The one in which Mom lets go a little bit

Just made the last school lunch of the year.

That's my favorite benchmark because I feel like I get in such a rut with brown-bagging.

Next year the twins will make their own; they just don't know it yet.

So as I face another summer as cruise director for three boys, I have to look back at how much they've grown.

It is weird to compare your parenting style to your own parenting style, but it's easy when your kids are seven years apart.

I did it yesterday as I sat at Crockett Park watching Owen take part in the last day of Brentwood Blaze football camp.

He loved it, and I've never seen one of my kids so suited for a sport.

When Mason left the Blaze after one year, I couldn't wait to say goodbye to that part of our life.

I remember thinking it was too much: practice four days a week plus a game, traveling to far-flung areas of the Nashville Metropolitan area to play other teams. In third grade!

But we got a lot out of it. To this day the whole family can look at each other and say, "Remember those Hendersonville boys? Man, they were HUGE!" And we all feel grateful to have survived that trip to Drakes Creek Park.

I remember thinking I didn't want Mason to get burnt out on football before he played in middle school. Now I think he should have stayed in it because boys learn a lot in that level of football.

The thing about football coaches is that they are tough, in a good way, though.

This three-day camp had more than 100 boys participating, from kindergarten through about sixth grade.

The organizers did a great job running boys of all ages through the same drills. The expectation was that the kids could do it, and even the "pee-wees," as mine was called, felt they could do it.

T-ball and baseball are different, somehow.

The coaches are still dads, but there's just more babying going on. At football camp, the atmosphere is all hustle, all the time. If you don't hustle, you're gonna get attention you don't want.

So they hustled. Nobody threw a fit, like you see in the baseball dugout sometime. Nobody checked out mentally and started playing in the dirt. On the football field, there's not a lot of down time for anyone. They're always either running, throwing, pushing or pulling someone, so you don't hear anyone getting a hoarse reminder to pay attention.

Sometimes when they're waiting in line to do a drill, they'll turn around and mess with each other, but that's part of it. Once the coach calls you sharply by the last name, you won't get caught doing that again.

The other funny thing was watching Mason micromanage Owen during camp. Mason paced the sidelines on the first day and followed Owen from drill station to drill station, occasionally yelling at him to turn around or get his fingers out of his mouth.

By the second day Mason had calmed down and just offered encouragement or constructive feedback.

I remember when my older boys were that little, my most feared enemy was older boys. Because older boys knew things and said things I didn't want my boys to know or say yet.

I should have trusted my boys more, though. Watching Owen turn around to listen to some evil second-graders fiercely yelling at each other to shut up and talking trash that verged on potty mouth, I could tell in his face that even he didn't like how they were talking to each other, and he didn't join in.

Crisis averted!

For now.