Yesterday, in a successful attempt to avoid all things Super Bowl, I went bowling and to McDonalds with my cousins. These particular cousins belong to my uncle who is the Fun Uncle. Everyone has one of these, I think — the guy who used to pick his nose to fart in front of you when you were little, just to get a laugh.
So I take the three kids, ages 7, 10 and 12, to the bowling alley. The youngest gives unearned love and admiration to anyone, especially any girl who might own make-up or a curling iron she can use. The other two gave me the skepticism that is typical of any tween. We played one game of Bumper Bowl in an alley with really boom-boom bumpers and it turns out I sucked.
While we played, there was Queen and Garth Brooks blaring the whole time. Of course, I sang along. And OHMIGOD apparently that was pretty damn embarrassing because the old two kids looked like they wanted to crawl under a rock the whole time. (The youngest said she thought I was a good singer (which I am not) but I did French braid her hair later so I am pretty sure her opinion was biased.)
And this I discovered why parents and adults embarrass kids. It is not, as I always thought, because they are too dumb to know what they are doing is lame. It turns out, they do it because it is FUN.
