When we left Arkansas, we headed north to Missouri to visit my side of the family for a few days. We are always busy, busy visiting family when we are in Missouri. I have a lot of family members and they all seem to want to see us. :-)
However, we did get a rare treat....a visit with a friend from college/Army. Eric Minor was at Lindenwood University, was in ROTC, and graduated with Brian. I haven't seen him since then, and Brian saw him a bit while he was in Iraq the first time around. Eric is stationed at Fort Leonardwood, only an hour from my hometown. He was visiting family in St. Louis the same day we got into town, so he stopped by to visit for a bit before heading home. Brian's dad told us to take a picture of the boys and I am so glad he made sure we did this!
While in town, we threw my sister, Amanda, her baby shower. I wanted to make sure she got one and this was the only time I knew it could happen. It was a little earlier than they are normally thrown, but it turned out really cute and she got SO many great things for the baby. One of the best things was that we got to see some family members we rarely see!
I didn't take many pictures while in Missouri. I try and just enjoy the moments sometimes instead of recording them. :-) It's something that's hard to do at times, but it's nice at the same time.
When we left Missouri to get to North Carolina, we ended up going right by Fort Campbell. This was our first official duty station, where we first lived as a married couple. This was also where Austin was born. We decided to make a pit stop there to show Austin where he was born and the house that we brought him home to. Here's our little two bedroom duplex on post.
We tried to get in touch with some friends that still live there, but I have the wrong number for her. Sorry, Jen! Maybe next time!
Our drive to North Carolina wasn't too bad. We stopped for the night in Knoxville, TN since we didn't want to put the kids through a REALLY long day of driving. Brian drove the Tahoe with the dogs and Austin and I drove the van with Colten and our bags. I originally thought that Austin would switch back and forth between the two cars, but he's all about Daddy lately, so he stuck with him.
I was very surprised at how good Colten was. We had switched him around to forward facing for the trip. It was something that I knew had to happen if I was going to be the only adult in the car with him. It is so much safer to stay rear facing for as long as possible, so my plan was to keep him that way until I couldn't anymore. This trip changed my plan a bit and there's no turning back now...he loves it too much and I know car rides won't work if we switch him back around! Anyway, he watched movies when he got really cranky and took his naps (although, they were a little later than they normally are) pretty well. He played with toys, ate snacks and laughed at Mommy.
We had traffic in Nashville and that's pretty much it. The stop for the night worked well and everyone seemed to get some rest for the next day of driving. We had a wonderful view for most of the day. Driving into the Smokey Mountains was awesome.
After we got out of the mountains and into North Carolina, we had fields of wild flowers to look at. I don't know how many times I wanted to pull over, wake Colten up and take pictures of the boys standing in the middle of a wild flower field. They were gorgeous!!!
When we finally pulled into our driveway and got out, we realized that it was HOT in Spring Lake! About 95 degrees. We got in the house, cranked up the A.C. and unloaded the car. The kids and dogs were running wild around the house! It was funny. We headed to our friends' house for dinner (Thank you so much Oliver Family!). It was so good to be in our house!!! We are making our house a home now and hope to have pictures of it up soon!
OH, and I just have to post this picture of the geese that have been eating in our backyard!!! When our fence goes up, they probably won't be visiting us anymore, but it's pretty neat that they like it right now. Of course, Abby and Koa go nuts when they realize they are out there, but the babies are so cute and it's neat to see that the adults take turns standing guard while the other eats.
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