I love it when my grown children make an effort to reach out to me.  Most of the time I’m thinking they’d rather be sharing ideas with someone their own age.  And then magic happened this week.  I received calls or visits from all four.

It started a few days ago when my phone dinged while I was still slaving away at the office.  It never dings.  I don’t have texting buddies.  I can barely answer the cell phone.  “So I was really excited to get a new phone that has a keyboard on it so that it would be asy to text and then I remember that nobody ever texts me.”  Obviously, my oldest daughter, the GAP is not savvy when it comes to texting either.  Every word was spelled out in full with perfect English.  She even included punctuation.

“So am I the first  Ive never been number one,” I texted back.  I a little more into texting than she is.  I don’t include punctuation or apostrophes, mostly because I’d have to go to another screen and then make it back to the main one. 

“You are number one to all of my kids.  The best i can get is 2.  ive decided second best is a lot less work.”  She was picking it up fast — lowercasing her i’s, leaving out an apostrophe.  She always was quick.  She made me smile.  And, of course, I’m number one with the grandkids.  I’m a novelty, a grandma “toy.”

Then on the way home, Hot Wheelz called to tell me about his fish tank of diminishing returns.  My favorite, he said, had tanked.  “You mean the one that looked like Dory.”

“Mom, it didn’t look like Dory,” he said.  All fish kinda look alike, just like all my kids’ baby pictures look alike.  Don’t know why I thought of that, but they do. 

Then the next day Coco dropped by.  “Mom, I made the right choice to move into a house where I rent a room.  I needed to be around other people.”  It’s hard for Coco to admit when she’s made a mistake and even harder for her to turn around and start over.  I was proud of her.  “One of my roommates fixed me up already.  He was really hot,” she said.  So is she, I might add.  “But then I woke up with a really big zit on my eye.  My whole freakin’ eye was swollen closed.  I went into work all lop-eyed.  My assistant manager said, ‘It looks a lot better now, after I’d soaked it in ice all day long.  ‘More like it was something you were born with, not something wrong.”  We laughed.  “I’d rather have it be something wrong that can be fixed than look like it was something I was born with and can’t do anything about.  So then he tells me I could just wear an eye patch.  ‘People are really into pirates right now,’ he said.”

“Well, how’d the date go?” I asked.

“Good.  He called last night and we talked for an hour.”

Then yesterday the youngest called.  “Mom, wish me luck,” he said.  Today’s our first soccer game.”  He’s the assistant coach at a private high school. 

A couple of hours later he called back with a smile in his voice.  “We won.  Three to two.  We outshot them thirty to ten.  Then got both their points from TK’s.  We had two and didn’t make either one.”  What the heck is a TK?  But I know when to pretend you know what’s going on.

“Sounds like you better work on accuracy,”I laughed.

Love sometimes doesn’t have to be said in words.