Wedding Bells

My youngest son has recently announced that he is getting married. I am excited, apprehensive, and amazed by the turns his life is taking.

Aaron has been a single dad raising three kids on his own for quite a few years now. (The youngest, who is now six, was not quite two when their mom left the family.) Aaron did he best he could on his own, facing life struggles with varying degrees of success. As any single parent can tell you, balancing work and family and other obligations with no one there to back you up is a very tough job indeed.

This past January he re-met Stephanie, a woman he had liked when they were teenagers (they once got in trouble when they were fifteen for getting caught kissing behind the church when they were supposed to be in Sunday School!) But they grew up different ways, lost touch with each other, married other people, had families, went through messy divorces, and have both been struggling on their own for some time. Now they have come together again and are ready to blend their families. She has four children ages two to twelve - essentially one counterpart kid for each of Aaron's brood with an extra little girl thrown in as a bonus.

Raising seven children on a struggling college student's part time work salary is not going to be easy. But Aaron never has worried about if something was easy or not. And eventually his schooling should pay off in a career that will take care of the whole tribe, if they can just get through a few lean years.

So come August I will be off to Michigan to meet this new brood of children and re-meet the girl who told me 15 years ago she wanted to marry my son.

And as of the day of their wedding, I will become grandma figure to the whole bunch.

To celebrate this union Larry and I will take the entire clan to Michigan Adventure Amusement park and then we will stay at their house to babysit the wild brood for a week while Aaron & Stephanie take off for a honeymoon. I look forward to having time with them, but a whole week of 24/7 responsibility for this tribe of kids - half of whom we've never even met, has me more than a little intimidated! We are arranging out time off from our jobs so we'll have a few days of R & R to recuperate here when we return before heading back to work. I suspect we'll need it!