What kids call adults.

Grownups miss out on all the good stuff. No more cartoons on Saturday mornings. No more playing on the Slip N' Slide in the summer. No more digging in the Lucky Charms box for the prize. No more reading comic books under the covers with a flashlight. No more cookies baked by your grandmother. No more Santa Claus or Easter Bunny.

Growing up sucks.

What kids call adults. Grownups get to do all the good stuff. They can drive cars. They get to eat as much candy as they want. They can stay up all night. They don't have to go to school. They don't have anybody telling them what to do. They can buy themselves cool toys. Being a kid sucks.

John Lithgow has a great song called "Big Kids Scare the Heck Out of Me". This was certainly true for me: big kids were always hanging around behind the 7-11, smoking, or worse, drinking beer at the playground and flipping the swings over the swingset. This made it impossible to use the swings the next day. I wondered if I would ever be scary like that.

But even more mysterious was the world of grownups. They seemed to have an infinite amount of cool stuff. As I got older and became a scary, clove-cigarette-smoking, beer swilling, swing-flipping teenager, I wondered when I would finally feel like a real grownup.

Would it be when I had my own keys on a keyring? A wallet with money in it? When I left home and lived on my own? When I had credit cards? A car? As I achieved each real grownup milestone, I felt a secret thrill of adrenalin, like a spy sneaking through another layer of security into some heavily guarded military base.

Am I there yet? I have a baby, and all the above possessions and encumberments. Yet I still feel like a spy, an imposter. Probably because I don't have those baby teeth strung on a necklace yet.

It does add strangely to my enjoyment of life that I get all happy doing something as simple as getting in my truck and driving to the grocery store. It feels like I am getting away with something that I should not really be allowed to do.

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