No more teenagers in the family

For the past 6,883 days, we have had at least one teenager in our family. Tomorrow that streak comes to an end when our youngest, Jack, turns 20.

I say "at least one" because for most of that time, there have been multiple teens among our children. There was one stretch from September 2013 to March 2014 when four of them were teenagers.

Come tonight at midnight, the counter resets permanently to zero.

It's another one of those little life milestones you don't think too much about until they actually happen. As I told someone recently, the combination of having our first grandchild and seeing the family teen years come to an end really brings home how quickly time passes.

Other than a string of car accidents and some other relatively minor crises, I've enjoyed having teenagers. I really have.

I got to see them all graduate high school and go off to college. Four have degrees, with Jack currently working his way through the second semester of his freshman year at Cleveland State University.

I've seen one get married and have a baby, one get engaged, and one build an incredible life with a longtime partner we absolutely love (that last one is Elissa, whose boyfriend Mark has long been a full-fledged member of the family and is one of the best bakers I've ever met).

On the other hand, as the kids have gotten older, I've come to realize that much of my fondness for their teen years stems from how much I didn't know. As they get into their 20s and 30s, they're very free about confessing stuff they did as teenagers that, in retrospect, I'm glad I wasn't aware of.

Ignorance is truly bliss, in this case.

Still, Terry and I can't deny that we've been blessed with five great kids who are turning out to be some pretty great adults. We experienced our share of homecomings, proms, high school sporting events and all the other stuff that comes with having children in the 13-19 age range.

And now we're past it all. Time to move on.

Which is just fine.

(Happy early birthday to the one and only Mr. Jack Tennant!)

I am the only 54-year-old man who tears up when he hears "Dark Blue" by Jack's Mannequin

By any measure, I am not the intended or expected demographic for "Dark Blue," a song by the American rock band Jack's Mannequin.

When the song was released in 2005, I was a father of four with a fifth child on the way. It was understandably much more popular with 15-year-old girls at the time than with 36-year-old suburban dads.

Yet it's a tune that resonated with me then and still does today. And the reason is my daughter Elissa, who was 11 years old when "Dark Blue" came out.

I don't think Elissa got into bands like Jack's Mannequin until she was a little older, but at 11, she was clearly already on the path to teenagerhood. Her interests and attitudes were changing, and being our oldest, she was the first kid with whom we navigated that tumultuous period of adolescence.

One thing I remember from those days is that every time Elissa said or did something that was more "older kid" than "younger kid," my heart would hurt a little. You know your child is going to change and that she is inevitably going to experience the universal (and sometimes painful) process of maturation, but part of you clings to the time when she was young and innocent and strongly attached to you.

You want your child to grow and become independent, of course, but those sentimental links to early childhood are strong in parents. It's so hard to let go, even when you know you should.

I remember Elissa playing "Dark Blue" in the car when she was a young teen. Listening to the chorus of the song made me realize – painfully, abruptly – that the little toddler I used to dote upon was gone forever. The angsty, somewhat melodramatic teenage lyrics were a world apart from the songs with which she used to sing along as a 4-year-old watching "Barney."

Dark blue, dark blue, have you
Ever been alone in a crowded room?
Well, I'm here with you, I said
The world could be burning and burning down

Your children have to go through the same heartbreaks and trials you did if they're going to grow into well-adjusted adults, but you sometimes wish it didn't have to be that way.

It should be noted that Elissa got through her teenage years pretty well, all things considered, and is now one of the smartest, funniest, most passionate 30-year-olds you'll ever meet. Her siblings also grew up successfully with relatively few scars, visible or otherwise.

But when I hear "Dark Blue," my mind still goes back to the time when I was the father of little ones who hadn't yet experienced heartbreak. And I admittedly get a little misty.

It's a strange mix of sadness, sentimentality and pride in what they've each become. All wrapped up in a 20-year-old song.

Four teenagers in the family? Yes, sir, may I have another?

In a few weeks, my daughter Melanie will turn 13. When that happens, we will enter a six-month period in which we have four teenagers in our family at one time.

Specifically, our oldest four will be 19, 16, 15 and 13. I will freely accept offers of prayers, happy thoughts, and Prozac.

(SIDE NOTE: "Prayers, Happy Thoughts and Prozac" could be a good name for a band. Or at least the name of an album. I'm going to form a band not so much to make music, but just so we can use that name.)

This stretch of parenting four teens will end fairly quickly because my oldest, Elissa, will turn 20 in March. Twenty is a weird age. It's only a milestone birthday in that you leave one decade of life and enter another, but it doesn't get you anything in the way that ages 18 and 21 bring new freedoms and legal privileges.

I remember being 20. It was a long time ago, like centuries ago, but I remember it. I remember having more hair (and none of it being gray). I remember being able to go directly from a dead sleep into a fast morning run with no need to "warm up." I remember going to college every day and then working 6-8 hours at night and thinking nothing of it.

I also remember regularly making foolish decisions, so I guess you take the good with the bad.

Anyway, on the surface, having four teenagers in the family at the same time would appear to be a nightmare. And it certainly does have its challenges, from the mood swings to the school drama to the brain damage.

Yes, brain damage. Anyone who has parented a teenager, or even dealt with one, will tell you the only way to explain their behavior sometimes is that they must have suffered some sort of cerebral injury.

And indeed, the teen brain really is still under construction, busily forming the connections and functions that serve a person well later in life.

During those years when the contents of a teenager's skull are being built up, they do things that are puzzling to a rational (and even a not-so-rational) adult. You have to roll with this. Guide them, correct them, help them, sure. But in the end, acceptance is a lot easier.

Still, looking at the big picture, it really is a fun adventure when you have teens in the house. Their friends come over a lot, they keep you busy, and they tend to be noisy, irreverent, and altogether a good time.

Which is what I try to remind myself whenever they frustrate me, since it's guaranteed that I will miss the chaos of these years when it's all over.

I'm interested to see how it will play out when little Jack, our youngest at age 7, is a teen. By then, Elissa and Chloe and possibly Jared will presumably be out of the house, and Melanie will be knee-deep in college, leaving Jack to navigate those years with just his parents and a bunch of pets left behind by his siblings.

Being so much younger than the others, his experience of teenager-dom will be a little different than theirs. It will, in fact, be much like mine. My elder three siblings were 16, 14 and 12 when I was born. Which meant that by the time I started school, they were all either out the door or well on their way.

So when I was a teenager, it was just me, mom and dad living together. It couldn't have been nearly as loud and raucous in their house then as it is in mine now.

But I was definitely just as brain damaged, maybe more so, than my own offspring. Some things, it seems, never change.

The older I get, the earlier I wake up

My wife is philosophically opposed to the idea of, as she puts it, "getting up in the 5s." By which she means waking up before 6 a.m.

You might take from that that she would be OK with getting out of bed at, say, 4:30 a.m. And you would be wrong. Terry would no sooner get out of bed at that hour than she would eat blue cheese.

(Terry hates blue cheese, you see. I love it. Terry prepares the food in our house. Guess which ingredient you never see in our meals outside of the occasional rogue bottle of salad dressing?)

Anyway, Terry does not like to get up early, or at least what I consider early.

Most days, I'm out of bed at 5 a.m. Occasionally it's 4:50 a.m., and I don't need an alarm to do it. I just wake up, lay there for maybe a minute, and my feet hit the floor.

I realize there are many people for whom a wake-up time of 5 o'clock would be "sleeping in." These people generally fall into one of three categories:

(a) They deliver newspapers
(b) They have blue-collar jobs that require them to be at work at some unacceptable time like 5:30 a.m.
(c) They are 104 years old

That whole thing about needing less sleep as you age is true, right? I assume it is. How else do you explain the line of senior citizens at the buffet restaurants every day at 4 p.m.?

My sister Judi used to get up around 4 in the morning. She would use the early hours of the day to exercise, clean the house, and watch reruns of "Cops."

My family loves "Cops." It's a thing with us. There's something about seeing shirtless white people of Southern descent getting arrested that appeals to us.

Anyway, I get up fairly early only because I have to. If I'm not up by 5:00, there's no way I can do everything I have to do in the morning. That list, in order, includes:

- Get dressed for running
- Feed the cats
- Go downstairs and clean out the litter boxes and sweep around them
- Go outside and get the newspaper
- Get a drink of water
- Lace up my running shoes
- Go and run 2-3 miles depending on the day
- Stretch
- Come in and record the run in my running log book while getting a second drink of water
- Shower
- Dress
- Read the paper and eat breakfast
- Brush my teeth and head out the door for work

If I'm not out of bed by 5:15, something on that list is going to get sacrificed. And I don't want to sacrifice any of it.

Well, I would gladly sacrifice the cat-related items. But those have been my jobs for many years now, and I'm fairly certain no one else in the family is going to take them over. So I'll continue doing them.

During the summer I have the house all to myself in the morning because none of the kids have to get up for school, nor does Terry have to pack their lunches and see them off. My teenagers would, if given the opportunity, sleep until 3 p.m. every summer day.

We don't let them do this, of course. (Most of the time.)

As I type this, it's 9:20 in the evening, which means I'll be waking up in a little more than 7 1/2 hours. So if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go and eat my nightly chunk of blue cheese and head off to Dreamland with the rest of the old people. Good night!