Long Road Trip in a nutshell

At basic graduation & family day we meet a lot of nice young soldiers and their families. After graduation a couple of our families met for lunch at Hooters (the boys' choice) before we all hit the road. We all had a great time and of course Hooters made it fun for the newly graduated soldiers. They brought them all up from (we weren't the only group there) and gave them applause and recognized them for their accomplishments which I thought was great and they so deserved it. Kris & a fellow soldier went and got a tattoo afterwards. It was Kris' first one and he wanted it so badly, lol. For family day it rained really bad so they didn't have the big ceremony with smoke and all on the field like we hoped and have been waiting to see. We adopted a soldier whose family couldn't make it and we had a great time with him with us. I still talk to him and his girlfriend on facebook and he's truely a great young man who will go far.

We got to bring him home for the day before heading to AIT since it was on the way so he got to see a couple of his friends, do some laundry and sleep a little bit before heading onto MO. We went to Anheiser Busch brewery and took the tour there (we have been many times before but his girlfriends hadn't been).

Josh didn't want to make the trip to graduation or AIT because he gets severely car sick so we didn't make him go especially with having to travel through the mountains. I just wish that he could have went with us for a family trip. He enjoyed his freedom here at home though so I can't blame him any.

Dropping Kris off at AIT was hard on the younger two siblings as Hannah thought Kris was staying with us and Hunter says he missed him.
I kinda felt like a bad mom not really missing him while he was at Basic or AIT. As a fellow soldier I knew what he was going to be going through and I knew that he would be alright and can get through it. The hardest part as a mom was not getting a lot of mail or phone calls but I also know what its like to be that soldier having to say see you later over and over again just makes you more homesick even though you want to hear them.