okay, so it won't be complete silence, but my middle daughter is off to camp this week and some peace is being looked forward to. as much as i love my girl, she can jabber quite too much - incessantly comes to mind as a description - and generally with no connection to anything you've been discussing when she decides to interrupt. the girl refuses to write her comments down to remember them all at one time so is telling us something every 5 minutes. yes, i do mean that literally. most of it doesn't mean much to us and i do try to listen, but by interruption #157 patience is a hard thing to find. nevermind that i tell her not to interrupt me when i'm writing, she absolutely must get whatever it is out of her head immediately or it will be forever lost. (or, according to her, make her head explode.)

and have i mentioned at all that she's now a teenager?

she's been hormonal for months now. i wish the whole female thing with her would just start and get it over with so we could start predicting when to duck each month. not that i'm sure that would solve the problem. heck, it might only make it worse.

i have to admit that i worry about jewel a bit as she's not as mature as most kids her age and lacks the social skills to make up for it (and refuses to listen to our advice on the matter). she's the kid, i'm sure, who was much like me at her age - the one kid in school who was so not with it and so desperately wanted to be. and i don't have the answers for her since i'm still not with it in any sense of the word. how do you help when you never found the answers yourself?

actually, i did eventually find my answer, but it won't work for my girl at the moment. she needs to learn that silence is okay - people together do not need to be talking all the time (she will talk just to talk - she's very uncomfortable with silence). she needs to learn to pay attention to the conversation when there is one and make her responses appropriate (asking to go to a jack-in-the-box when it wasn't on the restaurant list is not helpful). this is the girl i talked about going straight when you go right some time back. she does the same thing in conversations. just be yourself and to hell with everyone else will make this kid a very lonely girl.

but one of the reasons we're going to appreciate the peace is because of the fighting. she and shebop share a room and once shebop gets home from school you would think world war three was breaking out up there. shebop is home with the flu right now, so a week long break between these two is just what we all need. the one it's going to be tough for is taz. jewel helps with bath time and she's the one of the two older girls taz gets along with and is willing to listen to at least a little. so the silence created by her time away will be filled with the constant question of "where's jewel?" from him.

and knowing how shebop is, jewel's first moments home will be opened with an explosion of the ninth degree when she discovers shebop's inevitable excursions into her things.

tomorrow i will revel in the silence. i'll worry about the explosions on friday. there's only so much silence a mom can get in this house and this mom has learned to enjoy it when she can