The Seventh Grade Squeeze

My oldest son, Jacob, will be starting 7th grade in just a few weeks. In my efforts to wrap my head around the whole Where Did The Time Go concept, I have been feeling a little nostalgic for my 7th grade year. That was a fun year, and I hate to say it,  but given the chance, I might would just do it all over again (this time with contacts instead of the my old goofy pink glasses with lenses the size of salad plates).

So it's probably obvious (what with the glasses and all) that I was a pretty big dork in 7th grade, but it really didn't matter because I had a great circle of friends and in our own ways, we were all a little dorky, right? Anyway, that was the year, that I gained some independence in that I was allowed for the first time to hang out with my friends unchaperoned at the mall.

I spent a lot of free time with my friends at the mall trying on clothes, eating pizza, ogling boys, and giggling. One of our favorite stops at the mall, was this store that had fun trendy clothes for teens. The only problem was that this store's fitting rooms did not have doors or curtains on the stalls. At 12, this was not a shopping deal breaker, but now, with my aging postpartum duct taped body, fuhgeddaboudit. One afternoon while shopping there with my friends, I decided to try on one of those sexy tight dresses intended for a girl much older than 12. I knew there was no way on God's green earth that my mother was ever going to let me wear it because she had this crazy rule that I was not allowed to dress like a hooker. Go figure. Hanging out with my girls, I thought I would just try on the dress for poops and giggles. I'm sure at the time I thought it made me look every bit of 16, because really isn't 16 the age all 12 year old girls aspire to be. So I had my fun slipping into the red dress but when I decided  it was time to take off the dress...well that's when the real fun started. This dress was a pullover style with no buttons or zippers and I think it had the innate ability to get tighter while being worn. I pulled the dress up over my hips, my waist, my small chest, but then when I got it to my shoulders with my crossed arms and head hidden inside the dress, it stopped moving. It just wouldn't budge in either direction. So there I was standing in the doorless stall of the dressing room stuck in this dress with my bra and undies on display for all those in the fitting room to see. When I realized that I could neither pull the dress up over my head nor back down over my body, I called for my friends to help me. By this time, we were all laughing so hard that our bodies were too weak to pull the dress and then all of a sudden, I had to pee. So there I was with the not so sexy red dress stuck over my head, shoulders, and arms completely encasing me like a sausage, laughing so hard I'm crying, all the while doing the pee pee dance and praying that the store manager wouldn't come in and find me this way. My friends somehow managed to free me from the dress, I threw on my clothes and made it to the restroom without leaving a yellow trail. Four kids later, I can't say the outcome would be the same.

Life has a funny way of coming full circle and now I'm looking forward to see what adventures lay before Jacob this year. I pray that he has the kind of good friends that will help him out of a tight situation if need be, and I hope that his 7th grade year will be so memorable that he'd like to live it all over again.