Short Stories

My Two Sons. Well, it turns out sort of like I expected. One is a jock and one is an artist. Both are shockingly strong willed. Lucky me.

It is actually lucky. Lucky because it means that once they make up their minds which direction to go in, they really go.

The hard part is helping them find their way.

This summer I'm feeling like I'm doing OK at it. We've fallen in love with competitive baseball, and baseball on TV, and going to games, and baseball video games and board games. Well, I guess we're just loving all things baseball.

You'd know it's true if you saw my family room. Each week the paper puts in a poster of a Brewer. Each and every one has been clipped out and hung up in my family room. Even as I sit here and type to you, Russell Branyan swings his bat above my head.

The other Mr. has begun a week of choir camp. He came home singing yesterday and thinking out loud about first semester choir. He woke up this morning and went to the piano. In between he breaks out his drawing stuff. In all aspects, this child is an artist, moody, flighty and driven by some unknown and misunderstood thing.

I'm learning to love that part of him, to encourage it and help it grow into something more than an adults left over childhood wish or dream.

The princess is two, so she is supreme queen of all tantrums these days. There just isn't anything else to be said about that. Two year old tantrums, especially from foster kids, can be quite impressive in their own right.

The Mr. and I are just plain feeling our age. For the last year or so, we've taken turns at dramatic amounts of dental work and minor back issues.

The good part of all that is the conversation it led too.

We realized we are just a family that is hard on things, well, people too.

We're pretty hard on our cars, toys and house. Our yard shows the wear of a busy family with pets. We're hard on our clothes and books, our dishes and shoes. We're hard on our friends and family. Not in an abusive way, but in a demanding way.

We demand authenticity, real honesty, depth and intimacy. We expect loyalty. We never expect it without giving it.

All this being hard on stuff really just shows a life being lived. Really lived. No one who knows us would ever accuse us of just going through the motions. We're not just waking through life in a daze. We're living it, missteps and all.