I guess I should thank my kid for acting like a smart-ass teen simmering in a vat of sarcasm for the last 8 or so years, but it still is super startling to me that he is officially a teenager as of today.
For as much as we butt heads & word-snipe at each other, I’d like to think that we have a tight relationship and he hasn’t reached that point yet where he’s ashamed to be seen with me and Henry (I just verified this with him right now). It’s been a wild 13 years but wow, you guys, he’s really grown into such a cool homie.
He sent me this text ^^^ yesterday – like, how fucking sweet, amirite?! Granted the present was a load of banana bread that the Teen Center ringleader made, but still! He said he was originally going to give me the loaf that he had already taken a chunk out of, but then decided to give me the full loaf instead. WOW, SUCH GENEROSITY.
Everyone at work always wishes me a Happy C-Section Incision Anniversary on this day because it’s wildly known that I am super neurotic about my phantom incision pain. IT IS REAL AND I HAVE IT.
I was mad that he didn’t even have the decency to dry his dumb-ass 1970s John Ritter hair.
(As I type this, Chooch randomly has the 1980s Music Choice channel on TV and “Spring Love” by Stevie B is on but he keeps having the audacity to TALK OVER IT so I yelled, “I don’t care if it’s still your birthday, I’m trying to listen to this song so STFU!” and he murmured “Wow.”)
What else can I tell you about 13-year-old Chooch…he still loves dogs and asked every dog-walker we pass if he can pet their dog. He is desperate to get a job because he wants to build a gaming computer so he hoards every cent he gets. He loves the lottery (Henry played his birthdate for him and Chooch screamed I HAVE TO CHECK THE NUMBERS earlier tonight like a fucking 80-year-old). He still gets along better with adults. He calls everyone a dingo. He is super independent – during his spring break, he and his friend Haojie rode their bikes to one of the malls six miles away and let me tell you, I was a nervous wreck but at the same time I was like YOU DO YOU CHOOCH because I never would have thought about leaving my neighborhood when I was 13!
However, he’s also as dense as a loaf of fucking potato bread because when they decided to take the trolley home from the mall, he couldn’t find the trolley station and I was like it’s in the giant parking garage past Eat n Park, so he sent me a screenshot of a map of the area and asked me to DRAW IT?! Nate heard me bitching about this at work and came out of his office holding up the satellite view on his phone and said, “YOU MEAN THIS PARKING GARAGE, ERIN? THIS SIX-STORY PARKING GARAGE IN THE MALL PARKING LOT?” I mean, if he couldn’t see that, perhaps he shouldn’t be riding his bike miles away from home?
Anyway, they eventually found the fucking thing and I told him not once, not twice, not thrice, BUT FOUR TIMES to make sure they took the red line.
They took the blue line.
“Don’t worry,” he texted. “The driver told us what to do.”
They actually made it home, somehow.
Oh, another thing about him is that he is really charitable, like he’ll buy his friends drinks from CVS or give a homeless person a buck, but god forbid don’t ask him for one of his French fries. We had a HUGE fight over this last week which resulted in me shrieking about how I shared my body with FETUS-HIM for nine months and then spoonfed his pathetic baby-ass for however-the-fuck long but he won’t give me one fucking fry?!
He gave me two after that.
We walked to Scoops for some birthday ice cream after dinner, and I realized that this might have been the first year we didn’t get him a cake?! Is that weird? Do I get some sort of parental penalty for that oversight? Maybe I can buy him a Hostess cake from a gas station on the way to King’s Island on Saturday, or a cake pop from Starbucks? I don’t even think he cares. He got to have a sopapilla at his birthday dinner and I’m pretty sure he prefers that over cake.
I can’t wait to have patbingsu on my birthday….in Korea, hahahaha, whaddup, Chooch?!?
Anyway, here’s to thirteen happy years with my little BABY-WABY and also 13 years of having a battle-scarred, incision-twingey body thanks to my little BABY-WABY. I hope we’re always close and that when he’s an adult and I’m dead or whatever, he thinks back on his childhood fondly and tells his kids stories about how his mom was so fucking super cool and SACRIFICED HER ABILITY TO COMFORTABLY WEAR A CROP-TOP EVER AGAIN. I mean, I hope he tells them about how his parents took him everywhere and how their friends treated him like he was their friend too and how his mom was the cooler one but the dad was alright too.
(Ugh now Taylor Dayne’s “Love Will Lead You Back” is on this stupid music channel and I might be crying.)