You say "Freak" like that's a bad thing!

I'm a scrapper. And I'm a Mom. Which means I go about armed with a camera. I'm a kind of a memory soldier... marching to the front of auditoriums, halting the kids by interesting landmarks for a quick snap, invading spaces they're prefer I not. All in the pursuit of capturing memories. I have been told by them, on more than one occasion, that I'm a freak.

A couple of nights ago I was cleaning out a crap-stacking-spot. One of those out of the way areas that's easy to ignore. I came across Lane's 4th grade composition notebook. I read a few well chosen stories from it aloud to the boys. We were all having quite a laugh. Then Lane wanted to know if I had any of Levi's stories? You know, so we could laugh at him, too. I directed them to the storage box in my closet that contains many of their school papers, pre-school through last year, tidily sorted by year and filed away. They drug the box out and spent a couple of hours going through these, reading aloud, showing each other their "artwork", laughing their butts off.

Afterwards, Lane gave me a hug and told me that maybe being a freak wasn't such a bad thing after all.