseling has helped.

Victoria Friese said Meghan tries to take on the role of her husband, waking up at night at any sound, wanting to protect them. Shianne panics when mom leaves the room. Meghan tells Shianne that mom's in the bathroom, but she panics and has trouble believing it. Shianne has changed, Meghan said.

"She doesn't have as much fun," Meghan said.

Meghan has soft happy-child eyes when she talks of making a Valentine's box that has a drawing of her and Daddy on one side. But the softness shrivels, and in a couple blinks, she has eyes that seem to be looking at sad things that no one else could possibly see, when she talks about missing Daddy - the hugs, and seeing Mommy go through hard times.

"I tell her, 'Mom, it's OK. He's going to be back soon,'" Meghan said.

Victoria Friese said it's hard to explain to people what life is like, the fear: "We live moment by moment."

"It's incredible the love she has for Lee," Handt said.

Handt and his family live across the street from the Frieses so they have seen a lot: How, before Lee Friese's deployment, his wife would be at the window with the kids to wave good-bye as Lee Friese went to work. And how they'd be at the window or door again, waving, when he arrived home from work.

Years ago, when Victoria Friese, about 20 or so, was a waitress at a Breckenridge, Minn., restaurant and had lifelong aspirations of being a mother and wife, she went out on a first date with North Dakota State University student Lee Friese. She decided it wouldn't work out; she just wasn't physically attracted to him. But she fell in love as they started having long conversations on the phone and realized who he was, his values, how beautiful he really was. He became her everything, she said.

And as far as physical attraction:

"Handsome doesn't describe it," Victoria Friese said about her husband. "He's breath-taking, inside and out."

Just look at his arms.

(Reach reporter Virginia Grantier at 250-8254 or at vgrantier@ndonline.com.)