Silence IS Golden!

It is the last day of school!! I have not been this happy about a last day of school in about; oh well, a lot of years.  I woke the kids up singing songs about it being the last day of school.  Neither one was impressed.  We had an impromptu dance party to celebrate and everyone went on to their respective schools. I only had to work an hour today.  Happy Summer to me!  

When I found out I was only going to have to work an hour today, I first thought that I should pick up the kids or do something crazy, mom fun like that said "WOOHOO SUMMER!".  Thankfully, I quickly came to my senses and instead you can find me at home right now. Alone.  Enjoying something I will not have anytime soon: silence. Silence will not be heard in this house for a long time.

Thank you.  I will.

 In the beginning of summer we go outside and bring our noise with us.  We swim, we play in the driveway, and we go to the park.  But as summer drags on and it gets too hot for man or beast, all of our noise will be inside.  There will be a TV or radio or video game and they will be on loud.  There will be the slam of the door opening, closing or my yelling "Close the door!".  There will be whining, there will heavy sighs, there will be moaning.  There will be yelling: yelling at each other, yelling at the dogs, yelling for me MOMWHEREAREYOU?  I am hiding in my closet trying to find one minute of silence, that is where I will be.

It won't be all bad noise.  There will be laughing, please God, lots of laughing.  There will be the squeal of preteen girls jammed four to a bedroom squeaking and squealing and laughing until they cry.  Because everything is funny, everything has to be relived and everything must be screamed at the top of their lungs in that small room.  There will be boy laughter that starts with "dude!" and ends with a fist bump and goes right into lengthy video game discussion.  There will be adult laughter over summer drinks because really, everything is very funny and laugh-out-loudable over summer drinks.  There will be dinner conversation where everyone talks over each other until Bill and I lock eyes and smile thinking we made this loud mess.  Or we lock eyes and question how many more days til school starts?  There will be teen laughter; secretive and almost elusive and we will strain to hear more.  There will be friends over adding to the din and requests for lemonade, food, more food, more everything.

There will be the daily questioning of where are we going today?  What will be fun today?  Thankfully I have Adventure Mondays in my pocket courtesy of a good friend who is a fun mom and I can tag along, slacker-like, as we all have fun, at least once a week.  There will be road trip planning and with it a million questions of where is this?  What can I pack? How long will be gone?  What about the dogs?  

There have been many summers when I have braced myself for the onslaught of summer and its noise.  I planned camps or weeks or days down to the minute. I don't feel like I am bracing myself this year. I feel like my silence today is giving me time to mentally prepare for summer and after two hours of it, I say bring it.  Bring the noise.  Bring the stickiness of summer with its watermelon faces and lemonade on the counters by kids who pour while watching TV.  Bring the smell of sunscreen on warm skin and chlorine bleached hair.  Bring the smell of BBQ on the breeze, however warm and stagnant that breeze might be.  The boy and I will be on the back deck breathing it in.  

You can almost smell how hot it is.

I think it was three or four years ago you could ask me at any day during the summer how many days it was until school started.  "Eighty-six" I said as school ended that year, or "We are down to twenty!" I cried jubilantly.  However, if you asked me right now how many more days, I would say not enough.  I hope this is still my answer in August.  Hopefully if I tuck away just a few pockets of silence between then and now, it will be.

Guard Your Heart

Good grief, look at this picture.  It looks like I have seen a ghost.  Or someone just killed my best friend.  Or my best friend has been killed and I am being haunted by their ghost.  What caused this haunted, tight, vaguely constipated face?  It was not a ghost or a death that left my face like this, it was simply surviving my first two weeks of working at a high school.  This picture was taken early in the morning after our usual crowd of 150-200 or so left and I had some time to sit for a yearbook picture.  I think it does a great job of conveying how totally overwhelmed and slightly scared I felt being surrounded by teenagers.  It also does a great job of showing that I should not wear a scoop neck anything, ever.  I think if they were to take the picture today, it would be difficult to get one of me looking at the camera as I would be having two separate conversations going on and probably handing someone something and telling someone else that yes that they could use my computer to print.

Those first few weeks of school were a blur.  I will now admit to feeling very nervous about being surrounded by teenagers at first.  There were just crowds of them and I didn't know any of them and I was not a teacher so I didn't carry the weight of being in control of their grades.  I was also initially hesitant to tell them to stop bad behavior. I sicced my librarian on them because it made me feel icky.  Eventually I got over my fear of confrontation and engaged.  Enough so that I feel confident that the very image at the top of the page is being defaced by Sharpies in many yearbooks as we speak.

Adding to my sense of HOLYCRAP, was the fact that there were Juniors and Seniors assigned as Library Aides to us almost every period.  I was trying to figure out what I was supposed to do every day and now I had kids I was in charge of as well.  I had kids who loved the library and loved to read and happily shelved.  I had kids who were killing time to graduation and would push in chairs and then fall asleep for the rest of the period.  I had kids I didn't know what to do with and kids who could be a lot to handle.  The good thing about these kids is that they showed me that teenagers are like awkward adults.  Slowly I began to realize that if I felt uncomfortable engaging them in conversation, that they were wishing I wouldn't even try.  This made me talk to them even more. And slowly,they would engage in conversation back with me. I learned about their classes,their jobs, their plans for college and they learned that I was someone who would listen, someone who was not shocked by their language and someone who laughed alot and let them use the period to do their homework.  Other kids became familiar as they checked out books all the time or asked me what was a good book to read.  There were siblings of kids who told them to go to the library, it was a good place to hang out.  We accumulated a motley sort of crew who began to know each other and us and made the day a lot of fun.  

And now that we are eight school days from graduation, I am feeling a little verklempt thinking of these kids flying out of my safe little library nest.  They are more than ready: they are skipping classes, rolling their eyes at assignments, weary of their nestmates and just ready.  They are too big for the nest, too big for the halls of high school, they are ready to go.  Remember that feeling of knowing that the rest of your life was just days away?  I have talked about my favorites before and I have some perched and ready to go.  One I totally got ripped off on because she is a freshman and I should have three more years with her, but she is moving.  Rude. 

I promise I fed them mostly cookies, no worms.

As I begin to feel very sad about watching these favorites graduate and move on, instead of acknowledging that it has been a good year and that I will miss them, I keep saying next year I will not invest in anyone.  Especially not seniors.  Come in and get you involved in their lives, get you to care and to worry and to laugh and cry with them and then they are gone?  Who signs up for that? I told the few Juniors I have that I will carry them over into next year but no new kids let into the fold.  They say "yeah right Ms McMahon".  As if they know me better than me.  That I will still be feeding the ones who I overhear are hungry or running interference for ones who need it. That I would be willing to help with History and English homework but just still stare at the Math homework along side them.   

Maybe because it was my first year I just cannonballed into the deep end of the pool with these kids.  I never stopped to think that they wouldn't still be there.  They have made me laugh and cry, taught me new words as I tell them which ones they cannot say in front of me.  They have made me remember what it is like to be 16 or 18 or just a teen.  I have watched them fall in love and break up.  I have seen them pass without trying and fail miserably.  They have been named in our family dinner conversations and in our extreme cases, offered up in our prayers.  And now they are on their way to the rest of their lives and I am so happy for them and sad at the same time.  I will miss them.  I will miss knowing what is going on in their lives and miss knowing that I can help.  They have brought out the very best and the very worst in me and I hope I did a little of the same for them.  (the best anyway)  Next year, I will wade in a little more slowly, especially with seniors, because this time I didn't know to guard my heart and they have left their mark on it.    

To Clean or Have Cleaned

If cleanliness is next to holiness, then as for me and my house, we are knocking on the gates of hell.  I should be too embarrassed to write about how dirty my house is, but somehow I am not.  We pick up, we straighten, we vacuum and wipe things down but never all at once and not with great enthusiasm.  Dog hair is accumulating, dust has taken over and I don't even want to think about the bathrooms.  The other night on my way up the stairs I noticed that they had not been vacuumed in a very long time.  So long that I was able to scrape the dog hair into a pile on each step as I walked up.  That counts as cleaning, right?  The kids come in and dump everything in the kitchen.  It is so much fun to cook dinner while stepping over backpacks and trying to put clean dishes away.  It normally takes so long to put things where they belong that any intention I had to clean was wiped out.  

Hmm, perhaps I am guilty of kitchen cluttering as well.

Bill will go into white tornado mode where he cleans everything in his path with bleach and pure muscle.  He doesn't stop until every scrap piece of paper has been trashed, he has lost half a lung from bleach fumes and he is exhausted.  The kids and I know that there is no helping the tornado.  Just stay low and out of his way and when he stops muttering how disgusting we are and sits down it is safe to come out.  He is working six days a week lately so the tornado doesn't have time to come out.  I have attempted my own tornado but my spins out a lot faster than his does.  He and I both refuse to ever clean the kids' bathroom again.  Dirty.  Dirty, messy, toothpaste and soap everywhere disgusting children.  The boy is the worst of them all.  Boys under twenty should be allowed in outhouses only, I am not really sure that they deserve indoor plumbing.

I know, all these kids living here, they should be put on cleaning, right?  My mom used to enforce the Saturday morning march on us as kids.  As soon as cartoons ended at 10am, she was right there pushing a dust cloth in our hands or a vacuum or sending someone upstairs to clean the bathroom.  We would try to limp our way through, but she would actually check and make us clean again if it was not done right.  No one went anywhere until the house smelled like Pledge and  sparkled.  We showed her though; whoever was dusting with the Pledge would make sure to accidentally spray the wooden stairs as well.  Good luck staying upright when you hit the bottom two stairs with your sock feet!  We have tried the march here with the kids but they are craftier than we were as kids, or lazier or smarter or our house is too big, and it just doesn't work.  

When I stayed at home, I felt it was my job to keep the house clean and now that I am working I feel like someone else should be cleaning it but somehow that person is still me or Bill and we are tired.  I guess it is time to hire someone to clean it but I struggle a little with paying money we sort of have to have someone do something we could do ourselves.  I know Dave Ramsey would be shouting "SAVE YOUR MONEY, CLEAN AS A FAMILY."  He also advises never buying a coffee out and finding joy in paying off debt.  I am sure being debt free would be lovely but I also don't want to live without joy or Starbucks trying to get there.  

Summer is upon us and that means kids at home using a different glass ten times a day.  Pool towels and wet swimsuits strewn throughout the house in varying piles of dampness.  Shoes kicked off at the front door, the back door, in the middle of the living room and not always as a pair.  That seems like enough to stay on top of without adding toilet cleaning and dusting, right?  I would like to enjoy the kids this summer and not be a total screaming shrew about how messy and disgusting they are.  I have daydreams about being out with them having fun while cleaning people clean our house and coming home to clean.  Clean kitchen, clean bathrooms and a clean house all at once.  That would be a happy, happy day.

I guess it is time then to pull the plug and hire someone.  Time to admit that while I like a clean house, I just am not getting it done on my own.  The kids will have roommates or spouses one day that will get onto them about their mess and they will learn.  That will be about the time Bill and I downsize into something we can white tornado together.  Until then I guess we pay for the peace of mind a clean house can bring, even if it makes me feel a little guilty. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to clean before I can have cleaning people over.

Weary

This first year of working at a high school has been a year of learning for me.  I have learned words I hope to never hear again. I have learned that I am a good listener and that kids like to talk to me.  I have learned that I have strong opinions about mandated testing but that I can't share them because I would like to continue my career in education.    I have learned more new things this year than in the past five years combined.

Currently I am learning that May = Weary.  Everyone is weary.  Kids are testing and are weary.  It is beautiful outside and they are weary of being cooped up indoors.  They are weary of their friends, they are weary of their teachers, their parents, themselves.  The kids who are failing are weary of being told they are failing. The adults are weary too.  They are weary of trying, of reaching out, of extending and helping.  They are weary of each other and conversations have gone a little stilted and stale.  They too are weary of being cooped up inside and I think every one of them has a tally of exactly how many hours are left in the school year.  I used to only wear jeans on Friday at the beginning of the year.  I am wearing jeans almost every day and I am not alone.  Last week we had alumni T-shirt day and I picked my alumni Tshirt out of the laundry hamper and wore it.  At the beginning of the year, I would have picked it out and washed it, but I didn't even see if it passed the sniff test.  Weary, and gross.

Her shirt looks clean.

I have also had a hard time leaving my work kids at work.  Their problems stay with me and I want to help, I want to fix it and I want them to be better.  Happier.  Healthier.  Stronger.  Lately their problems have been more than I know what to do with.  These problems have been bigger than my knowledge, bigger than my carefully chosen words and advice can help and definitely bigger than my soft heart can handle.  My emotional weariness has been evident to everyone.  I guess I could not get involved or invested, but what is the point of working with kids if you are not invested or involved with them? 

I thought that I might just creep through the rest of the school year with weariness as my new uniform, but that changed today.  Today I had off.  I needed to use up some personal time and I have made the most of it.  I have had two appointments taken care of, lunch with my handsome husband, cleaned a bathroom, prepped dinner and will bake at some point.  That is a productive day! Being productive didn't change my mind set from weary though, it was something my trainer at appointment one said.  I was explaining how weary I have been feeling and she said "isn't it all about effort?".  Isn't it all about effort?  We have to try, we have to put things in if we expect to get things out.  Life can get us to where we just muddle through, where we stop trying or challenging ourselves and where we endure rather than exceed.  This made me remember that when you make a little effort, it will snowball and grow into bigger efforts.  That things don't get better or easier all at once, but slowly, over time.  

I don't want to endure the next twenty one days of school, I want to live them.  I want my kids to make an effort and live theirs too. I want my school kids to tell me all their terrible things and I want to hug them and tell them yes, life does suck, but it will always, eventually get better.  It has been a long year, but it is not over and I will stop dragging myself around and wearing weary as an accessory.    Wearing weary around is exhausting and I think I can do better.  I will start small, like not wearing shirts out of the hamper and let it grow bigger, like maybe wearing a skirt.  (double effort as that requires shaving).   

I overheard colleagues talking about their own weariness last week and one said "Yes, but that is why we are professionals".  Weary made me forget that. Effort, professional, twenty one more days.  Let's get it done!

Tick Tock

Time is a hard concept to teach.  I have recently been made aware that my kids cannot do elapsed time.  They can be staring at a clock (digital) and I will say we are leaving in 45 minutes and they will still ask what time that will be. The boy brought home a sheet of homework with clocks and word problems about elapsed time with the notation "struggling" at the top of it.  We worked on it together and we were both struggling to tell elapsed time at the end.  He worked the problems out with a T chart and I was trying to show him to just move the hands of the clock.  I don't know what the hell he was doing with that chart and he didn't know what the hell I was doing with the hands.  Let's hope he can program his phone in a few years to tell him when to be somewhere.

I am not sure older kids grasp time either.  Tell one that they are six weeks away from graduating and being done with high school forever and they moan and tell you it is "Such a looooooong time!”  In the same breath, they will tell you a paper is due tomorrow, they haven't started it yet, but they still have plenty of time.   I also know that they can't tell time because they ask me every day, every period, what time the period ends.  They have no idea, they just stand up like Pavlovian dogs when they hear the bell and shuffle out.  I myself have felt like every day in April lasted ten days yet I am surprised to see tomorrow is the last day of April.

I have this book called "Q&A a Day: 365 Questions, 5 Years and 1,825 Answers".  Every day for five years, you answer the same question on the same day and then see if your answer changes from year to year. Sometimes they do, like the days they ask you what three foods you ate that day.  (Three?!?!?)  Some days they don't.  For example, on January 31st it asks "Who do you want to be?"  I am proud to say I have answered "me!" all three years.  Sometimes the questions are so dumb that I just draw an X through it year after year.  "If you were a dance, describe it".  Please, I am committed to this thing, but I am not going to patronize it either.  Lately as I have been writing in my 2014 answers, I am surprised how much has changed since 2012, or even 2013.  This makes me think that perhaps elapsed time is a harder concept to grasp than I thought.  I think about what I was going through and what I wrote as answers and think that time was not on my side for a portion of it.  Read my sad sack posts from last year and you will know.  It was timing, it wasn't the right time, I had too much time on my hands, or not enough time with Bill because he was traveling.  The kids were growing up too fast while at the same time they were stuck in the same phase for too long.  Too much time, lack of time, time that drags, time that sped by.  Time: elusive and hard as hell to pin down.

Even adages and proverbs and sayings can't agree on time.  Does it "move by so slowly" or does it "go by so fast"?  "Time is money" or is "the best way to fill time is to waste it"?  Lately I am struggling with telling someone who is hurting that "it will get better with time".  How can I use time as comfort when it has no real measure?  I can't say if that time will be ten days or a month or three years.  Why would I think that saying "give it time" would give someone who is struggling to get up, to go to sleep, to keep going on about their day any measure of peace?  I know that it is true, but I know that if the situation was reversed and I was the one hurting, that would not bring me comfort.  I would know the other person was right and I would swallow their well-meaning words, but it would be a placebo and not the medicine my wounded heart or ego needed.

Think of that first year of a baby's life.  That child goes from teeny tiny screaming meatloaf of a human with a cat-in-the-hat shaped head who does little but cry and poop and sleep to a standing, maybe walking, talking, smiling and laughing human who still cries and poops and sleeps.  365 days of amazing.  Now think of a child between 9 and 10.  They grow.  They expand their learning.  But they don't transform before your eyes like that first year and yet there are still 365 days in that year, exactly the same amount of time.  Time is eternal when we are waiting or hurting or in limbo and time is gone in the blink of an eye when we are harried or happy or challenged.  I think that perhaps the boy is right with his struggle with elapsed time. It isn't as cut and dry as I thought.  I think I will send his homework back with a quick notation to his teacher.  Underneath where she wrote "Struggling", I am going to write "Me too!”

Coming Clean

I have a problem.  No, it is not drinking.  I know you are thinking it based on the nights I may or may not drink the entire bottle of wine and then find myself incredibly funny.  Or the times I go out with friends from work and come home with crazy eyes.  But really, it is not drinking. Nor is it swearing. I have that bad boy under control!  It is reasonable to think it could be Starbucks, but that I can miss for a few days and still function.  Kettlebell you ask?  Kettlebell is not an addiction, it is a lifestyle!  Don’t be silly.

My problem is oat bars.  I am addicted to oat bars. I cannot eat enough oat bars.  I eat them for breakfast and I eat them after dinner.  Almost every day.  Usually I make a double batch and it will last through the week but lately the family has found my oat bars.  And they have been eating them!  Which leads me to say things like “Don’t eat the oat bars!” or “WHO ate the last oat bar?!?!” and maybe once I said “Eat that last oat bar and I will cut you.”

Bill posts vegan recipes he thinks look good all the time and I usually peruse them and say no.  He was very certain that I should make the oat bar one so I did.  The first batch was meh, but the second time when I added chocolate chips?  Well, an oat bar star was born! I am not a fan of most vegan sweets (for a full rant, read here); however, these oat bars are magic. 

Magic.

It started small, as problems like this tend to do. I would eat one before my 5:30am kettlebell and found it was just enough to get me through the workout without tasting it the entire time.  Then I found myself eating them for breakfast when I wasn’t working out. Next, I was breaking off a small piece to eat while cooking dinner or another small piece to eat while cleaning up dinner.  Finally, I have given up any pretense of small piece and plunk a large square of them on a plate every night.  The only thing that saves me from packing them and eating them at lunch is that they taste better when they are kept in the refrigerator.  They tend to break apart while traveling.   

What is in there that has me jonesing for them twice a day?  All natural goodness in those things: almond butter, almond milk, oats, maple syrup, cinnamon and coconut oil.  And, of course, chocolate chips.  Could I make them without the chocolate chips?  What? Why?  That would be like drinking decaf coffee or O’Doul’s: pointless.

I ignored Bill when he said I had an oat bar problem.  I dismissed the kids when they accused me of hiding oat bars so they couldn’t eat them.  (Might be true).  But now that I am taking an entire blog to tell you about oat bars, I see the truth.  I do have a high need for oat bars, but is it really a problem?  I am eating all natural good for me food twice a day.  These things are so all natural I will find oat in my teeth hours later.  Neighhhhhhhhhh.  I have not gained weight despite the copious amounts of chocolate chips I stir into them. I have even tried adding walnuts and hemp seed to increase the Omega-3 factor.  No, this is not a problem!  This is high nutrition!  I guess my reluctance to share could be the problem.  However, I shared my body with those kids; I think I am still ahead as far as giving. 

I think that everyone should mix up a batch and tell me what you think.  Here is the recipe: 

Oat Bars

1 cup almond butter

4 tbsps melted coconut oil

5 tbsps maple syrup

4 tbsps almond milk

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp vanilla (only pure vanilla, no imitation vanilla)

½ tsp salt

3 cups of oats

Copious amount of chocolate chips (I prefer the dark chocolate chips)

Whisk together all of the ingredients except the oats.  Then stir in oats and POUR in chocolate chips.  Put into large rectangular pan and refrigerate.  Eat twice a day until someone mentions that you may have an oat bar problem.  Continue to make and eat oat bars, but be sure to section off some as soon as they are set and hide them in small bags throughout the refrigerator.  I prefer the vegetable crisper for its low detection rate.   

I think that you will find that they are not the sweetest thing, or the most decadent.  They do not make you see better, smell better or get straight A’s.  They do taste good, they fill you up and they are better for you than any cookie you might buy. It is nice that in my mixed household of vegan/vegetarian/carnivore that everyone can eat them.   That is, if I share. 

Prom: Then and Now

Ahhh, prom.  That time when a young girl’s heart dreams up the perfect evening and a young man’s heart dreams of getting through prom and onto the after party.  Such a special time in the life of a teen and if you play your cards right, an adult as well!

Circa 1992

Look at that hair!  It has been curled, swooshed and sprayed to the absolute breaking point.  One can of Aqua Net nobly sacrificed itself to create that hair waterfall.  What is holding it up in back you ask?  It is the early 90’s; you know it HAS to be a banana clip.  Note the lips painted a peach to match the dress.  This may not be as apparent as the 82 layers of carefully applied Wet & Wild peach eye shadow it took to achieve that smoky pumpkin look.  If only the camera had panned down and you could see that the subject’s satin shoes had also been dyed to match.  Such a committed effort at being  monochromatic.  Take a moment to look at the subject’s hands and her stab at civility.  Yes, those are short, white gloves normally only seen on butlers and Mickey Mouse.  Our subject thought they complimented her pearl accessories and gave her just that right touch of class. 

Speaking of class, where is our subject off to prior to prom?  A garter party!  What, you ask?  (Recent Facebook research indicates that these parties are indigenous toBuffalo NY and may have only taken place in the early 90’s)  Here our subject will sit on a chair surrounded by her friends and their dates and an odd assortment of parents while her date reaches up under her dress and removes the garter she had especially made for this occasion.  It is respect he shows as he fumbles under her dress, over her nylon encased knee and removes that strip of peach satin and lace.  Said garter will then be worn on the outside of his tux jacket and later hung from a rearview mirror alongside the pine tree air freshener.  Surprisingly enough, this garter ritual in no way leads to later pregnancies and births in nine months.

While at prom, our subject and her date will dance to songs like “Whoomp! There It Is!” and “Rumpshaker”.  Forgive them if they look awkward; they are too young to drink and dances like “The Shopping Cart” and “The Lawn Mower” have not been invented.  Fall in love again all over as they dance to Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”.  Yes, it is a song about love failed but they are young and optimistic and her wailing gives them a long time to dance together.  What?!  Lights on and “Last Dance” playing already?  Too soon this magical evening has ended and our young subject must return home by midnight or turn into a grounded, surly teenager.

Circa now.

Being as lucky as she can be, here is our subject some years later getting to enjoy prom all over again!  She has aged well despite tanning with baby oil in her teens.  Why is she going to prom now?  Creepy, you may be thinking.  No, not creeper – chaperone!  Our subject is looking forward to chaperoning.  She thinks it will be fun to watch well-behaved, beautifully dressed teenagers enjoy prom for themselves.  Yes, this is her first time chaperoning!  How did you know?

Look at the wise choice our subject made for her dress!  No peach and lace this time.  This time it is a simple, black dress suitable for her role as wise adult.  No cleavage is shown and the black says "let me blend into the background."  Modesty, decorum, class.  Wait a minute!  That black might lend itself to funereal but that ruching screams "LOOK AT ME" and  "I work out!"  Oh, vanity.  And are those heels, actual heels, she is wearing?  Did she forget about the toe that forces her into comfortable/orthopedic shoes for daily wear?

She has learned some things from her last prom go around.  You will notice the absence of gloves and peach anything.  She is also not wearing a garter.  The only thing under her dress that is new is Shapewear.  What is that, you ask?  Shapewear is both magical and evil.  Magical as it takes any imperfection, let's say fat, from your midsection and deposits it elsewhere on the body, like under your collar bone or on top of one thigh.  Evil in that it is more constricting than any pair of nylons or Western jeans you have ever forced your body into.  Whew! she was heard to exclaim both getting that thing on and off.  

I am proud of our test subject.  She has learned that her thin, forty pieces of hair should be styled straight down and not pushed and prodded into skyscraper heights.  And that red lipstick?  She believes that the name on the bottom of the tube is "Hooker Red", but she wears it well so judge not.  

At prom, our subject made light chit chat and exchanged laughter and eyebrow raises with her colleagues.  She enjoyed seeing her favorites and others dressed up and playing nicely.  She could not see what was happening on the dance floor as it was a mob of bodies pressed into each other and moving rhythmically.  She was told this is grinding.  No, she did not enter the fray.  She did find it very hard to not dance over on the adult side though.  Once or twice her body may have been moving to the music despite her best attempts to stop it.  Luckily for her, she was mommed up and asked to hold various items for people.  This made her feel both loved and old and quelled the dancing in her feet.  

Where was her date, you ask?  Sidelined at home with a sick kid.  No, she is not mad, she cropped him out of the picture because he had on shorts with his suit jacket as he waited for his jeans to dry.  Pictures of that will be sold for $9.99 and supplies are limited, so order soon!

Ahhh, prom: definitely more fun as an adult even if the subject did not get to dance.  Who needs to dance at prom when you are lucky enough to  have impromptu dancing to A-ha's "Take On Me" on a Sunday morning with the love of your life? (yep, still hard to dance to.)