kids, love, family

We spent 2 very long days in the car last Friday and Saturday. Basically we drove to LA, spent the night in a motel, visited my mother-in-law's cousin and sons for 2 hours, then drove to Salinas.

Somebody PLEASE tell me NOT to do that again. All that time in the car to visit a (very nice) old lady and her 2 sons who both still live with her. (One of them has NEVER moved out -- he is 60 years old!!!!) Still, it would have been ok if we had at least done ONE lousy thing in the city. I love it there, and this trip I saw nothing. Ugh.

But this was funny -- I caught part of a conversation between my 2 oldest sons. Garrett will be 8 in August, Evan is 6. They were in the back of the mini van, apparently talking about what they were going to do when they were grownups. For those of you who have really small kids or who plan to have them someday, this is a great parenting trick, especially when you have boys: eavesdrop on them in the car. They forget you are there. You can learn valuable things that way. When my oldest was 4, he and his friend Josef had a very serious conversation about the day the airplanes flew into the buildings (Sept. 11, 2001) that alerted me and the other mom that we all needed to talk about this because despite our best efforts, the boys knew everything.

So they are talking in the back seat about the future, and Evan asks if Garrett will get married. "No, I think I'll stay single," says G.
"Oh," replies Evan. "You know, you could marry a boy if you don't want to marry a girl."
"Yeah, I know," he replied. "But I think I'll stay single, at least through college."

Ha ha ha ha. I LOVE this. It is my teaching, come to life in their words. They have absorbed something that I feel SO strongly about.

LOVE makes a family.

Not a mom and a dad, not a boy and a girl, LOVE. Families come in all shapes, sizes and configurations. I love the movie Lilo & Stitch because of its concept of family -- ohana in Hawaiian. Lilo says that her family is "little and broken." But the point of the movie is that it is still a FAMILY. (I must insert here that I accidentally must have pushed the caps lock key just before typing "family" that last time. Unintentional, but I decided to keep it. Hmmmm.)

Now I certainly don't wish for my kids to go thru all the normal teenage angst and have to deal with the additional burden of wondering if they are gay, BUT --- I am SO grateful that if they have to face that challenge, they at least already know that their mom and dad will be there for them all the way and that no matter what we love them more than they could ever imagine.