Noteworthy weekend

Another weekend-roundup. There really were only two noteworthy events on the weekend.

Track and field
The first was the final athletics meet for the year (for us). It took us away from home from 6.40am to 8pm. A long day! I ended up riding with the team in the morning and driving some of the team/supporters/coaching staff home in a school van. It's a 52 kilometre round trip, it took more than 2½ hrs to drive that!

Our son ran three individual races 100m, 200m, and 400m. He recorded PR/PBs in two of those events, much to our delight. He also ran the 4x400m. It was a "freshman" (9th grade) team consisting of the same guys who won a medal last year at the middle school finals. Obviously they were competing against guys older and stronger than them, but their goal was to beat their time from last year and they did this and narrowly missed their goal of 3 min 50 sec. It will be interesting to see if they'll have a chance to do this again next year.


Mother's Day
The other noteworthy event was a Mother's Day morning tea in a fancy coffee shop with David and our two younger boys. This is the second year that I told them that's all I wanted. 

Motherhood is a long-distance event of constantly loving kids regardless of how they treat you. I can't really say much more without invading the privacy of my boys. I got my morning tea, and there was some fun, but there were some tense moments too.

I've included this incident (as veiled as my description of it is) because I know that I'm not the only one who has difficult teenagers, though we hesitate to tell one another. I also know that when we set up a day such as Mother's Day, there are often high expectations and frequently circumstances mean that we don't hit them and we're disappointed. If that is your situation, for whatever reason, I don't want to discourage you by giving you the impression I have the perfect family, because I don't. My kids aren't perfect and neither are David or I. We don't love one another perfectly either. 

This is probably a whole post on its own, but I've been challenged recently by the Holy Spirit about loving the difficult people who are in my life: my own teenagers who I can't choose to avoid. I even thanked God on Sunday morning (before we even got out of bed) that because I have these kids, I have this opportunity to grow as a result.

One more thing that I can tell you about was that I did have the opportunity to talk with my own mum (and dad) for an hour via a video call in the afternoon, which was wonderful. So thankful for today's technology!