“I’m so thirsty, I could carjack that Coke truck for something to drink.”
“How would you do that, exactly, Jack?”
“Well, I’d jump on the bumper and cut a hole in the back with a laser and pull out a coke at the next stoplight. You want one?”
“That’s way too complicated, and I don’t want you hanging from the back of a truck in rush hour traffic.”
“Oh.”
“How about we borrow a helicopter and then hover over the truck and rappel down and cut a hole in the roof and pull out all the sodas we want?”
A Lamborghini will run a person anywhere from $200k to $4.5 million, which is totally news to me, but not to Jack who seems to have moved on from an obsession with video games, set in post apocalyptic zombie land, to a more expensive, but still fantasy-based hobby.
He’s also a fan of the Corvette and the Ferrari. He says when he starts making money he’ll buy me a Porsche. I tell him I don’t need a Porsche. I’m rockin’ a 2007 Prius with the door ding in the passenger side where Colin hit a cement post once while getting out of the car at school.
When we bought the Prius, I took my shiny, red, Acura with the sunroof to the consignment car lot. I cried a little bit. It just wasn’t a good mommy car.
There’s no getting around it. There has been a distinct change in tone around here over the last couple of years.
It was bound to happen. Little people get big, and find out the truth:
These are some of the cold, hard facts of life. Hard to deal with all at once, I’m sure. Add puberty to it. And parents who are frequently out of touch, demanding and laugh at their own jokes. It gives a person plenty to complain about. I’m just as sure of that as I am that being the teenage child of a blogger is all kinds of wondrous karma.
How I, sort of, finally made Argentine chimichurri.Nine years ago I took off to gallivant around Buenos Aires, Argentina, leaving my husband home with our two very young boys
The trip marked a turning point in my life – and it had nothing to do with testing Mike’s chops to care for a toddler and a preschooler solo (kind of) for period of weeks.
I returned from the trip, quit my stable, full-time-with-benefits job, launched a consulting business, and joined Rotary – the organization that had sponsored the trip. At that time our local district would partner with Rotary International to take a group of normally sane young(ish) adults, and ship them someplace else. In exchange, folks here would welcome a team from that district.
I was at a meeting recently with a couple of other parents, making small talk about our kids.
One woman had younger children. Preschool, maybe. Just emerging from mommy-and-me-gymnastics stage and entering into the “Let’s see what kind of activity keeps you most interested but doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg” phase.
Jack and I have had long conversations lately about potential careers. I remember the feeling I had at his age: like the whole world was a bunch of wrapped gifts on display, and I was waiting for Christmas. Anything could be in those pretty boxes under the tree.
Except a horse. Not one of those boxes was ever big enough for a horse.
Come to think of it, Christmas rarely lived up to expectations.
But, whatever did happen was bound to be interesting.
Today Kurt Cobain will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 20 years and a couple of days after he took his own life at age 27.
At the time, Nirvana’s music was only hovering somewhere on the edge of my perception. I’m not much into music, save for the stuff I load on my iPod for running. Today, Cobain’s being hailed as one of the last true rock artists to earn icon status. He was here and then gone again in a flash. And he’s left us two decades to ponder his impact.
Not that there’s been a lot of pondering on my part. Instead, there have been been kids and work and Courtney Love making a minor spectacle of herself, and the occasional summer road trip with the windows down and Smells Like Teen Spirit cranked way up.
On Saturday, Mike and I came home after the kids had gone to bed. We found my iPad on the kitchen table, its screen shattered.
There was a note:
“We’ll disguss (sic) this in the morning. I would recommend you not touch it. – Jack”
Hmm. We would indeed ‘disguss’ this in the morning.
Over the course of the past four or five years or so, we’ve had regular stints as exchange student host-parents. It’s different from being a regular parent. There’s not as much yelling.
I’m finding, however, that my sense of motherly righteous indignation can get just as revved up on behalf of someone else’s kid as it can for my own.
At issue is the relationship between our exchange student, Guillermo, and his golf coach.
Jack, who will be 15 in May, wants a summer job.
He tells me that if he can get something full time at an $8 hourly rate, he’ll save up enough for a new computer and a PS4. I don’t know where all this stuff will go, since the family room (man cave) is pretty much already full of electronics.
I guess we could get rid of the foosball table. And the couch. Maybe knock out a wall or two (note to Jack: I mean that satirically. We are not knocking down a wall to accommodate more electronics).
I remember wandering around downtown when I was his age, stepping into little mom and pop stores, in which I’d never shopped, asking if they needed summer help. After about three or four rejections, I stopped asking and just window shopped.
