I hope you enjoy this month’s contribution to Hallmark’s “Life Is A Special Occasion” campaign! (Perhaps you should grab a cup of hot cider, and possibly a sedative. This post is about puberty.) I have found that I mentally divvy up the lives of both of my boys into neat little “eras”. It’s easier for me to keep the details of their respective childhood experiences straight if I can associate what I’m trying to remember with the circumstances of a specific period of time. Lucky for my tired brain, they have always been vastly different people and each of them have a unique set of eras, with only two exceptions.…
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The Knowing Is One Thing; The Realization Is Another.
I had the extreme good fortune of being able to spend some quality time alone with Jim this weekend. Much of Saturday was spent just taking care of things around the house, and in the evening we went out for dinner and a movie. I think it was over steaks at Texas Roadhouse when Jim said, “You realize, don’t you, that in a year it will be like this almost all the time…just us?” And while I knew that already–we’ve talked about it for years, how we’d be in our mid-forties when the kids stopped living at home full time–at that moment the realization truly hit me like a ton…
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DJ J, Revisited
It’s interesting how life works. While contemplating how my life has taken some pretty cool twists and turns over the past couple of years, I have discovered that often we end up doing things we never set out to do, ever. These new activities, pastimes, or even career changes come in the form of a natural progression, sometimes when you least expect it and often before you realize it. As it turns out, I’m not the only one in our house experiencing this sort of thing. I have written before about how J, my 17-year-old guitar-loving son who has always had a wide range of musical interests thanks to his…
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One Score, Or Twenty Years Ago…
This kid was born. Today is D’s twentieth birthday. It was alarming when I realized last night as I was wide awake at midnight–two hours after I had gone to bed–that I can no longer say I have two teenaged sons. It’s a bizarre feeling. Of course, you can’t slow time down and this is just the thing that tends to happen. Today is a little bittersweet for us since D is in New Mexico, miles and miles away from here. In fact, in many ways it doesn’t seem like his birthday at all because I’m not making a cake (that would be weird–and mean!) and naturally there are no…
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Old Friends
I was on the phone with D the other day when he asked me to go to our local Big Box Toy Store to pick up a specific Star Wars toy that would be part of a thank you gift for his fraternity “dad” (it was meant to be funny). I was happy to do it: the combination of getting out of the house and away from my LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER to-do list and doing a small favor for him–when he typically doesn’t ask for much at all–made this kind of errand a pleasure rather than a chore. Yesterday I headed out to the store and as I drove…