Henry County military father surprises daughters with early homecoming

HENRY COUNTY, Ga. — A father of two returned home a week early after an eight-month deployment in Saudia Arabia.

Ricardo Bachelor surprised both of his daughters at school in Henry County on Friday, just in time for the holidays.

Channel 2′s Kristen Holloway was there for the reunion.

Saniya Bachelor, 8, lit up when she saw her dad walk into her third-grade class at Unity Grove Elementary.

“I was very shocked,” Saniya said. “Very happy and excited.”

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Bachelor, a senior master sergeant in the Air Force, spent the past eight months in Saudi Arabia on his seventh deployment.

Overwhelmed with emotion, Saniya says it’s a homecoming surprise just in time for Thanksgiving.

“It feels very nice and very calming,” she said.

“Seeing them grow, they’ve grown so much, and not being a part of the lives in an everyday basis, it can be kind of challenging,” Bachelor said.

Saniya says the past eight months have been hard, but she’s so happy her dad is back.

“It felt like he wasn’t really there. I really missed him,” she said. “I tried to talk to him every single day.

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Bachelor also surprised his oldest daughter, Samarra Bachelor. She is an eighth-grader at Locust Grove Middle School, also in Henry County.

“I felt very, very surprised because I thought he was coming back in two weeks,” she said.

Bachelor says deployments are always tough, but moments like Friday feel the best.

“It gets difficult more and more as they grow and those significant times that you can’t get back. It gets challenging, but I can’t ask for better kids. Military kids are some of the most resilient,” he said.

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First on the to-do list for the Bachelor family is Starbucks. Their dad says the girls can get whatever they want this weekend before heading to North Carolina next week to spend time with family this Thanksgiving.

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