Happy New Year

Just a little late. It's now officially January 3, and I haven't posted for a while. It's been a busy week with kids on vacation from school, but thankfully, they'll all be back at school tomorrow morning. I enjoyed having them home with me this past week, except for Middle Monkey. He spent three days on a church retreat. But the other two were here, more or less. The Monkey Prince and I went to a play downtown on Dec 28. We saw "Shakespeare in Hollywood" at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. Clever show. We enjoyed the day out together, I think. I do like spending time with him. In just four months he'll be 18, and at least by all laws of the land, will be responsible for himself. Maybe he'll not want to spend time with me anymore once he's a man. I'll be sad if that happens.

I'm trying to be the wonderful mom since the Monkey Prince finally brought a girlfriend around to meet the family, a nice young lady. The Princeling has always said I was too weird and evil to bring a girlfriend to visit, but I can't be that bad if he actually risked it. Or, she is very important to him. And I was nice. But I have to admit, I have some mixed feelings about my firstborn growing up. But I'm proud at the same time. He needs to be a grown up, and I need to let him be a grown up. I'm also tired of being the parent in control. I'm ready and he's ready to move on. One thing I'm happy about is that he's "old" by teenage dating standards. We have a no-dating-before-age-16 rule in our house. It seems positively prehistoric to other parents these days, but I stand by it. I was raised by immigrant grandparents and old school parents who had the same rules for me. It worked, so I don't see any reason to do otherwise. I hope the extra time he's had to think and mature will help him to continue in his usual good decision-making. Nice kid. Nice girlfriend.

At the moment, I'm enjoying just a little bit of a buzz from some very excellent wine we had leftover from a gathering we had yesterday. I just had to consume the last two and a half glasses left in the bottle! I mean, if I didn't, air would have gotten into the bottle and the lovely elixir would be "off". No. Can't have that happen! It's 12:09 in the morning, so I think I'll take advantage of the buzz and crawl off to bed. Now that my employment status has changed from statutory employee to part-time, I have to actually report to my computer at a specific time and complete specific tasks in a specific time frame. Sheesh. Just like a regular working person! I better get some shut-eye and wake up completely sober!

Happy New Year!