Teenagers...

Teenagers are great. Everyone should run out and buy one right now.

How else do you get your own sitcom, starring yourself, a younger verson of yourself, a person who morphs from being your boyfriend to being eerily like your father and back again (really freaky), with a script made up of every boring cliched truism your mother ever threw at you?

How else do they (truisms) mysteriously reappear in your life if not in the guise of your own pearls of wisdom to a teenager?

It's true then. Just when you think you are finally free of your mother's voice in your head, you wake up and it's coming out of your mouth!

Teenagers are different in every generation, but they are all the same.

Teenagers...

Go through every towel in the house, including the bath mat (what does she DO with the bath mat?) during obligatory daily teenage bathroom marathons, and then store them in balled piles on the floor in their room for you to find.

Create an obstacle course using the rest of their clothes, bags, school books and other deitrus, in order to make rescuing the towels that much more exciting.

Love to cook drippy foods including grilled cheese, cottage cheese, grated cheese, milk, eggs, or melted chocolate several times a day.

Hate to clean up cheese in any of its forms.

Don't appear to eat anything; nonetheless, when they're around the fridge is completely emptied of food every four days.

Need you to go job-hunting in the shopping mall with them on Saturday, even if you'd rather chew your own arm off than go to a shopping mall on a Saturday.

Only job hunt in all the stores that sell all the stuff that they like and not in the stores that are actually looking for staff.

Turn the puppy eyes on full blast when you brush pass the sale rack in the job hunting stores.

Get really annoyed when you don't remember their friends' names, even though you have never met any of these people, because they all live on planet MSN.

Spend ALL DAY and ALL NIGHT on MSN with their legions of mysterious friends. (At least it's cheaper than the phone).

Decide that your blog name for them is stupid and insist on picking their own (Brooke).

Think there's nothing wrong with playing the same song eleventy million times in one day, particularly when it's Eminem and they know dad HATES Eminem.

Laugh when dad's pain is being broadcast through small, strangled little cries of despair at the Eminemness of the world.

Fiddle/ brush/ cut/ dye their hair obsessively and don't mind leaving all the deitrus on the bathroom floor, sink, shelves for you to admire.

And dispose of if you feel the urge.

Wear clogs to school in the snow when there's a perfectly nice pair of suede fur-lined boots on offer.

Wear tee-shirts to school in the snow when there's a wardrobe full of perfectly nice sweaters to choose from.

Laugh till they puke when you say they should borrow one of your hats to wear to school.

Laugh till they puke when you say that about any of your clothes.

Watch the same episode of Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Friends over and over again without appearing to notice the similarity.

Spend most of the day lying on the sofa wrapped in their sooky blanket watching television.

HOW, HOW, HOW is it possible for them to do that and trash the house at the same time? I can't remember how I did that part!

Ah teenagers.... it's all coming back to me now.... those years of 'torture': i.e. being waited on hand and foot by harassed parents who were mutedly furious at my laziness and messiness, but so relieved I was a) alive, b) at home, c) not a crack hoe on the streets of Dublin, that they put up with the mess and the noise.

At least I am not dealing with my attitude to authority from that time.

And now, finally, I get why I always got to sleep in on the weekends...

The best thing about teenagers is that on Saturday and Sunday mornings, they sleep. And Sleep. And Sleep. And Sleep.

We creep around to make sure the sleeping happens for as long as possible.

No MSN, no Eminem, access to the bathroom, a clean kitchen, tv off.....

Himself is blissfully making strawberry pancakes, I'm finishing off this and then we're planning a forest hike for later. Sleeping is good. Long hikes in the forest are conducive to sleep. Therefore, a hiking we will go today!!!