Gurls, Gurls, Gurls

Greyson’s latest bedtime request is to ask me to ‘talk’.  This is his most effective stall tactic yet because I’ll give my right arm to listen, and give advice, to my little boy.  We’ve had grand conversations about life, sometimes about death, always about his friends.  He is now listing, on paper, his best friends, enemies (yep) and gurlfriends (sic).  And on the latter, this includes pairing up his best friends with specific girls in his class with a heart next to each couple.  Greyson’s girlfriend, to no one’s surprise, is Linda.  I wrote about Linda last year. She’s from China and has had a crush on Grey since the first day of Kindergarten. She wrote him a valentine that said simply “I love you Greyson” and at the end of the school year, she signed his yearbook “I want to marry you”.  So, he’s following in his Uncle Nate’s footsteps whose first crush was my amazing Asian best friend Tina. 

We took the boys to their 2^nd “Boo to Boot” at the school – a safe, fast but frenzied trick or treating event where they go from car to car collecting as many sweets as they can.  This event gives me a chance to catch up with the moms that I never see.  These moms think Mike is THE best (I already know this) but I did have a mom tell me this year that Greyson is apparently the talk of the 1^st grade- for the girls anyway. Her daughter Taylor told her that all the girls like Greyson and this mom rambles on about how cute he is and all of that and I’m smiling and giving the obligatory ‘aww, that’s nice’ but thinking to myself ‘how is this possible, that 6 and 7 year old girls are already talking about boys in this way?’ and I know Greyson’s daddy well enough to know that when you combine Greyson’s list of ‘gurlfriends’ with the feedback from Taylor’s mom, that we’re in for it where girls are concerned. 

Grey has taken to blushing when he sees kissing on TV and if he’s reading a book that talks about a ‘beautiful girl’, he stops, gets a little sheepish, and then reads the sentence or paragraph with a catch in his throat. Graham is blissfully unaware but as is the case with all little brothers, follows Grey’s lead by covering his face at the kissing parts or burying his head under a blanket. 

Graham isn’t ready to tell me all of life’s little secrets yet but we are having great fun. Both of the boys have taken up tennis this term and Graham’s coach Pippa is usually one-to-one with him. He talks about his tennis lessons a lot and it’s obvious he’s really taking to it. Between tennis and golf, we’re taking a different direction than Mike and I did as kids but hoping that we’re forming a team that will play together into our golden years.  This is one thing that American football can’t do.

 

I’ll close it off by plugging my upcoming “Survival of the Fittest”, a 10k that I’m running on Saturday for two worthy charities. I’ve raised £1600 so far for CLIC Sargent in the UK. CLIC benefits children with cancer and I decided to take it a step further by personally donating $1 for every £1 raised to The Paxton Andrews Foundation, based in Wisconsin.  Paxton’s story is equal parts heartbreaking, uplifting and maddening and if you don’t know it, I plead with you to read his momma’s letters to her son – www.warriormomma.com.  She lost Paxton last year, when he was 5 months old, and her fight to raise awareness, to cry out in unspoken languages that demand you listen, is changing the face of childhood cancer forever.  I know Paxton’s momma personally and a few months ago I read every letter and was moved to action.  £1600 isn’t enough, but it’s a start. Join me.  http://www.justgiving.com/JessiGuenther

             GREY*isms*

G: “Have you ever had cancer mom?”

Me: “No, but Papa has – he had colon cancer when he was 50 years old”

G: “What’s a colon?”

Me: “It’s the large intestine – it digests your food”

G: “I hate digesting – especially in the mornings”