While driving my oldest to school the other day I asked, “Are you excited about starting gym class?” His response – and bear with me as I try to spell this – was: “Mmmnahno” (the inaudible version of “I don’t know”) and the tone he used was as if I’d just asked him what the water on Mars tasted like.

I rolled my eyes and shrugged it off, but was still a little sad that he didn’t want to have a conversation with me.

But then he started asking me a bunch of inane things that I or no one in the world would have the answers to because apparently that’s the most hysterical thing to do among 11 year olds these days.

Just last year Teara told me stories of my nephew being unbearably annoying at this age and I thought to myself, “I can’t see my little boy acting like that. I know he’s going to stay the same cute, charming kid he’s always been 😍”

Well I ate my words with a side of bacon that morning because here he was acting like such a buffoon that I wanted to drop him off on the side of the road.

Some of the questions:

– Do you know how much air I’ve breathed since I was born?

I honestly sat here for a good minute trying to think of more but they were so stupid my brain couldn’t recall such nonsense.

And he does it to everyone. My father who thinks the sun rises and sets around his grandsons even gave him the “What is wrong with you?” stare when he asked him something along the lines of, “Can a house be made of pancakes?”

He’ll ask my mother something like, “Can goats fly?” And she’ll be like, “What? Can what fly?” And he’ll be like, “Can goats fly?” And she’ll get frustrated and think she heard him wrong, and say “What? I can’t hear you. What did you say?”

But she did hear him, she just can’t fathom that her wonderful grandson would act so dumb on purpose.

I’ve always tried to answer my boys’ questions as honestly as I can. I even had “The Talk” with 2 of them already and found the best way to go about it is to just tell it to them straight. And if I don’t know the answer to something, I simply admit it because although I appear as though I know everything, alas, I do not. (Just kidding, I do know everything.)

But this thing he does, they’re not real questions. They’re the most idiotic inquiries he can muster just to try and stump us and get us to call him a moron. I’ve been mothering him for over a decade and for the first time in his life I’ve actively started ignoring him.

To any of you parents out there reading this thinking the same way I did a year ago – just you wait and I’ll start frying up the bacon.

And to any parents out there who have experienced this behavior with your own children, PLEASE, let me know when it stops. Because if I get asked one more time, “What happens if your hair starts growing inside your head instead of outside your head?” I might rip my ears off.