Raising Future Adults

As a military wife in my twenties, I spent nearly four years living in Germany. I arrived in Germany with a baby who was not quite nine months old and I had another child while I lived there. When it was time to go back to the US, the movers arrived to pack us up and I decided to take my two small kids to the arcade to get them out of the way. This turned out to be a huge mistake. My youngest was a few weeks short of his second birthday. He didn't have the life experience to understand what was happening nor the verbal capacity for me to effectively explain. From his point of view, we left our nice, safe home in the morning and returned to an empty home in the afternoon. He felt like someone must has stolen everything and he was very, very upset. It took some weeks before we would see our stuff again. On our way from Germany to Kansas, we visited multiple relatives up and down the East Coast that we hadn't seen in nearly four years. After we finally got to Kansas, as we ...