Tell Gramma and Grampa, they love that shit

Whenever I get a few minutes alone with Shaune’s parents I corner them and proceed to shamelessly tell them every wonderful thing the kids have been up to. I tell them about recent accomplishments, share funny anecdotes and give them accounts of something kind or endearing one or both boys have done.

I do it because I want to catch them up. 

I do it because I truly believe they are interested.

I do it because my boys are absolutely, cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs, head-over-heels, madly in love with their grandparents and would want me to fill in the spaces when Gramma and Grampa couldn’t be there to witness their lives first-hand. It’s the only time I feel really comfortable gushing about the kids.

Okay. I’ll stop here to give you a second to lower that eyebrow. Umm, hello? This from the woman with an entire blog dedicated to stories about her kids.

While it’s true most of the content over the years here has been about motherhood, raising kids and family life, I’ve tried consciously to stay on this side of humility. I’ve tried not to write entire posts about how athletic, talented or smart my kids are because a) I know you’d likely want to strangle me and b) some of that stuff is private ir at least should be.

At a dinner recently, one of the parents of the other family at the table announced that the two oldest kids had achieved straight A’s on their report cards. I looked around to see if the other kids, not included in this announcement, had heard this. It was out of the blue and it caught me off guard. I busied myself helping one of the kids with a maze he was working through on the back of a paper menu and hoped that Deaglan hadn’t heard.   

My reaction and concern for Deaglan has nothing to do with how he's doing in school. I worried that this announcement could serve to make him feel inadequate somehow. We looked over his report card when he got it, praised him for working hard and helped him set goals for improving where he needed to. 

We made a medium deal about it - not big and not small. 

Because although grades are important to Shaune and me, we're more concerned with raising people who try their best, are kind to their classmates and friends, and have a willingness to keep going when things get tough. 

We also value modesty.

It's tricky though. We, all of us, love our kids deeply and want them to succeed and when they do succeed, we feel overjoyed and proud and also like we've succeeded. It's hard to resist the urge to announce it to the world or to anyone who will listen or at least to all of our Facebook friends. It's tricky and I totally get it.

I wonder sometimes though if we shouldn't just wait for the grandparents to come over and blab ourselves silly till it's out of our systems.

Here are some pictures from iur Family Day weekend.