A Weird Life

Jack's new thing is that he wants to call Tom every night as we're driving home. But he doesn't want me to dial it, he wants to do it himself. So I pass the phone back to him and list Tom's digits and then he pushes a wrong button and passes the phone up to me, I delete the wrong number and pass it back to him. Finally he gets the right number in the right order and waits for Tom to answer. When Tom doesn't answer, I have to remind him that he will leave a message and that he needs to wait for the beep and then begin talking. It takes a second for him to get the hang of it but he leaves a sweet message, neglects to say goodbye but that's ok.

Then suddenly Dean decides he needs to call Tom, too. I should have known. I tell him we can't, I need to concentrate on driving and it's too hard to see the buttons and we haven't really talked about leaving messages. Dean got upset because it isn't fair that Jack knows how to leave text messages and he can't.

I know. It was really sweet.

As luck would have it, we were pulling into the driveway as this drama was unfolding and, even luckier, Tom was home. Jack went bounding over to him to tell him that he left a message for him and I took the opportunity to pull Dean into the front seat for a little one on one. I explained that Jack wasn't text messaging but it didn't seem to mollify him. Then I was struck by genius. I said to him, "Did you know when I was a little girl we only had one phone and it had to be attached to the wall with a cord or it didn't work?" His eyes grew, his mouth popped open and he said, "No WAY!"

"YEAH!", said I. "And", I continued, "we only had 13 channels on the television."

I didn't tell him about the part where we had to change those channels with pliers. Figured that would require too much explanation. Heck, I still haven't told him that we didn't have a remote control.

As we climbed out of the car he said to me, "Mom, you've really had a weird life."

So true son, so true.