The moment my heart melted.....

It's summer. And you know what that means. Camp. Lots of camp. We've got various camps scheduled for the summer.....aside from our home based cooking camp.....we have a few "off campus" sporting camps, art camps, and such. You know, where they leave the safe confined space of their mother's loving arms......or to be more exact, the camps I hate.

The eldest signed up for Auburn University football camp again this year. And ironically, the sweet baby girl is also away at the University of Alabama gymnastics camp, but only as a day camper, thank goodness. My pacemaker can only take so much departure from the children at a time.

I'm sure they are both enjoying themselves greatly......me, not so much. Call me a mother hen, but I like to have all my little brood together. In one place. Under my wing, preferably. But, it just doesn't always work out that way. However, I have found a good way to make it happen, break all their femur bones.....

So, as you may remember, and if you don't, I'm sorry, I'd love to have your read the post from last summer of our first experience dropping off a child at camp, and leaving him. You know, out from under my wing. But, alas, that piece of literature would be lost somewhere in cyberspace with the rest of the whole first two years of my blogging adventure. My tech savvy self accidentally deleted our first blog. But just suffice it to say, that adventure was hard on the mama. And hard on whoever had to endure the mama's crying.

No, I won't rehash it all here again....just know that I think I may have been the one who gave the Lord those words to use in the bible......"weeping and gnashing of teeth".

Because that could certainly have described this mama when we drove away after depositing my baby on a college campus, to stay day and night, without me, at the tender age of 11.

I think it's also the main reason the father decided to do it by himself this year. Without all the mama drama. Hmph.

But luckily, and against my better judgement, we sent him away with one of his Dad's cell phones. We have stood firm against getting a child a cell phone when they are so young, because really, who are they gonna call? But that's a whole other post, for another day. He was informed that he could call us, anytime when he had a break, and especially at night, once he arrived back in his dorm room.

Well, tonight he called his mama......first. We chatted for a bit, and then a hot pizza delivery and a mean game of ping pong in the activity room were calling his name, so I let him go. But it was hard. Almost as hard as driving away last summer.

I didn't cry. I did what any sane person would do, with the proper phone plan......I texted him. Just to see if he'd text me back. And guess what.....he did. It was just 4 little words, which consisted of a total of 10 letters and 1 number.

But it was more than enough to make my heart melt, right then and there.

"night loveu2"

~~~~~~~~~~~~