<p>I knew a single mom tha was scurrying around with 3 kids (including one with serious medical issues) that had to call AAA when her keys got locked in the car. Twice in the same stressful day.</p>
<p>Eldest son was living in China and asked to move 2 kilos of hashish from west to east China .When package arrived ,he was arrested and spent 8 months in a Chinese detention center .We spent about 60 K to get him out . I have shared this story on a couple of other threads as a warning to kids living abroad ,who think they could pull off something like this and not get caught ! He is back in the US now . He had a great job ,and a beautiful apartment .Most of his belongings were lost . This is still upsetting to me ,one year later.</p>
<p>Thanks for being so willing to share this–hopefully your S will put his life back on track and maybe at least one family may be spared some of the grief and hardship and heartache you and your loved ones endured.</p>
<p>You win. How any of them survive to adulthood is a mystery.</p>
<p>Wow…</p>
<p>Just when I was thinking poorly of my ds1, along comes a doozy of a story. Glad he’s OK.</p>
<p>Fauxmaven, I saw the movie Midnight Express in 1978 and it has given me a VERY healthy fear of international prisons! I wouldn’t even chew gum in Singapore!</p>
<p>DS got a ‘starter’ pack of checks in the mail and asked me what they were used for.</p>
<p>My younger son (who is more life-savvy than my older one) didn’t know what a slip was. I told him I was going to the store to buy a new slip for a certain dress and he didn’t know what I was talking about.</p>
<p>Another thing that I find odd is that although all of our kids are well-read and score well, there are still some rather common words or phrases that truly stump them. I was talking to my nephew (very smart) and I used the phrase “put that on the back burner,” and he had no idea what I meant by that. I’ve had similar situations with my own kids…they won’t know some rather common words or phrases…but they’ll know some of the most oddest SAT words. (Of course, when they were much younger and had Pokemon cards, I had no idea what language they were speaking. 
)</p>
<p>My kiddos had to learn how to write checks–they needed them to give to landlords who didn’t like debit cards and wanted to impose a fee for charge cards. That’s the ONLY thing they seem to need these pieces of paper for.</p>
<p>Our kids also have a much larger written vocabulary and sometimes have trouble pronouncing words that they rarely hear (but have often read). When we had a bunny, D said, it was so cut watching it G-aw. We were confused until we realized she meant gnaw (why is English full of weird silent letters). </p>
<p>I swear there are many kids these days that have no idea what a toaster, iron or ironing board are. If they have an IQ test with these objects, they will be stumped. This is part of the problem when there are large cultural differences and things in tests are not a part of some of the other cultures who also have to take the tests. Sorry, end of sidetrack.</p>
<p>Our kids LOVE idioms and trying to figure out how they came to be. D was amused that a friend’s thirteen-year-old S wrote an essay about “foresight” and said it was when you have eyes in front and behind your head. He was serious & she was very amused.</p>
<p>Well, some kids have street smarts and some do not.</p>
<p>In December D was pulled over in her university town for going 70 in a 60. First time ever, and a driver for 5+years. When the officer asked for her insurance card, she gave him the medical insurance card!</p>
<p>Her (lack of smarts) got her a $100 fine and an online course, I forgot the cost.</p>
<p>One month after she started college, I got a call from her asking me what she and her roommate (driving) should do because it was raining and the front window was fogging up making it difficult to see. I had never seen the car, but offered suggestions, to no avail. I finally suggested they call the roomie’s parents who lived 20 minutes away! I had thought they had already called them, but no, I was the first person, 1200 miles away, who popped into their head.</p>
<p>She’s a PBKer, but sometimes I wonder.</p>
<p>“There are still some rather common words or phrases that truly stump them.” - Yea, somehow they think that is less surprising than parents clueless to their lingo. I was surprised to learn last week that my kids were not familiar with the terms “in hock”.</p>
<p>I know a young mother who asked her engineer husband to put their two year old in her car seat in the back seat, while she packed up the car. As they were going down the highway, the two year old says,“Mommy, I am not buckled!” He had actually put his own daughter in a car seat without buckling her in.</p>
<p>I don’t know what “in hock” means either. Always wondered since it’s in a bon jovi song. Not a phrase that’s in my generation’s lexicon.</p>
<p>I had to learn how to write checks for a class in middle school. I actually use them all the time. </p>
<p>My friend (recently turned 23) was telling me yesterday that her mom sent her to the store for an onion, and when she got there she had to call home because she was completely overwhelmed. Didn’t know what kind of onion to get, what the difference was, what size to get, and couldn’t handle choosing one. Apparently she had a similar issue in an attempt to purchase ground beef. She lives on her own now and has never used her oven because she is too overwhelmed to learn to cook.</p>
<p>D went to the grocery store & called me, asking me what the myriad of different cuts of meat were, grumbling that all she wanted was a steak. She thought she ought to buy the cheapest one, but I suggested to her that it might take her forever to chew it. She was amazed at the range of prices and different varieties! (Can you tell she never helped much with grocery shopping?)</p>
<p>Our kiddos have at least done a bit of cooking. They can both make themselves a few meals that they like and even cook for others. :)</p>
<p>I know of middle school kids who were absolutely fascinated with the thermometers in their chemistry class. They’d never seen a thermometer that wasn’t digital.</p>
<p>Quite a few of them have no idea about analog clocks either–ONLY digital. “Clockwise” makes no sense to kids who only know analog clocks.</p>
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<p>Going slightly offtopic, but I got two tickets in a matter of 10 minutes last fall. I was at practice and got a parking ticket. When I went to leave, I saw the ticket and decided to take it inside to the coach since the team was leaving on a road trip the next morning. I came back out not 5 minutes later and sure enough the parking girl was printing out another one as I walked up!</p>
<p>DS’s school offers a service which allows parents to have a birthday cake delivered to their dorm room. Since this was my son’s first birthday away from home (and to tell the truth I was feeling a wee bit of empty nest syndrome) I ordered the cake, and some balloons. The cake was a bit pricey, but I figured having some extra cake to share with the roommate and friends was worth the extra money because it would earn some popularity points. I made extra sure that I got my order in early enough that it would all be delivered on DS’s birthday.</p>
<p>A couple of days went by… </p>
<p>After not hearing anything at all I finally texted “Is the cake a lie?” (which is a line from the computer game Portal, kind of an inside joke). He quickly responded that he had gotten everything I sent him.</p>
<p>Fast forward three weeks. I headed up to his school for Parents’ weekend, and met him in his dorm. I notice the balloons (mylar, so they were still inflated). Then I notice the cake box. In his closet. With almost all of the cake still in it… said he meant to eat it but just hadn’t gotten around to it…</p>
<p>Insisted that D do her laundry when she returned home for the summer last year. Told her to sort things that needed to be dry-cleaned. Obviously, I wasn’t specific enough because I came home one day to find that she had machine washed and dried a lined linen blazer and a wool-blend jumper, both of which I had bought for her for job interviews. Needless to say, they have never been the same since. Ugh. And she graduated top 5% of her class…</p>