last resort

My husband thinks we should buy a fly swatter. We have been carefully raising five beautiful hot house flowers and the bees have begun to swarm about them. He came up with the flyswatter idea last week in church after glancing back at the balcony where our daughter HAD been sitting alone a minute before. . . .

Then there's the tall, blond surfer from the Outer Banks of NC who went on a mission trip with our tall, blond dancer and now calls her several times a week. There's the guy from work who slips notes in our eldest daughter's lunch bag. There's the guy raised-in-a-Christian-home who has been into Buddhism the last few years and all of a sudden is a regular attender at church since he's begun a correspondence with our strawberry blond. Or the young man who was too shy to play games at our son's 8 year old birthday party, but in the intervening nine years has summoned up enough courage to park his cute little red pick-up in our driveway and pick up our cute little daughter.

It's a whole new ballgame at our house, and, as my husband reminded me, we have the next fifteen years to enjoy it, since our youngest daughter is only five! (I even have mothers of five year old boys eyeing her!) We have put off this day for years, having strongly discouraged dating for our high school aged children. Now that our eldest has graduated it seems the dam has broken, and not just for her. All of a sudden boys have begun to hover around the edges of our lives; it seems every time we turn around we bump into one; they are always present in our peripheral vision, our phone (our girls do not have cellphones for a reason. . . ) rings even more often. It's like they were all out there waiting for some secret signal - maybe one of those tones that ears over 40 can't detect??

The fly swatter is probably not practical; the convent is not really an option since the girls were all raised as Protestants. We've decided our only option is to move to Malaysia.