A life less comfortable

The other day Steve, Megan and I were hanging out in the kitchen.  Megan told me I needed to stop mentioning my up coming midlife crisis.  She then told Steve he needed to get over his laundry obsession with our 12 teens and their unclaimed, unmarked laundry that he has recently begun hiding.  Steve and I laughed at seeing ourselves through Megan's eyes.  Steve said if someone had told him a year ago that he would be hiding laundry from our house O teens he would laugh them out of the room.  Often reality proves to be stranger than fiction. The thing is I can't seem to get my mind around the fact that very soon our baby girl will be graduating from high school.  I've hardly recovered from Joe graduating and starting college.  You see we haven't lived full-time with our kids since they were in 8th grade for Sam, 9th grade for Meg and 10th grade for Joe.  We moved away from the states when they were 9, 11 and 13.  We placed them in French public schools for a year and t

22 years ago on this date Steve and I met at the Hot Biscuit diner in Kilgore, TX.  My roommate Susan and our hall-mate Cindy and I had gone to the Denny's type restaurant to study and have iced tea with multiple free refills (if we had had money we might have even shared an order of fries!!!)  We were studying and occasionally chatting when we noticed directly across the nearly empty restaurant some guys about our age studying in a corner booth.  The next thing we knew the waitress was walking from their table to ours with a sheet of paper.  She gave us the blank notebook paper saying the guys over there wanted our names.  We gave our names and she crossed the restaurant and said the same thing to the unsuspecting guys.  So over the next hour we wrote all over that sheet of paper, front and back, with the waitress wearing a track in the industrial low-pile carpet between our tables as she delivered our messages.  Steve said his name was Ferris and he had a girlfriend, his friends

Just in the last few hours we have had 2 significant conversations with 3 different students about various issues relating to character development.  Steve likes to call those special conversations held in our office with said student seated in a large rocking chair "come to Jesus" moments.  When we casually ask a student to come to our office for a talk they visibly stiffen and become very serious asking, "Am I in trouble?"  These talks almost always end in hugs and better understanding all around. This week the kids are attending spiritual retreats.  The high schoolers are off campus about an hour away having their retreat and the middle schoolers are having daily programs on the school campus.  Since 9 of our high schoolers are away our middle schoolers asked if they could have friends stay the night.  So here we are with 3 of our own middle schoolers and 5 extra for company for the next two nights.  We got off to a great start with a lovely enchilada dinner bu