We have a Marine!

It's been an exhausting weekend, but he's home!!!

I've known for quite some time that I've got this quality about me that seems to attract misbehaved kids, overly friendly dogs, and very strange people. Evidently, I inherited this from mom. One thing we've learned from the trip is that when you combine our magnetisms, you get to laugh at/ be annoyed by a lot of weirdo's. On the shuttle between the airport and our hotel, we met a couple of ladies that had a son and grandson in Tyler's company. Mom made the mistake of asking one of them a question, and she promptly proclaimed that she was "Aaaaarmed with knaaaaledge" in a nasal Wisconsin accent. This quickly became her nickname, and our first suspicions of doofus-ocity were quickly confirmed. And, true to our magnetism, on a base full of the family of the nearly 600 recruits, every time we turned around, there she was. EVERY. TIME. Anyway, she provided a lot of laughs...

We arrived on base a little after 7 on Thursday morning, only to find out that there was almost no shade, almost nowhere to sit, and we would not get to see Ty until 10:30, and would not get to talk to and hug him until 1. Also, the green flag was up, announcing that it was too hot for certain people to work out. After months of Ty's letters containing many brrrs & shivers, we arrive, and its about 90 & sunny. And what do we hear from James? Oh yeah, it's 65 in Austin. argh. Also, the base seems to be located in some sort of wormhole that makes time pass at half the speed of smell.

Ok, so enough whining... at 9:30, a drill sergeant came out to yell at us all the rules of the base. There are a LOT. For an hour. Finally, at 10:30, all the boys came out for their final run as recruits, a four mile run called the "MotoRun" (it stands for something about "Motiviation").
They came marching out in formation, and since they had us lined up by platoon, Ty ended up almost right in front of us. We knew they couldn't turn their heads, but you could see all the boys eyes scanning the cheering crowd for their families. I think this may have been my favorite part of the whole day. We finally spotted our boy in the back row and waved & cheered more than we ever did at any of his football games...Tyler's eyes landed on us, lit up, and it was so obviously all he could do to keep from breaking into a huge grin. We could actually see him biting his cheeks to keep from laughing. The boys took off for their run, and Mom said it was cruel to dangle them so close to us, but not let us have them. We were all herded into a theater to watch a film & get yelled some more rules, while the boys finished their run. We watched them run back up, and got to see them from afar for another minute before they had to hit the showers.

After what seemed like hours later, we headed to the parade deck for the noon drill parade whatsit, followed by the moment everyone bought the plane tickets for. They had base liberty time from 1-5:45, so immediately after the parade, they were finally released to our hungry arms.

After the whole day in the sun, I developed a fever, and fell into bed the minute we got back to the hotel, and stayed there until I was roused sometime in the 5s on friday morning. Again, we arrived on base in the early 7s (that was the latest the shuttle could take us), but this time we were a bit smarter about it & tried to hang out inside as much as possible. The graduation ceremony (during which a little girl sitting behind me kept standing on my rear...) started at 10:00, and lasted until about 11:30, and was very cool and all, but the result below was all we cared about.

Ok, sorry this took soooo long for you to read, but I was asked for the play-by-play, so.... you got it. It's sooooooo incredibly good to have him home.

PS: Out of all the almost 600 recruits, Tyler was the second best gun-shooter-person. :) cant you tell i learned all the terms?