Guest blogger - from the middle OS!

"What am I doing here?"

i'm typing with one finger on my left arm...it's slow going so i enlisted the help of my middle OS to write this post. it appears that aaron has his own version of doing hard things! :) now here's aaron!

my wonderful mom

Seeing that my mom is at this moment, incapable of typing and, more importantly, incapable of posting embarrassing stories of my family and me on the Internet, I will take the opportunity to tell you a story about my family, particularly my mom and me, through my eyes. 

I am the middle OS, Aaron, and despite all of the stories that you may have read about me, I do think I’m a pretty good son. I mean, I’m taking over the blogging responsibilities for my mother while she sits handicapped with her arm in a sling. If that’s not care, devotion, and sacrifice, I don’t know what is. So, I will tell you now, the purpose of this blog post is to prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I am a good son. (I would also like to add that I am the best-looking, smartest, and strongest son, However, this hardly needs to be proven in a blog post.)


Last month, my mom came to me with a question, just one question that presented one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make in my life. She walked into my room and asked, 

“Do you wanna go to the Quilt 

Symposium with me next week?” 

My first and last time using a free arm quilting machine

I felt like a deer in the headlights, frozen, unable to respond. Being mildly asthmatic, my breath shortened. 

"where is my inhaler???"

My eyes shot around the room for my red inhaler. These were the questions that tortured my mind, telling me that if I left home now, and never married, I could be free from this wasteland of lose-lose situations. I could reply with a quick “Naaah” and give a bad excuse why I couldn’t attend. I wouldn’t have to worry about spending the day in a symposium (whatever that is) of quilters, whom I felt sure, if I went, would kill me, wrap in a quilt and leave on the side of the road; but, my mom would be hurt and angry that I didn’t want to spend the day with her. On the other hand, I could sound a cheerful “Sure” and my mom would be happy and excited to go to the Quilt Symposium with me, but I would surely die and spend the last minutes of my short life listening to an explanation of what a free arm sewing machine is and telling which quilt was my favorite and why. 

Still scaling the options to this agonizing selection, all I could respond was a painfully pensive, “Uhhh...ya…nu...wha…When is it?” as if I needed to check my schedule. This was before I had a summer job and spent my days reading, playing my guitar, mowing the occasional lawn, and watching movies. 

My grandma and me at the "symposium."
We haven't quilted anything in our lives.

My schedule was open. At this point, I need to remind you of the purpose of this post: I am a good son. I do not wish you to think that I could not have formulated an excuse to save me from the bloodthirsty quilting monsters, for that would imply that if I said agreed to go, it would not have been out of the sacrificial, devoted, and encouraging love I have for my mother. I’m clever enough to have thought of something. 

“Friday,” she replied hopefully.

My mind, defrosted by the torching decision looming over me, remembered, in the midst of all the fearful quilters and patterns and sewing machines that danced in my brain, all the things my mom does for me. “Sure, Mom, I’ll go.”

Wow! Did you hear that? He said yes! He’s gonna go to the Quilt Symposium! What a great, kind, loving, caring, sweet, sensitive, thoughtful, ambivalent, agreeable, self-sacrificing and loving son he is. 

the hottest guy at the symposium...for real

I know, that was my reaction too when I heard it. He really is a great son. 

(to be continued...)