This is Not a Parenting Blog

This is not a parenting blog. This is not...

Really. I promise.

But sometimes the little everyday moments are so simultaneously dismaying and entertaining that they call out to be shared.

My daughter is 11, and she often goes to my parents' house after school. It's not unusual for friends to visit her or call her there. Today, however, I was working from home and so she wasn't there.

About half an hour after school got out, my mother called and asked, without preamble, to talk to my daughter. I told her she was in the shower and she said, "Well, there's this little boy at my door..." I took the phone into the bathroom and put it on speaker. Turned out the boy had come to my mother's door hoping to find my daughter in order to ask her where another girl lived.

My mother had offered him our phone number, and he'd asked to use her phone.

So she was calling, with this boy she'd never seen before in her kitchen, looking for my daughter's friend's address...which my daughter didn't know.

"Just give him her cell," my daughter said. My mother said okay.

Um. Wait. "Mom, do you HAVE her cell?"

And she said, "I have it written down somewhere." Then she hung up to let the boy use her phone to call my daughter's friend's cell and find out where she lived--but not before she'd plucked our phone number back out of the boy's hand and said, "I'll just take this back in case she doesn't want you to have it."

A short time later, she called back. She said the girl's voicemail had been full, so she'd described to him as best she could where the girl lived. My daughter said, "Ummmm...she's going to kill you."

And then my mother said, "Anyway, I just called to say that whoever this boy is, he's much cuter than the one who came over yesterday."

Now that I think about it, I'm not at all sure whether this is a parenting story or a story about parents.