You know that things are moving into a New Phase at home when your nine year old daughter uses her laptop to access Yoobot (I’m Professor Gunter von Gunter. Hatch your Yoobot now. JaHa!), then goes on to Google Images to download from the Internet a fatuous picture of her beloved father, which is then digitally transmogrified into a Yoobot creation which does silly dances and has cool stuff in its own room.

However, this is as naught compared to the horrors coming my way in about 170 weeks’ time.

Girl Teenage Yearnings (with added Vampires)

If you have the nerve, read all about them at some considerable length here:

One of the signal differences between adolescent girls and boys is that while a boy quickly puts away childish things in his race to initiate a sexual life for himself, a girl will continue to cherish, almost to fetishize, the tokens of her little-girlhood.

She wants to be both places at once — in the safety of girl land, with the pandas and jump ropes, and in the arms of a lover, whose sole desire is to take her completely. And most of all, as girls work all of this out with considerable anguish, they want to be in their rooms, with the doors closed and the declarations posted.

The biggest problem for parents of teenage girls is that they never know who is going to come barreling out of that sacred space: the adorable little girl who wants to cuddle, or the hard-eyed young woman who has left it all behind.

If only it all happened gently and beautifully like this.