Oct. 17- letting Chelsey take the lead

Chelsey and I have done a lot of mother/daughter trips over the years starting when she was about 13. Mostly shopping trips to different cities where I carefully planned out what malls we were going to visit based on what shops they had. We would get to the city and I would lead her around for the few days we were there squeezing in as much shopping as I thought we could handle both physically and financially. At the end of the day we would end up back at our hotel room where we would try on our new clothes and watch a movie before falling asleep. I loved those trips because it was such a great way for me to stay close to her.

Now that I live in Tampa and she's still in Colorado, I decided that we could do our mother/daughter shopping trip this year where she lives. And now that she's 21 and we're in her city, she's deciding what we're doing. She's picking our shopping places, restaurants and even the movie we watched in our room last night. I have to say, it's been interesting so far. We've had mexican two nights in a row (her favorite food), we spent 3 hours in one store, Forever 21 (also her favorite) and we watched a movie in the room last night that made me want to hide under the covers out of embarrassment. When she picked it she said, "this movie is hysterical mom". So, thinking we had a similar sense of humor, I agreed. 30 seconds into the movie I thought I must have just turned into my grandmother because I was squirming over the sexual content. It wasn't graphic, thank goodness for that, but the language and the descriptions just went on and on and on. I didn't think it would ever end. Geez, when did I turn into such a prude?

Two more days to go and hopefully we'll have Italian food one day (my favorite) or watch a non-sexual comedy like Caddyshack (my favorite but probably not hers). But if not, it's still wonderful to spend such dedicated quality time with Chelsey that it really doesn't matter what we do, where we eat or what movie we watch. It's all good!