Like, meet Tweenie!

There is another character in these stories. My daughter is 7 going on 15. So I feel justified in dubbing her "Tweenie".

She recently went from being my sweet and innocent baby girl to savvy preteen in about 4 seconds. She knows how to navigate through most websites without any help, beats me at "Memory" every time, and now refuses to give kisses or say she loves us (mom and dad). Yup, it's confirmed--she's growing up.

She has a very important person in her life, BFF (I am so out of touch that I had to look up that term. For the uninitiated, this means "best friend forever"). Tweenie and BFF spend every possible moment together. Boys not allowed.

Of course Rascal couldn't let this little detail stop him. After being sent away for the hundredth time, he adopted a new strategy--he decided to shmooze BFF. Whenever she comes over he tries to hug and kiss her. Unfortunately for him, he hasn't figured out that he's only making things worse. Apparantly he doesn't know what "Ewwwwww!" means.

Recently Tweenie was waiting for BFF to come over and had been waiting for "like, hours mom!" when the doorbell rang. She began to inhale and jump up and down. I watched her suck the air from the room for at least 30 seconds, then, since she was still in gaga mode, I figured someone should answer the door.

Later, BFF was literally walking up the driveway to go home, and Tweenie already wanted to call her. Because it's been sooooo long already.

Another reason I know she's growing up is her new vocabulary. For starters, every sentence must have the word "like" liberally sprinkled throughout. Yesterday she was telling me about something that happened at school, and it went something like: "so then Ms. Moore, like, she, like, told us that if we, like, collected enough, like, cans for the the, like, food drive our class would, like, y'know, like, um, like, win."

I told her that from now on she needs to think about what she wants to tell me and then say it in a more fluent fashion. I tried to ask her what her class would in fact win, but she couldn't say. Mainly because she was tripping over "like".

She finds my advice on this subject, like, totally lame.