On Tuesday, our oldest (16) took responsibility for making sure that both she and her two younger siblings got up on time for school so that her dad could be away in the morning to help his brother and family make it to the airport on time.

On Thursday, we proudly got to watch as that same teen was inducted into the National Honor Society.

On Sunday, she got her belly-button pierced, just a few hours after she helped with the fellowship / coffee hour at church. Hey, the first two examples, along with many others, show that she has a pretty good head on her shoulders, as well as a heart for others. That she now has a hole in her belly button isn’t an option I’d have picked for her, but we’re getting to the stage where she gets to make decisions that we disagree with, and we get to enjoy watching the paths she considers and chooses. (She did opt out of getting facial piercings, and told her younger sis she thought those were cool but would have made her unemployable…)

By the way, that younger sis is pretty awesome, too – she went with her sis to hold her hand and support her through the belly button piercing procedure. They then went together to have a sister bonding day at the nail salon.

I love getting to be the parent of these kids!

Our oldest starts driver’s education tomorrow. In our state, you can get your learner’s permit at 15 and 9 months, assuming you pass a written exam. Possession of that permit gives you the opportunity to be behind the wheel, assuming that an adult is in the car with you supervising your driving. Wowser. This is a big thing. It’s not yet the ‘toss her the keys’ thing, but it’s a big thing none-the-less.

Our oldest is also making dinner tomorrow. This is part of a project for an advanced program she’s a part of. Don’t worry – this interest in covering the dinner shift is only for a week. As she’s a vegetarian, it also means that her family gets to experience vegetarianism for a week. We’ll survive, and I guess a cow and a few chickens might, too. Her duties include planning the menu, shopping for the supplies, and prepping the meals. They don’t, apparently, include cleaning up the kitchen if tonight’s taste of the project provides any guide. They do include making a dessert, so there’s that benefit.

It’s odd having teens in the house. Our oldest is near 16, our middle is 14, and our youngest is 11. He’s not technically a teen, but has done his level best to try to get every privilege afforded his older siblings. My hubby and I don’t think of ourselves as old enough to have kids this old, but evidence indicates otherwise.

My life has many aspects, and I’ve always been sensitive to losing my identity through motherhood.  Too many women I know go around known as “Mikey’s mom”, rather than as someone with their own interests.  As a Sunday school teacher before I had kids, I realized I knew many folks through the church as “Mikey’s mom”, rather than “Sue” or “Elaine” or “that awesome mom with this talent in…”.  So, I’ve always been interested in exploring many interests and highlighting things here from those interests: coding, clowning, business, motorcycles, etc.  But now let me give you into my life as a mom.

Tomorrow is my son’s 10th birthday.  He’s the youngest of my three.  While we don’t have birthday parties with friends every year, we’ll do it for big birthdays.  Ten counts as one of them, as does thirteen, which is what my middle daughter will turn in just two weeks.  So tonight we have the sleepover for my son.  He had 5 friends join him for a Harry Potter birthday party at our house.  We did a Dementor pinata, a Quidditch match, a cake that would have made Hagrid proud, butterbeer, polyjuice potion, and lots of jellybeans and chocolate.  (No chocolate frogs this time…)  The house was decorated in Hufflepuff colors and we had a photo area for ‘Have you seen this wizard?’.  All of this is homemade…   Pool noodles became brooms and hula hoops became Quidditch rings.  Paper bags and black clothing became a pinata.  Ice cream and cream soda became butter beer.  Much consultation with Pinterest over the past few weeks…

Tomorrow is also the fun fest at our church.  My daughters were approached to do face painting, and to help them fend off feeling completely responsible, I became responsible for face painting.  Tonight we three were practicing.  On my hand, I have a two different flowers, a heart, and a shark.  Each daughter has some set of images on their hands and face, all in the name of practice for tomorrow.

Next Saturday is the Homecoming dance, my eldest’s first.  So, in addition to party execution and face painting, tonight was online Homecoming dress shopping.  We debated dress length, dress fit, and backup plans in case the one ordered doesn’t hit the mark.

All this is the life of a happy mom on a Friday night.  The earlier part of the day had satisfying interactions with Gitlab open-source code as part of work.  But the afternoon and evening has happily been consumed with making memories with my kids.  There are 4 boys around my kitchen table right now playing a drawing game and generally ramping down to go to bed for their sleepover.  Some of them are unfortunately still eating the sugar we overstuffed them with earlier – slightly counterproductive on the whole sleeping thing of sleepover….  But much less energetic than the epic Nerf battles going on earlier.

The life of a mom… Ahhhhh…

Writing a difficult letter to a family member, trying to clear the air of years of messy interactions.  The aim of writing the letter isn’t so much to make the air truly clear, (that would take much more than a single letter could do) but just to see if there’s interest by the other party in meeting in the middle somewhere sometime.  This is one of those moments where the answer could be nothing, could be a door slam, or could be a positive movement.  History suggests its much more likely to be one of the first two than it is to be the third.  But the very act of sending the letter will be a positive movement for me.  In doing this, I’m expressing as clearly as I can my interest in moving forward.  There’ll be no more unsatisfied hopes that somehow if I just expressed it differently that things would get better.  No more ‘well maybe they don’t realize how awful their behavior towards me feels’ excuses.  My intent is to be free of any ‘it could be different if I…’ misgivings.  And then I’m letting it be.  And freeing myself up to be either pleasantly surprised by a positive response, or else free to stop feeling bad about a relationship that “should” be better.  Its a relationship between people who are tied together because of birth – not because of shared interests, common commitments, or shared values.  One would hope some of those would be there, but being born of someone doesn’t guarantee anything more than the genetic material strands shared in common. If nothing more comes of this relationship, I hope to honor the roll these folks played in my early life, and grant that their imperfections and mine make us each individual humans doing as best we can with what we’ve got.  But please, God, may my relationship with my own kids be one that I always work to nurture and grow.  May I extend love to the human family, both biological and other, that _are_ in my life, and may I always seek to lend an ear and an arm to someone else who may be a bit adrift in the world.

I’ve drafted the letter…  now to sleep and then revisit tomorrow before sending it.

The Post has an article about Target hiring a former CIA agent to give parents guidance on how to get your kids’ Christmas list, hide the presents, etc.  Parents need guidance for this?  Half the fun of being a parent is thinking through these things.  Tucking the gifts away in the back corner of the “scariest” room in the house.  Scary here can mean it’s dark, or that the kids know that entering that room is likely to give them the chore of cleaning it up.  Handling the Santa presents versus the mom and dad ones by changing your handwriting on the gift tag by using your opposite hand and wrapping the gifts in different wrapping paper.  Having the kids do the Santa letter at Grandma’s house so that she can pilfer the letter from the mailbox as soon as the kids have gone home.  (You do have to make certain not to get caught with that letter in hand: I found Cameron’s on the kitchen table this morning after some late night shopping… would have been a bad scene had he come out for breakfast when called.)

I was the kid who would find the presents in our house.  I remember how much fun it was to go sneaking around.  So now when I catch Callie doing the same thing, I leave one present in a place she’ll find.  But I make it the most educational/boring/oh my goodness how could my parents get me that present, just to see if she’ll confess her knowledge and thus display her means and methods.  Oooh, so much fun.

I did pick up a new trick from the article – hadn’t tried having the kids write their letters in invisible ink.  That’s a good one.