"Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanagable." ~ Plato

I've gone crazy.  That's it.  It must be.  Why else would I agree to let the Little Man invite a group of 13 year old boys over to spend the night this weekend?  I have completely and totally lost my mind.  It's the only reasonable explanation.  I have my hands full with the one I usually have around the house.  Boys of this age are a mystery to me.  Boys of any age, if I'm being completely honest. 

I just don't have the experience with them to have much insight into how those minds of theirs work.  I blame my parents.  They only had girls.  Three of us.  I am the oldest.  You could practically feel the estrogen in the air when you walked into our home.  Therefore I had no real reason to learn much about boys. 

As I grew up and came into contact with boys I went through stages:  friends, annoyed, interested, etc.  But figuring out the real life day to day workings of their brains never entered the picture.  By the time I cared about what or how they thought, they had passed the "Boy" stage.  At least as much as any of them ever really do.

I knew boys and girls were different.  I had no idea how different. It's probably a good thing the Princess was the first born.  A girl I could understand for the most part.  I knew about girls.  But from the time the Little Man was very young he has continually amused, baffled, and intrigued me. 

Since he was a tiny boy he was a bundle of energy.  He would exhaust me with his constant state of motion.  His non-stop curiosity.  He managed to get into things and situations that never in a million years would have occurred to me.  I can't begin to count the number of times he would do something which led me to wonder "What on earth was he thinking?"  I blame most of my gray hairs on him and his antics. 

Would I trade one second of it?  Not a chance.  I feel blessed to have had the experience of raising a boy.  It has been an exhausting, exciting, hilarious journey so far.  And as he enters into his teen years I'm looking forward to seeing what sort of man he will become.  I've just stopped hoping to figure him out.

As James Thurber said - "Boys are beyond the range of any body's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years."