First Date: Meeting the Parents

10-year-old daughter #2 has her first date this weekend. She and the Man of Her Dreams have been an item for a couple of weeks now, and tomorrow's pre-teen tryst is their special Valentine's Day event.

But tonight is the prequel to the Big Event. . . . we meet the parents, and here's how I anticipate the evening (at CiCi's Pizza by the way) going down: Them (those very strange people we don't know) and Us (well, you know us). . .



When daughter #1 was in fifth grade, she had boyfriends, but they never talked on the phone or saw each other outside of school. They were just 'going together.' We'd ask how she knew they were going together, and she'd say, 'We just know.'

This non-contact courting continued through middle school and even began to include just as confounding break-ups. 'How do you know he's breaking up with you? We're still not sure how you knew you were going out.'

'A friend of his told a friend of mine who told me that he was thinking about . . .' and the 'about' could've been pizza, football or spitting on the sidewalk. When she finally started 'dating,' we really didn't know because she and a group of her friends would meet him and a group of his friends at the movies.

But, more importantly, we didn't meet any parents until several boyfriends later during daughter #1's senior year, and that's when we ran into them at a nearby bar.

Daughter #1 and the Man of Her Dreams have been planning this date and pre-event parents' meeting for the last two weeks (I can hear her upstairs now talking to a friend on the phone about what she should wear). She came home from school yesterday, Valentine's Day, with an armful of, as she described, 'a foot and a half tall teddy bear, a big balloon and chocolate . . . from Brazil.'

This is developing into a true courtship. Daughter #2 says that Man of Her Dreams tells her that he loves her every day. She also says that his life has changed since he's been seeing her . . . his friends think he's REALLY cool now (daughter #2 can never be faulted for her lack of confidence).

And daughter #2 did make it a point to call daughter #1, who's currently boyfriend-less (yessssss!), to let her know all about her new 'honey.'

So, tonight at the all-you-can-eat pizza buffet, we get to meet 'them.' And I get to talk to kid whose teddy bears, balloons, Brazilian chocolate and daily 'I love you' are making me look real bad.