So I brought my 10-year-old son to a high school football game the other night. Jackie Tangent/sidebar: My son is becoming a tween, or in between elementary and teen years. (This is the Urban Dictionary definition of Tween: An age set overlapping preteens, ‘tween 8 and 14. A tween desperately wants to be a teen, but isn’t about to stop being a kid.) My husband was at home with our daughter, so it was just the two of us. The stadium was swarming with high school kids, parents and a few hundred tweens. I felt at first like it was the first day of school. I hadn’t seen that many Uugs paired with sweatshirts and jeans in one place. I realized I had forgotten to wear lip gloss and suddenly felt a blemish forming on my nose. I sat down next to some parents I knew from my son’s football team and although I tried desperately to focus on the game, it was all I could do to not have a panic attack at the sheer essence of teenager-mania that surrounded me. I know it’s coming. It may be five years away, but it’s coming. And I can’t help but enjoy this blissful state of denial a little longer. My mother-in-law tells me the teenage years are the worst. She had to deal with the hippy days and to this day blames the Beatles for the troubles kids got in back then. I don’t know what’s worse – yesterday’s hippies or today’s technology. I felt a sense of relief when my son walked up to me, without a cell phone, asking me if he could please have a hot chocolate. He called me mom in front of his friend. In public. And he wanted a hot chocolate. With whipped cream. I still have him for a little while longer.