Of Mothers and Daughters

An article by Don Quixote    1 Comment

This past month has continued my trend of being busier than I have been for some time. However, I have a few down hours and I wanted to jot down some notes while I waited.

This is a first in a series of updates.

On May 14th, the Ligioneer Church of Christ had a mother and daughter banquet. For those of you who don’t know, that’s where my father is a minister. Now for any of you who have known me for a while is aware of the fact that I am not a big family gathering kind of guy. I love my family, they mean a lot to me, but all this mushy gathering of a lot of related people in one confined space just doesn’t do anything for me. I’m more of a small group kind of person.

Well, this year my mom invited Michelle to come to the banquet.

Enter moment of crisis.

What to do? Michelle having not really met much of my family suddenly is presented with an opportunity to meet a lot of them at once. If it were me, I’d politely decline and call it a good day, but alas, Michelle is a better person than I am and agreed to go.

Which of course meant that I had to go because I needed to drive her there and back.

Well, in for a penny, in for a pound.

Being a firm believer in misery loves company, I brought Dafyd and Jace along to hang out with Grandpa Bob while all the ladies where out banqueting. Waiting until the last possible moment to arrive we pulled up about 5 minutes before everyone was to leave for the church.

The door opened and it was clear that the house was willed with every female related to me. I took a deep breath, whispered I’m sorry, and tossed Michelle like fresh piece of steak to a pack of wolves and shut the door behind her. The boys and I hid on the porch until the gnashing of teeth was finished.

Alas I was not spared as a short time later the doors reopened and we were sucked into the pile. Goodness sakes, these people acted like they hadn’t seen me in 5 or 6 years. Oh wait, they probably hadn’t. So to immortalize this moment for all eternity, we spent the next 10 minutes taking pictures of everyone with everyone else. And in a flurry it was all over, I didn’t see my wife again for the next two hours.

Meanwhile, Dafyd, Jace, Grandpa and myself decided to head down to Subway and give the boys their first taste of a Club sandwich. The boys loved it. Not only were they eating healthy (thankfully something that Kara has worked really hard to instill in the boys) but they got to pick out exactly what they wanted (though I had to convince Jace that ketchup probably wasn’t the best idea to have on a club sandwich.)

And just like that it was all over and everyone went home.

Not too painful after all. Who knows, maybe I’ll drag myself back up there around Christmas time… then again, maybe once is enough.

On a side note, one of the really cool things about this whole trip is that April (my older sister) had the opportunity to speak at the banquet. To the best of my knowledge this was her first speaking gig… ever.

She had spent weeks working on what she wanted to say and was pretty convinced that she was heading in a direction that God wanted her to go. As fate (aka God) would have it, I just happened to call her 3 days before the banquet to talk to her (though I had no idea that she was speaking, I just wanted to make sure I wished her a happy birthday before I missed it).

It turns out that Satan had been working really hard on her family and she had been having a rough week. She had decided to scrap everything that she had been working and try and writing something else since she felt that she herself hadn’t been able to live up what she wanted to say.

Well, I’ve done enough speaking to know that if Satan is going to work that hard to get you to change your message, then you had better make sure you stick to your original message. After 15 minutes of preaching to my sister (as she called it), her confidence was restored in what she wanted to say. By all reports God used April to touch a lot of ladies there that afternoon.

Who knew?