As I’ve mentioned , I live in a house full of men. My one daughter and I are outnumbered. I surrendered years ago to the mess and smells and mood swings . Yes , mood swings from teen boys are every bit as bad as those from teen girls .

I love my boys! Truly they are the light of my life . But I haven’t always understood them correctly or reacted to their strange ways with love. I’m still learning how important it is to be very careful not to wound their sensitive souls .

Fact: Boys need encouragement and love from their mom and guidance and discipline from their dad .

Yes , both parents need to encourage and guide, but it’s important that mom is not the “heavy” in the house. The world is going to beat them down and they need to know that mom loves them unconditionally. They need to know that dad is strong and able to protect them until they can do it themselves.

But I just want to share a quick story for today , not a whole book in everything I’ve learned about the male species from these wonderful boys.

My 18 year old brought home an electric display chest freezer/cooler from work. The store didn’t need it anymore and they gave it to him. We have a perfectly good refrigerator, but he was excited about it. I was happy for him.

First he put it out on the deck and plugged it in to see if it worked . He put one bottle of water in it . Yep, it got cold.

Then he forgot about it. He left it out in the rain . You can probably guess who drained the water out of it and covered it up after that .

So I decided to look online to see how much it’s worth so he could sell it and make money for his car fund . It’s worth quite a bit . I told him. He says , put it on marketplace. But that was the day that Facebook was mysteriously missing so I couldn’t .

I told him to bring it in the house. Why did I have to tell him? Because he’s distracted with boy thoughts.

So he brought it in and decided to put a jug of iced tea in it and some lunch meat and bread that he’d bought for himself. You know how boys who have jobs at grocery stores like to buy their own food.

So this morning I’m trying to have a conversation with him about something he has no interest in, that I think extreme prepping is a symptom of OCD, and he’s half listening.

He is preparing his lunch for work and he gets the jug of tea out of the cooler and starts to pour it into his big metal water jug that I got him for his birthday and that he loves, and suddenly he gets excited!

“Look! It’s a slush !” He’s so happy and grinning at me! I reply “That’s awesome!” and look at it when he shows me the slush and stop talking about what I was talking about. Looking at how happy that tea slush made him, I realize that he’s still an innocent kid and he’s way more focused on the concrete and immediate things in his world than big world issues.

Lesson: let your boys be boys. Sure they need to work and learn stuff. But don’t overload them with your adult problems and fears and thoughts. As a stay home mom, I get lonely and I have made that mistake of treating my boys like adult friends. They’re almost adults age-wise, but they look at life very differently than a battle-worn adult. They need to have their dreams and hopes and to get excited about tea slush and free coolers. Reality will hit them soon enough.