Would you like to adopt a 41 year old Puerto Rican that swears a lot? Cause I'd like to go to Hawaii too.
Ha! I feel extremely fortunate about that trip; especially about the cost. I had a ton of frequent flier miles accumulated over a few years, so three plane tickets (my son, daughter, and I) only cost like $300 total. Great rate on hotel and car too. I think the total trip ended up costing like $1300-$1400 dollars. It was a nice experience.
I re-read the last message I posted here a couple weeks back. My son had his Thanksgiving lunch yesterday. A few days ago he up and out of the blue says to me, "You can come to my Thanksgiving lunch if you want." So, I say to him, "What about mom?" and he says, "Okay, she can come too." I know this made my wife happy because, like I said above, she's basically gone every year since kindergarten.
So, we're at the lunch yesterday. In general, our son doesn't like being around his parents...when he's at school or with his friends. (Hey, he's 10 and he's a boy. What do you expect...? :o) Anyhow, we're sitting together, and Gabe is pretty talkative with his friends but not with us. No problem. A few minutes into the lunch, he picks up my cup of lemonade and starts drinking it without asking me first. My wife semi-scolded him for not asking first. None of all that affected me one way or another. What did surprise me was Gabe's behavior afterwards. He started to basically ignore his mom, and a handful of comments to his friends along the lines of, "My dad is the best dad. He doesn't care if I have his drink. He is awesome."
This surprised me in two ways. One, he typically doesn't like 'acting' close to us when he's around his friends cause it's not "cool." (No prob...) So, for him to say that out loud to his friends...in front of his mom... I was kinda like, "Whoa!" The second thing was his behavior towards his mom afterwards. She tried to make small talk with him and, at one point, he gave her this pretty mean look, and totally shrugged her off. You could almost see my wife's skin turn pale. It was just a sad moment because, even though Gabe wasn't afraid to say nice words about me in front of his friends, his reaction(s) to the lemonade 'situation' told me he's probably hiding some deep-rooted resentment towards his mom cause of this whole mess over the last year, year-and-a-half. For him to say, "My dad is awesome"...in front of his friends...was a huge moment. For him to basically ignore his mom in front of me and his friends was an even bigger 'tell' of where is at emotionally. I felt really bad for him, and I felt sorry for my wife. It gave me the feeling that she's slowing losing a close relationship with her own son...
