Not to be rude, but sometimes God has a strange sense of humor

They say great minds think alike, but I never realized how annoying that can be until recently.

My middle child/son/7th grader and I are practically twins. We both cough uncontrollably when we eat mango salsa. We both walk around the house with Kleenex stuffed up our nose when we have a cold. We both wonder if Santa Claus is related to Jesus and if Pokemon can beat up Satan? His jokes crack me up, my jokes crack him up . . . well, his jokes crack me up anyway.

We're almost like two peas in a pod.

But he's really starting to get on my nerves.

He's just way so meticulous about his school work . . . for his age . . . and his gender.

I mean, dude, go get yourself an obsession or pick up a bad habit, (besides asking me how to spell cellulose and infrastructure).

Earlier this week I called home from Costco. He picked up.

"How was school today?" I asked.

"Mom, how do you spell apparatus?"

5 minutes later he called back.

"Mom, how do you spell penetrable?"

"p-a-i-n-t-b-a-l-l," I replied.

(That was one of my jokes that didn't crack him up.)

"Son, don't you want to go shoot air-soft guns with your friends or something?"

I got the same pre-fab answer I always get: "Hello! Got HOMEWORK!"

It's really the editing that's killing me. You know things are bad when your son is editing your editing.

I've been on this planet for 41 years and 11 years of that have been dedicated to teaching students how to edit.

But what do I know?

One thing I do know is I've never had a student learn as quickly and precisely and irksomely (not a word, I know, he told me) as my own 7th grader.

This week it's been his science project outline. This is the third morning he re-printed that blasted outline. After the first edit he asked me if I would take a looksie over it. I did and I added 3 or 4 words to clarify why he was testing the myth that phosphoric acid in Coke would eat through a nail in 4 days. The next morning he rolled out of bed and didn't even open his eyes before he opened his mouth.

"No mom, you can't put a conclusion in an outline." And then he proceded to change it back and print it again.

"Uhhhhh . . . do you know who I am?" I said.

So the next edit I looked over reluctantly. He was sitting on the couch within view of the computer, but he was reading a book. He glanced up casually and said, "No mom, not to, it's with."

"Huh?"

"It say's there are a lot of different theories that say what Coke can do to phosphoric acid, but it should say with phosphoric acid."

Good grief! He changed a preposition from 4 feet away and . . . gulp . . . he was right?

Last night he had to pay me $1 to glance over the paper one last time and I waited until he was in bed before I even opened the file. As soon as my fingers touched the keyboard I heard a cry from his bedroom.

"No mom! That's dangling the participles!"

Is it bad that I wanted to scratch his eagle eyes out?

(Or did I already use that closing line?)

Okay, we'll go with this one:

Not to be rude, but sometimes God has a strange sense of humor.