Kids Today ...

We’ve come so far as a society with regard to caring for our children and providing for them a safe environment in which to grow up. You may hear someone from an older generation bemoan the fact that, for example, more kids wear bike helmets these days, as if safety precautions are somehow robbing them of a crucial element of childhood, but I think that the worry that we have as parents, as long as it isn’t taken to neurotic extremes, is generally a not-unhealthy thing. Had it occurred to someone 35 years ago that letting children ride in the rearward-facing back seat of a station wagon for 400 miles with the window down and exhaust fumes being sucked in might not be the best thing ever, well, maybe I’d be able to grasp such concepts as imaginary numbers, proper usage of who/whom, and the icing rule.

So given the current culture of (perhaps over) protecting our kids, what the hell kind of parents would let a 15-year-old girl go off to San Francisco unsupervised for a week with three of her friends? My god, do we not even have Social Services anymore?

Well, though it perhaps puts off the “Parents Of The Year” award for the EMDAMOTLA* and me for a while, The Live Acorn has been out and about in the City By The Bay since last Wednesday. I asked very nicely if she would be sure to call or at least text me twice a day just so that I could sleep at night, and that went well for the first couple of days. Since then, our phone conversations have tapered off and can be summarized thusly:

Dad, I have a blister on my finger that’s surrounded by a red ring and it’s swelling up. The internet says I’ve been bitten by a brown recluse.

And

Dad, I dyed my hair.

The spider conversation was fairly amusing … listening to a teen-aged girl trying to be nonchalant as she’s asking what actually happens in cases of necrotic arachnidism and if she’s going to die is a bit comical. As for the hair … well, she described her new color as “auburn,” which I assume means that she looks something like Milla Jojovich in The 5th Element.

I did buy her a journal before she left and asked that she write some thoughts and notes about the goings-on of each day. It’s not like she does anything I ask anyway, but with any luck, we’ll have our first Guest Blogger EVAH here within the week, regaling us with sordid tales of the dark underbelly of The Golden Gate City stories about how she was asleep by 9:30 every night.

Like I really want to know.

* Ex-Mrs.-Dead-Acorn-Mother-Of-The-Live-Acorn