[su_heading size=”18″]Enjoy Them While They Are Tweenagers[/su_heading]

This morning I told the boys that I did the dream thing with Baddy again last night.

I had gotten home late from watching the film, An Education, at the Aspen Film Festival and I woke up Baddy so that we could have connection and catch up on our weekends. He had just returned from riding one hundred miles in one day on The White Rim Trail, an intimidating feat. “Wow, where did all this candy come from?” I mumbled, as I drifted off to sleep mid-conversation. “Jillian, your falling asleep on me again,” he laughed waking me up out of my dream. I used to do this to him all the time when we would have late nights together, pre-children.

Thumper told me that in my Book of Dreams it says that when you are dreaming of candy it means that you want to have sex. I started to ask him what exactly he knew about sex but we agreed that it was to early in the morning for that kind of conversation.

Thumpber has entered his “Tween” years and is teetering on the edge of innocence. As I get a glimpse of his teenage years to come I get more and more worried, especially since he closely resembles yours truly. I watch him lewdly dancing about the house to his crazy music that Baddy and I naively turned him on to at an early age and I know that I have a whole lot of work to do before he begins to tune out my words of wisdom. I begin by telling him to tone down his thrusts out of respect for the person that he is dancing with.

So what do you get when you pour Jillian into a boy of this generation who is the oldest in the family instead of the youngest? You get a very sassy, social, highly charged, cheeky pelvic thrusting ten year old with a hot temper.

Luckily he also inherited my father’s good humor and charm and as he does silly things like shoving my ear buds up his nose to see if he can hear the Ipod through his nose, I try to keep my sense of humor. Parenting can be so monotonous at times and I don’t see any harm in getting on their level to appreciate their humor.

When we were driving home the other day Thumper saw a patrol sign on the side of the highway that said, “DUI CRACKDOWN” and he asked me why the sign said, “Do I Crackdown”. I found this an appropriate moment to begin the conversation about responsibility.

I know that the conversation could wait a few years but he has not yet become sullen and introverted and so I feel compelled to feed him life’s lessons now before it is too late.