Memorable Moments With Your Children

Anyone here who has raised children probably has certain moments with their children that stick out in their minds, either because it was particularly funny (or seemed so at the time), or perhaps it wasn't funny at the time but might seem so now, or because it was a poignant moment, or for whatever reason, you find yourself thinking back on these moments.

I have no children, by blood, but I adopted a young boy, had several foster children, and raised one of my nephews from the age of twelve.

I'll start off with one, although I have others that I'll share later.

My son was in bed asleep about 2:00 am on a Saturday morning. He was around nine years old then, I think. I was still up and bored, so I woke him telling him to get up or he was going to be late for school. He mumbled something, so I said, with more energy, "Get up! You have school!"

I went back downstairs, and, a few minutes later, he came down the stairs dressed for school.

"What are you doing up? It's 2:00 in the morning, and it's Saturday."

"But, you said..."

 

When my kids were little, we had a Shih-Tzu named Ming Toy. She learned to “sing” when we asked her to sing, because we discovered that if we made a high-pitched howling kind of noise , Ming Toy would howl along with us. Then, we started to say the word “sing” to her in that high pitched voice, and before long, she would happily sing when requested.

Ming Toy went along with us most places, and one night we were at the county fair together, looking at all the exhibits. I noticed that all three of my kids had disappeared, and at the same time, I saw that there was a crowd of people forming a little ways away from where I was standing.
Instantly concerned that it had something to do with my missing children (maybe they were watching whatever was going on ?), so I went over to see.
What I discovered was a crowd of people with my 3 kids and Ming Toy in the middle, and Ming Toy was happily serenading the crowd, as my kids encouraged her on to keep singing.

Another time, we had gone to church. Our pastor’s wife said that Ming Toy was not allowed to come into the sanctuary, but she was allowed to wait in their apartment, which was underneath the main part of the church . (The church was an old 3 story brick school building, and the pastor lived in the basement.)
When we were all in church singing hymns, we could distinctly hear Ming Toy singing along from her place in the basement. I think that is the last time she was allowed to wait for us when we were in church, too.

 

I used to see them a lot when I lived in Michigan as a child, and I have seen them in Maine, but not much anymore.

 

There were times when my son would do something wrong, and, perhaps because I was a pretty young single parent, I had to pretend to be serious while chastizing him. Either he would pick up on that or he learned manipulation from a cat, because he would get such a look on his face that I just had to laugh, and the game was over.

 

Feel free to tell your own stories here. I'll start it off with a few of my own.

I raised my (adopted) son in California from the age of about seven to twenty. I've told that story elsewhere in the forum so that I won't repeat that here, but I was a single parent and a foster parent for a bunch of other kids who lived with us for short periods, mostly from days to weeks, although one girl was with us for eight months. She sent me Father's Day cards for years afterward.

At the time, I was working for Champion Paper Company and making more money than I had ever thought I'd be earning and spending very little, so money wasn't an issue. When my son was ten or eleven, I had a long weekend coming up and didn't know what to do with it, so I took out a map of the country and told my son to place his finger on the map with his eyes closed, and we would go there. We flew to some little town in North Dakota, spending one night in a hotel and camping out for another night.

To encourage my son to do the laundry once in a while, I told him he could keep whatever cash he found in my pockets and would make a point of leaving a few dollars in my pants pockets once in a while. This was before debit cards, so there was usually change in the pockets. One day, I cashed my check out for cash because I was planning on taking us somewhere, and I made a point of having money with me in case something untoward occurred. He came out of the laundry room with a huge smile because he had found more than $300 in my pockets. He fully intended to give it back, but I told him no, a deal was a deal, so it was his.

One winter, I decided we'd drive somewhere in Northern California. I lived in Anaheim then, where temperatures remained in the 70s and 80s year-round. Although I was well aware that California included all sorts of climates because we had vacationed in places an hour or so away where we were in the desert, the ocean, or snow, I didn't bother to check weather conditions for where we were going. I don't remember where I had planned to go because we never got there. We were snowed in at a place called Bridgeport. Fortunately, I had a camper shell on my Datsun pickup truck, and we had sleeping bags and stuff. I had stopped at a park for the night, and we awoke to more snow than I could drive out of.

To think, they gave me a kid. I guess California was crazy even then.