OMGMMR! (And who really needs $353, anyway?)

Yesterday, I wrote about paying $353 for two tickets to the Jonas Brothers Concert at the Allstate Arena.

Tradition in our family is that we celebrate birthdays on the weekend; on the actual birthday, if it doesn't fall on the weekend, we just have a nice dinner and give one gift. Of course, in my daughter's case this usually means one gift from me and one from my parents and sometimes one from my sister.

Of course I wanted to give her the tickets as soon as possible, and of course I don't have them yet, so I printed out the seating chart for the Allstate Arena and marked her seats and gave that to her over dinner.

Her eyes got very wide and she said, "I can't scream in Chipotle, right?"

The remainder of our dinner conversation was a series of comments like, "It will be the real actual them."

At one point she actually said that her cheeks hurt, but she couldn't stop smiling.

She tried. She really couldn't.

We talked a little more about the fact that we'd be in the same room (albeit a very large one) with the Jonas Brothers.

We talked a little bit about how she'd tell everyone she knew, one at a time, at school today.

She folded up the seating chart, wrote "look at me all the time" on the outside of it, and said that she was going to carry it in her pocket today.

When we got back in the car, she got on the phone, and said, "OMG MMR!"

Apparently (you may already be aware) this means "Oh my God, My Mom Rules!"

When we got out of the car she asked if she could finally scream and I said yes and she did, and it didn't seem the least bit put on. She stood in the kitchen and stomped her feet and yelled, "I'm going to see the Jonas Brothers!" and then she did it again. And then she covered her mouth, but the foot-stomping took a little time to die down.

At bedtime, since she's still on the cusp, she showed the seating chart to her stuffed animals.

And I started understanding those thousand-dollar tickets.

Later, I talked to my mother. My mother's outlook on my spending money is very predictable. She gasps lightly and says, in a drawn-out and rather dramatic way, "Yo...u'....re craaaaazy!"

Not this time. She said, "I can still remember the look on Tori's face the first time she saw the carousel at Charlestowne Mall. And dancing in the aisles at Molly. No, it's worth it."

Nick & Joe and My Visa Card

And some other kid--I'm probably going to get in trouble for this. Nick and Joe and...um...and...

I could look it up, but that would be cheating, right?

I just paid $353 for two tickets to the Jonas Brothers concert at the Allstate Arena on the 22nd. And as if that weren't enough, now I have to...

um...

go to the show.

I read a lot about the insanity of suburban parents who pay a thousand dollars for concert tickets for their middle-schoolers, and I usually agree with it. And while I'm inclined to point out that this ISN'T a thousand dollars, I know that's kind of a cheat, too. Just like looking up the third Jonas Brother's name. Because we all know that those parents with their matching SUVs and $750,000 houses who are buying those thousand dollar concert tickets have a heck of a lot more money than I do. Their thousand dollars is in a very real sense a lot less than my $353.

But here's the thing.

Today is my daughter's twelfth birthday. I suspect that her days of wonder are nearly over. I hope that I'm wrong, and I might be. She's a very different kind of person than I ever was, and she delights in things and people. But the world does tend to become more ordinary as we age, and it takes more and more to impress us.

I remember the first time my daughter saw a flag flapping on top of a building and recognized it from a picture. She stopped dead in the middle of the parking lot and said, "That's in my book." I remember the first time she saw a helicopter, and how long she was content to stand and watch a stick float down the creek, and her delight in suddenly finding a lone purple flower growing in the midst of a patch of hardscrabble grass. I remember the first time she tasted hot buttered toast, and the wonder in her voice as she said, "You took me to the BEACH?" when we got out of the car. I remember her first 3D movie (SpyKids 2) and how she unconsciously reached out to touch the bubbles in the movie theater.

My baby is twelve today. She likes to act casual now, and she favors ripped jeans and t-shirts. She's developing suspicious hints of alien curves ahead, and the Disney Princesses are gradually losing their place in her life. But she's not all grown up yet. She's not entirely jaded. I know exactly the look that will come over her face when she realizes that she's REALLY in the same room with Nick Jonas. And I'm willing to pay through the nose for it.

Update: Her reaction made it all worthwhile.