Surprise requests

I got two surprise requests from my oldest son last night.

When I picked him up from his mom's house that he wouldn't be able to go to Boy Scouts tonight because "I have to finish my homework." Now, I'm not going to argue with him when he wants to do his homework. In the past years, we pretty much concluded that getting him to do homework was a battle that cost us more than it was worth. But I hate to see him missing Boy Scouts, and I certainly don't want to see skipping Scouts for homework become a regular thing. Scouts is one of the few activities that we've found that really gets him excited and engaged. And now I've gone off and signed up for Wood Badge, in which I make my own long term commitments to Scouting. Hopefully we can get him to do his homework early on Mondays.

The other surprise came when I asked him what he wanted to do for his mother's birthday (which is Wednesday). He said maybe we (he and his brothers) could give mom a break by coming over to your house for an evening. I'm sure that his mom would really appreciate that. I hadn't expected him to suggest something that was going to impose a personal cost on me though. But I don't want to turn down such a genuine and well-meant idea. So I'm going to be going along with the idea. I hope she appreciates it.