Tying Up Loose Ends
I’m spending the next few days tying up loose ends before I leave – making up kits to bring and sell, putting together teaching materials and setting up materials lists, working out itineraries and finding places to stay! I hadn’t sat down and told the kids that I’d be leaving until last night (mother’s day – great timing…) and Hannah was quite upset. She hates me to be away, and 2+ weeks is an incomprehensibly long time for her. Luckily we have a nice fabric of friends and neighbors who will be helping out (even if it’s just giving Hannah a hug when she’s outside playing with friends).
Max will miss me, too, but he’s always been more self-sufficient. To be honest, it’s still a mystery and fascination to me that these two amazingly wonderful kids want to spend so much time with me. I know I’m their mother – their mommy – but they see so much good in me that at times it really puts me to shame. Hard to live up to the expectations of our kids and our parents…
Max made a picture of me for Mother’s Day –
My mother sounds tired on the phone, weak, and in pain. She sounds much better than she did last week, and I think my sister in law is right that she’s getting stronger, but it’s so hard to hear your parent in pain. I can tell how weak she is by how short she keeps our phone calls. Neither she nor I are big phone people – we’re sort of ‘call and state your business and then get off the phone’ kind of women. We write more – but now that she’s in the hospital we can’t email each other like we used to all the time.