Communication skills becoming supremely bad

As children grow and mature, you (the parent) are presented with new ways to demonstrate incompetence.

Wow!

The good times never end!

Take what happened to our family this past week.

We had the opportunity to visit Washington, D.C., where my husband and a group of fellow BYU law school alumni were admitted to practice before the Supreme Court.

This means that if you personally ever need someone to plead your case in front of Chief Justice John Roberts and company, my husband has got your back.

One call!

That's all!

So.

Anyway. Way to go, Husband! Very cool. High five and who's your daddy!

Your mom and I are way proud of you! But that's not the point of the story.

The real point is this.

After my husband and his colleagues took their oaths, I texted the news to all our married boys back home: "DAD JUST ADMITTED TO THE SUPREME COURT! LOOKS HOT IN HIS BOW TIE!"

I added that last sentence because you know how it is. Kids just love it when old people refer to old spouses as "hot."

Well! Within seconds I heard back from our sons, who were all going SAY WHAT? OUR DAD IS A MEMBER OF THE SUPREME COURT NOW?

OK. That's when I realized that yes, Houston, we have a problem, which is this:

I pretty much stink at communicating with our married kids.

I'm not positive they knew their father and younger brothers and I were even going to D.C. in the first place. And for SURE they hadn't heard Word One about the Supreme Court thing. Which is why my random text about hot dads and bow ties took them all by surprise.

Why don't I do a better job of dispensing information? Hmmmmm.

I'm not sure exactly. Sometimes I wonder if it's that after so many years of living only with guys, I sort of communicate (in Mormon terms) like "the Priesthood" as opposed to "the Sisters."

You know how it is.