A butterfly, a bike, a bra and a legend.

This boy of mine... the one that has kept me hopping for almost 11 years now.  This boy that has so much energy, emotion and heart packed into his small body that I wonder sometimes how he keeps it together as well as he does. This boy that has been on my mind a lot lately. For this boy I pray and push myself to better understand what this mom should be.

Today I just don't know.

I found this blog post buried in with many other posts that haven't made it past draft status, and it feels like a good time to celebrate this boy of mine.

This summer in Juniper all the boys caught a butterfly they sat around and watched it amazed by it's movement and struggle. They were so gentle and soft, such a rarity I couldn't help watching, amazed at these creatures we call boys. 

They built a shelter, a shelter that looked suspiciously like a sacrificial alter...but they swore it was a shelter... I think I believe them.

Apparently there's not enough work to be done on the farm, so boys put this bike together from mixed parts.

Have I ever mentioned how easy it is to be amused on the farm? This was amusing....very amusing.

Again....amusing....

Inappropriate, yes. But amusing none the less. So amusing in fact, that it didn't stop here. Dylan looks pretty silly in a bra too, so does Max the dog, not to mention Grandma's beautiful little girl statue in her garden. I chuckle just a little....then a little more when I think of Mary getting in trouble for it.

And then there was Rocky.

Austin and Dylan discovered Grandma's collection of the first four Rocky movies and thought they were awesome. Who knew. The eye of the tiger came alive again and they couldn't get enough. They even talked like him...sort of...very amusing. Austin was so inspired by Rocky overcoming his trials again and again...the training sequences were by far his favorite. A few weeks after we got back while  Austin was watching youtube Rocky songs I mentioned something about the story behind making the movie. I can't remember what I said, but something clicked in Austin's head and he asked, "Rocky's not real?" It felt worse that when he found out about Santa Clause. He was crushed. I felt like there must be something I could do to keep the dream alive, but I didn't know what. 

Then it hit me.

"Your gonna eat lightning, and your gonna crap thunder!"

No, that's not it...

The eye of the tiger.

"Now when we fought, you had that eye of the tiger, man, the edge! And now you gotta get it back, and the way to get it back is to go back to the beginning. You know what I mean?" -Apollo Creed

I'm not sure what he meant, but "Eye of the Tiger" became our family theme song. So much that last week when Bingham had to run a quarter mile for his PE test he sang it to keep him running strong. "But Mom," he told me later, "I sang it quietly so the other kids wouldn't know my secret"