So Justin had a GIRL over tonight.
Well, okay, a GIRL and her brother; we were watching the kids while their (single) mom took probably her third night off in the last decade.
But this GIRL is one of the main girls in the Boy’s preadolescent existence — which is cool, because the GIRL is very cool and honestly if he had any sense at all he’d hang out with her much more than the other idiot children that follow him around at the Saturday Night pre-teen hangout, my opinion.
Their mom is, understandably, very strict about what her kids can and can’t do, and dating is WAY off the list for her daughter, so hanging out with Justin and watching Lord of the Rings with him (which she hasn’t been allowed to see yet and yesssss we asked permission first) was a pretty big deal.
We barbecued, and I explained to the eight year old boy how the grill worked: he and I did manly things, played with fire, cooked burgers and then played video games all night (Justin was of course ignoring me entirely while he and the GIRL (and Jackie) watched LotR. It was all very supervised and hopefully pretty fun.
We even sort of finagled taking the GIRL along to the theatre when we take Justin to see Two Towers, because the GIRL is gah-gah over LotR (Did I mention that she’s cool and he’s an idiot not to hang out with her more?) That’s very like a date, albeit a double date with two lame old people, which was a strict no-no until tonight.
Best compliment you could get came at the end of the night when their mom came to pick them up. Somehow the subject of relative ages came up and it became clear that I was a decade younger than their mom and that Jackie was even younger.
“So that’s why you’re so much cooler,” Jackie heard the GIRL whisper under her breath.
Heh.
It’s one of those personal goals of mine: be ‘the cool parents’ to your kid’s friends WITHOUT being ‘those useless rat bastards’ to all your kid’s friend’s parents. My folks made it look easy.
