We are walking out the door, already five or ten minutes late to Lego League.
“Honey, you didn’t brush your hair.”
“I knew you were going to say that,” he grumbles and stomps back into the house. Yet I know that if we arrived at school with his hair sticking up all over the place, he might not walk in. And I would be blamed.
“Don’t forget your soccer uniform.” I had said that too this morning and earned a dramatic eye-roll, made more effective by his dark, expressive eye brows.
“How many times are you going to remind me?”
Admittedly, I had reminded him at least three times last night. “Until it’s in your backpack?”
Most of the time, he feels badly after such interchanges. Today, he climbed back into the car to give me a hug. Some nights he calls out in the dark, “Mom!” for a second chance at goodnight.
It’s like watching the child and teenager in him battle for power the week before he turns 13.
