I'm feeling campy today

Tuesday Am
Originally uploaded by iDTechCamp

This isn't a mommyblog. It's more like a Menoblog. A Menoblog in which I drivel on about the things middle-aged housewives become interested in when their child-bearing years are over. Like interior decorating, T.V., dead celebrities, annoying bureaucrats, and what to do about those kids who won't stay off my lawn, dagnabit!

Which means if you're looking for poop stories and tales of bloating and weird food cravings, look elsewhere. (If you don't know where to look, shoot me a comment. In my wanderings through the blogosphere, I've come across more Craving Mommies/Pooping Children blogs than you can shake a stick at.)

So anyway. This here is the boy (not the girl in brown, the tall fellow in green) at Here's My Hero How Do I Make Him Move? 3D Game Design camp (or whatever he was doing last week.)

Week before last it was 2D Games Design, or, Pac-Man Is Not Lame. Next week it's Let's Completely Rewrite World of Warcraft to Produce Version 2.0, and then we'll end the summer with Introduction to Programming in C++. (I know. How lame. But that's the medicine, and the three weeks of game design were the spoonful of sugar.)

See, we get more and more technical around here, and not all of us have the skills we need. So my son needs to learn moar computer-y stuff so he can help his mother with her blog. In fact, now that I think about it, I'm kicking myself.

I just know the formatting on this entry will be all screwed up. Whenever I use Flickr, the post ends up in single-spaced, teensy font. Why, oh, why, didn't I sign him up for HTML Programming for the Sons of MenoBloggers? Dagnabit!

13

Every year you move further away from these images.


And this year you moved at warp speed.

And I just realized something. As an etiquette maven, I shouldn't call you Young Master Buxom any more. You're 13; you're not a "master" any more. You're not a man, though. (Even though this morning you said you were going to "miss being a kid.")

We're Episcopalians, so we don't do much of anything to mark the occasion. We don't have anything like a Bar Mitzvah. (It's just as well; I'd have disgraced myself by blubbering all over the place.)

Oh, I held it together while everyone was awake. We had a good day. We made breakfast to order: three hard-boiled eggs, two strips of bacon, and a toasted, uttered bagel. We gave you two boxes of Krispy Kremes to hand out to the kids in your advisory. After school, we went out together, and I bought you a new bike. One that would fit your long legs. And helmets for both of us. On the way home, "Slow Ride" played on the radio, and we laughed over the way it sounds when I play it on Guitar Hero. And sang along.

Dinner was more of your favorites: New York strip steak, baked potato, brussels sprouts. Yellow cake with caramel icing.

No, you're not a man. You're more like an adolescent giraffe, anyway. At 5' 9" and 115 pounds, you are the tallest, thinnest creature in Cook County. You're the tallest member of the family; you have the biggest feet. You have the deepest voice--and most of the time, the loudest voice, too.


The coolest moves, too. They were impressed at the Virgin Records Mega-Store on Hollywood Boulevard.

But you're still willing to pose with the Easter bunny.


Or next to the plaque commemorating the founding of a hospital by your great-great-grand-uncle. Yes, it's dorky, but you'll still pose to oblige me.


You know what? They never tell you what a crushing weight of love you're going to feel for the baby who turns you into a mother--(or a "Mamy," as you insisted on spelling it--in caps--when you were in kindergarten.)

Or maybe they do tell you--but you don't understand because nothing like it has ever happened to you before.

And another thing. They never tell you that the love never stops. No matter how stretched-out and long-legged and manly-sounding the baby gets.

Happy birthday, boy.

Love,
MAMY