In 2002, Maddie Grace Agustin received a Huggee Miss You doll holding a picture of her cousins. At the time, Susan Agustin didn’t give it much thought, other than that it was a cute idea. The doll was soft stuffed with crazy yarn hair, but the face was a picture frame where a photo of her cousins was inserted. Shortly after receiving the doll, the Agustin family was informed that dad, Gene, would be deploying to the Middle East. Susan decided to take the doll and make it “daddy doll” so that Maddie would have a way to hug her dad everyday. This special doll did everything with Susan and Maddie. He went to preschool, the commissary, he got a "no cavity" report at the dentist, and if Maddie had a scraped knee, so did her dad. When it was time to read books at night, Susan would tell Maddie and her “daddy doll” to go pick which books they wanted to read. It turned out that this little doll wasn’t just benefiting Maddie during this challenging time, but it was also great for her dad's morale. When he was able to call, Maddie would have all sorts of things to tell her dad about what he was doing with her. He was sometimes quite surprised at just how busy he was at home, as well as overseas. Maddie's "daddy doll" served the family well during Gene's 2003 deployment to Qatar and his subsequent deployments as he served in Operation Enduring Freedom in Djibouti in 2004 and in Iraq in 2005. Her "daddy doll" has been an important part of most of her childhood and is something she still holds onto today as a means of hugging her daddy while he is away on TDY trips to Iraq and Afghanistan.