Here There Be Monsters!

The past twelve months have seen significant changes in my daughter, who is currently approaching 15 with all the caution and restraint of Michael Schumacher in a go-kart race.
Her physical development has brought with it a two-headed beast that now fills our house – ‘self awareness and boy-awareness’.

She now spends two hours a day in the bathroom, putting on make up and experimenting with clothes and hair while MSN'ing on webcam with her friends and listening to the continual chirruping of her phone receiving text messages while her iPod speakers blare out something I’m surprised to find I actually like!

She still gets A’s in every subject at school and spends another two hours a day with her nose in a novel, so I can’t complain too much. Her appetite for books is enormous; she can devour a novel a week and I’m pleased to note that they are not all chick-lit or Harry Potter.

Right now she’s on holiday in Costa Rica, visiting friends. This is something she’s done before but in the past, her time away has been punctuated with teary phone calls every other night and vows never to leave us again.

This year it took a week before she made her first call.

And Costa Rica has changed, too, apparently! Previously she regaled us with stories of her visits to beaches, of rain forest treks and playing with her younger relatives. This year she’s been to a beach that was full of hot surfer dudes, sat in the warm volcanic springs at Arenal, where the waiter was ‘gorgeous’ and went to a christening where there were no hot guys at all. Boo!

Yes, I know, we were all 15 once. But when I think back, to some of the things I got up to at 15 and more importantly, the things I was allowed to get away with… well, I try not to think about it.

(For the record, I’d like to say sorry to Mr. Shearing. I now know exactly why you used to give me death stares and pace the living room until I brought your little girl home. I know it’s no consolation but I now share your pain.)

Anyway, after reading this morning’s email bulletin from my "little girl" and trying to work out if “a cross between Josh Duhmel and Ryan Reynolds” is a good thing or a bad thing, I found myself giggling at a news story on the internet. My wife stopped to see what was so funny and this was the picture that caught my eye:





Any my wife’s response?

“She’s not getting older, Mike. You’re regressing!”

She’s wrong though. I’ve always been a kid.