This fall, I'm going to accesorize with a miniature adult. They're like, so cute!

I work with all ages of children and tweens and teens. Most of them have grown up in very privledged households, and because of that, I find that some of them are far beyond their actual birth years. They've grown up quickly because they've been shuffled from nanny to nanny to house in Colorado to house in St. Thomas to house in Italy to house in Florida to equestrian tournament in South Africa to equestrian championship in New Zealand. And somewhere, in the middle of all of that to and fro, they have fine-tuned their networking skills to be the voice of their parents when their parents have left them for weeks at a time. Instead of accepting the frequent parental voids, they are making deals that affect their schooling, extracurriculars, and their debutante social lives.

It is kind of sad. But not when it involves me. Then, it's just plain adorable.

I "made friends" with a fourth grader last year that everybody else in the real adult world couldn't quite stand. She was, and still is, a certain kind of needy that often translates into "annoying." I used to work with only needy children however; children that had no source of love at home, and so had to compete for love when they knew they were around it. This now-fifth grader is a lot like the children of my former job, and because of the social conditions and school politics of where I'm employed, it's considered best to ignore needy students, to roll your eyes at them when they're not looking, and then bitch about how dependent they are on constant validation during lunch breaks. Because of who I am and my experience with "at-risk" (of never being loved) youth, I cannot do any of those things. No matter the social class.

So this now-fifth grader is my friend. I mean, really. She's fifteen years my junior, but because of her situation at home, she acts like she's 30, which technically puts her about five years older than me. We don't talk that often, maybe once or twice a week, but each time we do, I'm astonished at how her lack of a childhood has made her completely unaware she's surviving as an istie-bitsie woman, piecing her life together between all the networking and deal-making she does.

It's funny to me. Like last week, when she said, "my neighbor is opening up a boutique and I could totally see you wearing her clothes. I'm going to get you an invitation to the private opening party. If I can't get you an invitation, I'm going to get you her card at least. Yes, I'll get you her card." I laughed. When I asked her what kinds of clothing her friend makes, she said, "like Jessica Simpson clothes."

Okay, phew, sometimes she really is a fifth-grader.

And for the record, I would never wear Jessica Simpson clothes.

And one more aside: for the long weekend, she gets her own hotel room at some random Hyatt. I told her I'd come so she could legally use the minibar.