Well at least Jax isn't the only one crapping his pants.......

Alright, take a trip with me. Let's go way back to the year 2004. More specific? Okay, May of 2004 to be exact. As a very very single man, I was moving back to Louisiana fresh off of a $9,000 bill at a New York strip club. I had not one responsible fiber in my being. If you would've asked people who knew me back then whether they thought that 5 years from that time I would be:

A) Passed out drunk somewhere.

B) Naked.

C) Both A and B.

D) Talking to his twelve year old daughter about the dangers of kissing boys, and why it's important to maintain your sense of moral values. All while simultaneously dreading having the same conversation with his other four children.

I would imagine that 99% of people asked would've picked C, and the other 1% would've picked A, but that's just because Soyez and Joe would've guessed that I passed out before I could get all of my clothes off. But seriously, I think that my complete overhaul of domestication during the last five years may be the biggest transmogrification ever? (it's a word, look it up.) What else has changed that much since 2004? Maybe internet speed? Gas prices? GM's stock value? Michael Jackson's face? (Sorry about yet another stretch of an MJ joke. I'll let the jokes die when the news lets his death die.) but we can't end it there. How's this for biggest change since '04? The number of children in the greater New Orleans area named Katrina, DeKatrina, LeKatrina, or DeLeKatrinicia, etc?

Anyway, as you could probably sense by now, the correct answer would have been D. That's right, we found out that Tori has officially kissed a boy. (I just threw up again.) This whole fiasco started last night as Rach and I were trying to teach Tori a lesson about gossiping/reputations. We had found out that a girl on the softball team's parents won't let their daughter hang out with a particular girl on the team because that girl was rumored to have kissed some boy at the skating rink SEVEN times. That's right, SEVEN times!! Not eight, not six, but seven. Anyway, we were explaining that it's not nice to spread rumors about people, and that even if it's not true, that girl could be labeled as a slut for the rest of her life. And that although we don't condone going to the skating rink by yourself or kissing boys, that we would never treat that girl any differently if she came by the house. So in my head, we're having a productive conversation. I optimistically waltz upstairs to take a shower thinking, 'Good talk. Man, this parenting stuff is pretty easy sometimes.' Um, not so fast. By the time I get out of the shower, Rach comes upstairs and has that same look on her face that I had after watching a 3 minute montage of Billy Mays selling Zorbees and Oxy-clean and Mighty Putty; mostly sad, but just a little hint of funniness to it.

Rach: Tori just dropped a bomb on me.

Me: She farted?

Rach: Um, no. She just told me that her and Cole kissed.....

Me: I'm gonna kill that little bastard.

(Just for the record, this is not my Cole. There's a 12 year old Cole that lives across the street. We call him Big Cole. Well, at least we used to call him Big Cole. Not anymore. But to tell the truth, he's actually a really good kid, and we like him a lot. Damn it. Kind of wish we hated him. He and Tori became good friends last year. Actually, their family came with us on vacation last summer, and since then they have gone from 'dating' to 'going out' to 'just friends' to 'arch enemies' and back to 'dating' roughly about 9,000 times. He's also Gavin's best friend. And he also just happens to be playing video games with Gavin in the boys' room at this particular moment.)

(This picture is actually where it all started. It may look like just a bunch of drunkards playing with devil sticks on the beach, but if you look in the background, you'll see Tori and Cole playing paddleball. 1 more couple brought together by the magic of paddleball. It's like the new Match.com)

Rach had come in the room to tell me this as I was getting out of the shower. So at this point, I'm standing in my room, close to my doorway, in my underwear. While all of this is going on, Tori texts Cole to tell him that she told Racheal about them kissing, so Cole is coming down from the boys' room to talk to her about it. He gets to the bottom of the stairs, looks over, sees me standing in my drawers with the same expression on my face that Brad Pitt had at the end of Seven, and he quickly ducked off into the bathroom. Smart kid.

At this point, I've got so much stuff running through my head that I'm just frozen. I mean, what do we do? Do we get lock her in the room until she's 25? Do we ground her even though she volunteered the information to us, and run the risk of her never wanting to tell us anything ever again? Do we let it go and hope for the best? Nothing in the 29 years that I've been on this earth has prepared me for this. But we've got to do something.

Me: I've got to go talk to her.

Rach: (kind of laughing at this point, but I can't tell if she's laughing at the situation, or the size of the vein popping out of my head.) What are you gonna say? You can't just go in there and shoot from the hip all willy nilly. (For the record, she didn't use the phrase 'willy nilly'. I just love hearing that phrase and couldn't pass up an opportunity to type it.)

So I go in her room all willy nilly. She looks at me with a smile on her face and says, 'She told you!?" And from there, it was really kind of strange how unstrange it was. We had a nice conversation. She opened up, I gave her advice, made fun of her a little bit, laid down some ground rules, and that was that.

Then Rach and I decided to stage a full on interrogation with the both of them, just to make sure we had all of the facts. My best freind, who has also elevated himself into a productive member of society over the last few years by becoming an FBI agent, gave us some tips (He's also in the process of running background checks on his whole family, and seizing all of their assets). We played good cop, bad cop. We separated them and tried to get them to turn on each other by offering each of them immunity. We went at them Spanish Inquisition style. We tried everything short of waterboarding. We even tried the trick that Austin Powers used on Will Ferrell by asking them each of the questions three times. 'Damn it!! I hate it when I'm asked the same question three times!!!'

But after two hours, we found out this: Tori was definitely the predator, and Cole was definitely the prey. She had been stringing him along, and playing that boy's heart like a fiddle. (Which is not surprising considering the number of ridiculously strong women on her side of the family.) But in the end, I would consider the experience a success. We kept the lines of communication open. We set up some boundaries and introduced some new rules. And Tori doesn't even want to kill us. Yet. Look, I'm not saying that she's not going to put us through hell for the next 10 years. Or that there's not a possibility that she's got us completely brainwashed and just telling us what we want to hear. All I'm saying is that for now, for right now, we're going to hold on to every precious and innocent moment that we have left with her. And we'll cross all those other bridges when we get to them. Unless, of course, I have a brain anuerysm thinking about the fact that I have four other kids that I'll have to go through this with at some point.

My new responsible life is definitely so much more rewarding, but passed out drunk and naked was so much easier.