I Don’t Remember My Phone Number. Can I Have Yours?

My innocent five-year-old (who is feeling 100 percent better; thank you all for your kind thoughts!) has been attending a pottery camp all week, trying her hand at sculpting and painting all sorts of things. Today she made a birdhouse. She also made a new friend of sorts.

When Madeline announced over dinner that some “silly boy asked for her phone number,” I nearly choked on my ants on the log. (Yes, I sometimes serve my kids peanut butter topped with raisin “ants” on celery sticks for dinner, especially when Daddy won’t be home. The fare wouldn’t make the cover of Gourmet magazine, but it’s satisfying all the same.) After my tongue pushed the peanut butter off the roof of my mouth and I managed to control the weird twitch in my left eye, I asked. “Did you give it to him?”

“No. I don’t even know our new number.”

Whew. How fortuitous that we’ve just moved.

“But even if I did know it, I wouldn’t give it to him,” she quickly added.

Now that’s my girl. Keep playing hard to get until you’re about, oh, I don’t know, 22 or so.

(Later it was revealed that the little player asked for every girls’ number in the camp class, including the teacher’s. “One girl gave him her Daddy’s number. You’re not supposed to do that.” Right again, my precious firstborn.)

*After I posted this it occurred to me that the title might seem a bit nebulous. I just started thinking about how odd it was that a boy had already asked for my five-year-old’s digits when I recall boys asking for my phone number twice in my entire life, and if my memory of this college night long ago serves me well, one of the times unfortunately involved a pick up line almost as bad as the title. The poor guy had had a few too many and somehow ended up trying to (dis)engage the one nearly sober girl in the entire bar.