Just when I'm About to Throw in the Towel....

.... he makes me laugh.

William is a wonderful person but a pretty typical teenager. In other words, he's often driving me crazy. And this often surprises me. It shouldn't. But for some reason I cling to the illusion that being the fifth child he should know better. He should know the spiel by now, know what works, what drives his parents crazy, what should be avoided, what is useful and mature and what is certain to get him in trouble. I mean, after all, it's the same old stuff his siblings tried and tried and tried before him. Surprising (to no one but me I'm sure), he was off picking daisies or something when all that other teen angst was going on in our house. I've even confronted him about this peculiar and futile insistence he has to run through all the same tricks as his siblings and he just looks at me like he has know idea what I'm talking about! And in my more objective moments, I realize he truly doesn't have a clue. Those teenagers weren't driving him, their favorite little brother, crazy. They were saving it all up for hubby and me. (and an occasional teacher or two.) It seems so unfair that he has to reinvent the teenage wheel.

But every day, just when I think only masochists willingly live with their progeny past the age of ten or eleven....

he makes me laugh. A lot.

Tonight we were watching American Idol and William says:

"You know that thing you can do with fortune cookies, where you add "in bed." to the end of the fortune to make it funny? Well, you can do that with the Idol judge's comments too."

Later a commercial came on advertising a Bible CD. The announcer assured us that it was an exact reproduction of the King James Version, word for word. William commented:

"Word for word? Like, what are they going to do - offer a Reader's Digest version? Or do they mean they haven't left out any words. Do other offers randomly remove words from their versions? Like, "And God said "Let there be....." Let there be WHAT? They left out a WORD! Oh no! What did God say!?"

When my kids were little and were driving me crazy, and I was, perhaps, theoretically, about to scream into their impish, adorable, startled, sometimes even chagrined faces, sometimes just that, their face, was enough to dam whatever was going to come out of my mouth and instead I'd shake my finger at one of them and tell him/her - "It's a good thing you're cute!"

Nowadays I say that one to my grandkids. I've sort of adapted the line for William. I don't say it outloud to him, but I think it - I'ts a good thing he's so funny!