You Should at Least Have Facial Hair if You're Going to Take that Tone With Me

We're only one week into the new junior high school year here in the Farklpants household and already our vocabulary has been expanded to include such vernacular (being the normal spoken language for a little segment of society known as the PRE-TEEN) as:

1. MySpace
2. Text messaging
3. Parents prohibited
4. Attitude (not a word so much as it is symbolic speech and when I say symbolic speech I mean: eye-rolling and sucking breath through teeth)
   

Never fear, however, because we've introduced a few words of our own into Boy-Child#1's vocabulary as well [that being the normal spoken language for that large section of society known as PARENTS OF PRE-TEENS] and they are:

(Please note that the following numbered responses correspond with the above and also note that I would make a chart but that sounds like it would involve work)

1. Parental access to your page in the form of your password so that we can monitor you.
2. Prepaid phone (when it runs out that's just tough titties)
3. Dream on
4. That will cost you your MySpace and prepaid phone so you may want to find your happy place. Son. Capice?

It all started with this conversation:

Boy-Child#1: So-N-So has a MySpace page. I can't wait to go home and set up mine.

Tootsie: (double take and that eyeiiieyeiiiieyeiii sound from the Scooby Doo cartoons) Whoa now. Who said anything about a MySpace page? We'll have to talk about this.

Boy-Child#1: WHY?!? Fine. Whatever.

Then yesterday with this:

Boy-Child#1: How come So-N-So gets to go to Magic Mountain with friends and not his parents? You said I wasn't old enough to do that and he's my same age! (so indignant too!)

Tootsie: Good for So-N-So. I'm not his mother.

Boy-Child#1: So then I can't go with him if they go?

Tootsie: You barely make the weight requirement to be sitting in the front seat! You're ELEVEN! Like I'm gonna turn you loose in an amusement park without supervision.

And he didn't say it out loud but I'm sure that I suck. His face said as much.

It also got me to thinking that things are so different now than when I was his age. I mean, you know you're a child of the 70's when you remember things like seatbelts were an option at the dealership. You rode your bike barefoot and helmetless. An infant car seat equaled your mother's lap. You walked to school in kindergarten. You played outside unsupervised until it got dark. Hell, my brother and I were home alone while my mom worked and I was in charge...and NINE! I rode the city bus on weekends to go to the Galleria when I was not much older than Boy-Child#1. But I clearly remember my first non-chaperoned trip to Magic Mountain and I was fourteen. And if my mother felt, in those lackadaisical days of yesteryear, that fourteen was the appropriate age, then by golly eleven is too damn young. So dream on sport.