Call Me, Maybe

While Taido was out of town last week, Mary Polly had a couple of girls spend the night.  Usually our house is full of boys, so it’s always interesting when the hormone scale gets tipped the other way.  The dynamics in the house shift.

Nail polish fumes overpower the smell of sweaty socks.  One Direction and Carly Rae Jepsen drown out Passion Pit and Mumford and Sons.

Mary Polly is in the 8th grade.  She and her friends are just starting to be a teensy weensy bit interested in boys.  I am kind of slow on the uptake, but I’m pretty sure that giggling + slamming doors so no one will hear + constant phone activity = something close to boy crazy.

Not to rat out MP and her friends, but I mention all of this to reveal a moment of total paranoia I had as I was going to bed while the girls were all still downstairs sprawled on the couch bed and laughing.

I was really exhausted from our crazy week of starting school and arts camp at church and Taido’s being gone, so I really felt like I could not stay up another minute.

But as my head hit the pillow, I remembered suddenly that it was in the 8th grade that my slightly boy crazy friend, Alicia Rogers, talked me into sneaking out of my house in the middle of the night to meet some boys. I was lying in bed thinking, Was that the 8th grade?  Really?  Did I really do that?

It was perfectly innocent really.  We just walked down the street and said hello.  We visited awkwardly for not very long and then went home.  However, the anxiety I experienced over the possibility of being caught sneaking out (or worse, sneaking IN!) was so awful that I’m pretty sure that the innocuous meeting was hardly worth the trouble.

So, I thought to myself on Friday night, SURELY, these sweet girls downstairs would never dream of sneaking out of my house.  I mean, the invention of the iPhone and face time and really cell phones altogether has quite possibly entirely eliminated the need to sneak out and see a boy, right?

So, I got back out of bed.  I went and found Cole, who is staying up later and later than me these days.  I told him in addition to keeping an eye on the girls, I wanted him to wake me up and tell me when they were all really asleep.

No harm in taking a little precaution.

Incidentally, a few years after 8th grade, Alicia’s parents started homeschooling and moved away, which at the time, seemed totally unreasonable.  I cried and cried about how unfair they were being to her.  Now, as a parent of an 8th grade girl (and a 10th grade boy), I TOTALLY get it.  If Taido didn’t come back in town to bring me back down to earth on a regular basis, I’m pretty sure I’d have us all living in a cave in Siberia somewhere by now.

Where no one could call us.  Maybe.