Pig and I are entering a world of which we are quite unsure: The world of having a tween daughter. At least he's unsure. I used to teach kidlets around this age, so I feel a little bit more comfortable with certain aspects of it, although my insider knowledge makes me a bit more leery of things, too. Some of the stories I heard while teaching were enough to make my hair stand on end, and that was before I had a daughter of my own about whom I would worry.
Horse's Pokemon friend asked if she could come over for another day of epic gaming today. This was a boy who was in her class last year, and they have gotten together before so he could cheat at cards...erm...I mean so they could have Pokemon battles. The time was agreed upon for 11:30AM, and Horse was invited to stay for lunch. I was in the middle of baking chocolate chip cookies at the time of her departure, so Pig drove her over to her friend's house. I wish I had been the one to take her instead. She would not have gone into their house at all.
Now let me first state that to the best of my knowledge, Horse and her friend had a grand time, enjoyed their pizza lunch (and the homemade chocolate chip cookies I sent with her for dessert), and everyone was safe and sound the whole time she was there.
The paranoid mother in me wants to smack my husband upside the head for dropping her off at a boy's house when the only adult in charge is the boy's father, who was still in his robe after just getting out of the shower. You don't leave a nine-year-old girl alone in a house with an adult male you barely know and who is not fully dressed. I do not care how secure you believe the situation is. You don't do it. Yes, I met the boy's father on a previous occasion. Chatting with someone briefly does not put them into my "trust them implicitly" category. I do not consider that to be a safe and secure situation, especially for a little girl who is still incredibly naive about members of the opposite sex.
That brings me to the following mental train-of-thought: How supervised were Horse and her friend at that house? How innocent and naive is the little boy? Were the two of them simply involved in card games and everything was on the up and up, or was anything more sordid taking place? From what I have seen of this boy on previous occasions, he is just as innocent as my daughter is, but at this age, that is possible to change at the drop of a hat. If the only person keeping an eye on them was someone woefully underdressed, were they really supervised properly? One would assume that adult had to at least go and put some clothes on properly while the kidlets were off playing. I am not saying that a grown-up had to be hovering over them, and even at playdates here I do not do that, but putting multiple closed doors between the adults and children does not strike me as a wise move.
I am thinking that any get-togethers with this child are going to have to take place at our house from now on. At a bare minimum, we can guarantee that there will be no underdressed adults here. It is also nearly impossible for the two kidlets to be left alone in any given room in our house. Our house is just that small.
If I am this paranoid already, I am really not sure how I will survive my daughter entering the dating years. We might have to postpone them until she is thirty. Think she'll go along with that? Yeah, me neither.
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