Troy and I rent a humble one bedroom apartment in a humble neighborhood and we get a lot of our clothes at our humble church’s humble thrift sale.  We don’t own a car and we don’t have cable TV.  Our fireplace is on a DVD.  Our idea of fun is taking hammers down to the river to break up the ice.  And though we’ve raised Huck in this unfancy lifestyle of ours, I just realized that he’s a bit disturbed by how humble his mother is.  The other day while visiting my Sunday school classroom that’s about the size of most people’s walk-in closets, he got that look on his face.  The familiar look that says he’s heartbroken over my humbleness.  He shook his head and said very quietly, “Poor Mommy in her little classroom.”  I began going on about how great my classroom is and that I like it cozy and small, but then he saw the world’s saddest, tiniest trashcan and began to cry as he said, “Poor Mommy and her humble little trashcan!”  I had to comfort him over it, assuring him that I was CRAZY for my little trashcan.  I declared, “It’s all I need!”  Yesterday morning we were working on his book log before he went to school, and since we’d read more books than the page allowed for I had written the extra books onto an awkward form I made on the back.  There came the look and the words: “Poor Mommy and the humble work that she’s done.”

This coming from a kid who loves saltine crackers, rolls of green tape and bobby pins.