Mother's Day Update

It's been a good year of embracing motherhood. It's about time. The boys are teenagers. A lot of energy used to stay on top of Cameron! He seems to have matured a bit this year and as of last week had all his missing assignments turned in. One thing I love about their school here is the individual attention they've given to him. The new middle school principal has been meeting with him a couple times a week - just to check in - not threatening, but an "I'm on your team and want to see you succeed." Teachers help us stay with him to keep him honest. Everyone promises that unless he's psychotic he will grow out of it. 

BIG NEWS is he broke two bones in his ankle friday night at 10:30PM - playing basketball. He's made me his slave and is LOVING being needy and "helpless" even to the point of "needing" me to put his SHIRT on this morning for school. He made us late driving him to school this morning. Tyler wrote on his tardy slip, REASON: "crippled brother is lazy." Ah, the adventure of boys.

Tyler pulled the trigger for Cal Poly SLO, even though he didn't have super strong feelings about it v. a couple of his other choices. Finances/Aid offers made the decision to nix a couple. He did get some generous offers from a couple of the private schools. It wasn't enough. There were a couple of circumstances come up that we felt were Divine interventions in helping him make his choice. Since then, it's been nothing but affirmation and confirmation that he made the right choice. Not the least of which is that two longtime good friends, and former pastors from our Los Angeles home church have daughters who are 1 week older than Tyler; they also chose Cal Poly. We all laughed and said there will be a little "Mustang corral" next year for kids of former Rolling Hills Covenant Pastor's kids...(I'm sure these teenagers who don't really know each other yet just LOVE that...). 

We continue to manage just about every night eating off the downstairs hawkers without food poisoning. My little "flock" in the neighborhood has grown this year...Yi Hui has been a regular feature in our home and she has made some strides in learning to read and some other skills. I've managed to make it into the good graces of the family and pray that by the end of the year we can convince them to send her to a special school rather than put her to work at the end of the year. She'll certainly fail the primary school leaving exams, so no secondary school which will accept her. There's A LOT of strife, abuse and ignorance in her home, so we navigate how to help her with a lot of prayer.

All mine got for me was one of the freebie flowers from church (which the stem had broken at the top by the time it came to me), but I still felt deeply loved which is most important. Seriously been having some sweet family times with our guys. They love me, don't need flowers to prove it. Though taking out the trash without being reminded is also nice...

Two single guys in their 30's who are roommates and motherless called at 6 and came by with Subway sandwiches from the mall. One even gave me a red envelope cause he said he wanted to bless a mother and had decided it would be me. they were sweet, and a good object lesson for the boys for the future. I asked James to pray and when he'd finished (including thanking God for me), Cameron says, "SO is it mother's day or something? I wondered 'cause dad was making such a big deal about mom..." Later we called grandmas and on the speaker phone, they all asked, "so did your boys treat you well today?" and I went on and on about how "They made me feel like a Queen from morning till night." Grinning at the guys who were rolling their eyes and giggling.

My mother-in-law says, "Kimberly, you're not a good an actress as you used to be."

This is true.