la femme follette

nucleus. numeration. nutriment.

The children just finished a summertime science workshop on genetics.  Fillette was the most confused, having worked out some traits in her class.  Mama, can I see you roll your tongue?  I told her I could not.  She very haltingly blurted out a contradiction to this.  (She and Mari are always doing things like making faces and showing tongues; I presume she was already certain he could not.)  I assured her I could not.  She was stymied by this and did not know what to say.  Also, manufacturing quite a hostile countenance.  I was still trying to read the thing I was reading when she came along with her interruptions, so was slow to figure out that her instructor probably generalized for the class.  "No, no, honey," I assured her.  "You are recessive.  So is your brother."  He is left-handed.  She knew not how to respond to this.  Join the club, love. 

Mari is not always exactly joking when he suggests they cannot be his children, except for that they so, so clearly are.  Honestly, if they had not grown in my belly, I would be suspicious sometimes myself.  She is in the next room right now, declaiming García Lorca poems.  Who else's child would she be?  Plus, thing is, when one has the 10-pound babies, there is very little risk of switching at birth.

Speaking of our jocular disregard for the cultural primacy put upon one's spouse, Kowalski called today.  I was caught a little by surprise, since a. felting, b. midday he is usually otherwise occupied, c. only calls my cell phone when we are having a row, which we are not.  It was a nice surprise, and everything was fine until he reported his re-committing to a project and asked for my assistance.  I had a hazy, stream-of-consciousness narration of having once actually put together a list in service to him, per his request ... but then he said he was all done with the project and then I lost it somewhere ... maybe I threw it away ... 

He reminded me (as if I had forgotten) that he is fickle and distractable, whereupon I exaggerated a throwaway comment in service to humor, and then there we were, arm-wrestling over which of us exactly was the Responsible Party for the ultimate demise of us, in the final analysis.  It was a halfhearted re-match, like Rocky XIX or so, -- I because of the Charo Affliction; he because of the original reason for his call.  In pretty short order I let it go out loud and his last gambit was a taunting, though good-natured, complete rendition of "Maybelline,"  an exponential improvement over what I usually get, which is a yodeling, growling kind of performance of "So Wrong," which slays me every time and I will never let on.  (though I just have, o, internet) I am not knitting any more socks, I swear.  I have repented enough.  Him! 

Then I went to pick up the CSA box. 

Plus, it came with a whole, not-live chicken, and six ears of corn.  I am up to my ears in peaches.  Also, when loading the car's CD magazine this morning, I spaced and grabbed Pete Seeger when I wanted Bob Seger and I was a. wildly disoriented and then b. a little sad. 

entrapment, entreaty, entrechat, entropy

I finally finished "the baby's" birthday legwarmers.  The "baby" who will be 7 years old this week.  Mari corrects me when I call her this, but for Garçon & I, she will always be the baby.  When she is not with us, we call her this, as in "It's almost time to go get the baby from her ballet class, so let's hurry."  This of course begs the question of who it was doing the babying of her and when.

I do not even have time to be emotional about her being seven (7!), for I am totally lost in a wave of homesickness I did not see coming.  Kowalski and I were talking about his socks and he reported them to be super, etc, but still quite warm and so past the season.  I countered that it was 36 degrees only there and he said, "Yes.  But you know people are in shorts."

I said nothing for a long time, and then he asked me, cautiously, quietly, "Have you forgotten this?"  I admitted I had -- 40 degrees back home is warm -- and burst not into tears, but some pretty heavy-duty sniffling.  Add to this that my baby is still -- in late March and in the same 40-degree temperatures -- wanting to cozy herself in wool and mohair practically up to her heiney, plus that when we asked both children if they would want to go to Chicago for summer vacation this year, they pronounced it unacceptable as a destination (no ocean, no mountains) and here it all is still days later, the relentlessness of displacement.  I find as I go on that it is of course impossible to imagine how it feel to lose a thing that I always just took for granted, but also every time I am surprised by how painful it is to realize an absence when it comes.  Anyhow.   

These legwarmers are the improvement upon the last.  At that time, Fillette expressed wanting for a pair of legwarmers to wear in the weather, saying nothing about ballet.  As soon as I made them, she wanted to wear them everywhere, including ballet class, which was fine with me but for that the girls are not allowed to wear them the whole class (just during warm-up) and so when she removed them, her palest-pink, regulation tights were covered in black mohair lint.  I have issues and could not let this go on.  Additionally, she subsequently expressed a secret wish for a pair that was thigh-high, "Like the big girls wear."  Done and done.

Just as the last, these are from the pattern in Hoverson Last-Minute Knitted Gifts book using Araucania Nature Wool and Madil Kid Seta, both from stash.  Again, they are in the 2- to 4-hour chapter and each one took me 6 hours (three movies per leg!), and I did not even knit these as long as the pattern is written!  These are 20 inches long, which is one movie short of her project's length as published, but just the right size for our baby ballerina.  Birthday knitting soldiers on.  There are too many spring birthdays for all this knitting.  My hands are tired!  I will try to get a work-in-progress photo of the next. 

bling

For us, daffodils mean that Fillette's birthday is just days away.  My birthday flower is a peony, just as ephemeral and glorious as the spring-bulb lineup's bloom.   I always feel a little happier whenever I have peonies near.  Between the heralding of spring plus birthday, Fillette is just! over! the! top!! to see daffodils each year, and it was under her direction that I was lying on the pavement in front of our house, photographing our first two blooms.

Spring in our neighborhood also means that everyone comes out to the playground to be seen-scene.  The children are all taller than we remember and they have different teeth or can run instead of toddle or talk instead of point or have shiny, 2-wheeled bikes out for the first time or are -- in a change from last year -- sitting the tiniest bit sulkily at the edge of the playground wall, wanting to feel too old for all this until it seems there is a Game and it needs Organization from a Girl or Boy who is Obviously Mature Enough to Explain the Rules and Referee so then they forget about how cool they wanted to be before.  All the adults take our seats around the perimeter and ask one another, How was your winter?, and so today, finally, it feels like a new year. 

mt 26, 41

Lazy day, made a big pan of granola.  Just like me:  lazy, granola.  Soccer league tonight, the second-to-last night of this up-all-night sporting. 

Otherwise, everything is quiet.  Pretty literally, since I am easing back into the routine after a prolonged and inexplicable, undiagnosable something that has left me with a total loss of conductive hearing in my right ear.  The ENT seems concerned, so that job is hired out.

This did not excuse me from having to listen to Fillette's out-loud recitation of her latest theological research.  The children are trying to satisfy the wager of sorts that Mari and I put out: if you are so interested in Easter, tell us by the end of this week why it is and then we will have it.  Ecumenically, their first try was:  Esther saved her people?  I told them, no, that is Purim.  Fillette was upset the most by this:  I didn't know that!  And we have Purim!  Yeah, because Mari and I like Purim.  What's not to like?

She spent the day, sitting next to me while I turned the heel on a sock, reading the Passion narrative from the abridgement in Tomie dePaola's Book of Bible Stories.  For reasons that are obvious, she loves hearing about Jesus & his gang of 12 + the ladies.  Oh, that reminds me -- before I get too lost in how she cornered me about Why Is It We Do Not Go to Church on Sundays like Other People, which I demurred by pointing out quite reasoanbly that when she was adamant as a wee gal, we indeed took her.  I will not be brought up by my children for standing in the way of religion, not I, no, no. -- Fillette wrote a letter to Tomie dePaola a couple of weeks ago and he wrote her back!  I stuck a Post-It note in there with my $.02 and there was a little something worked in there for me, too! 

I had expected that he would return the correspondence (Fillette addressed the letter to him in his hometown, not via his publisher; she's got a sly mother, that one), because he is 70+ years old and was raised properly.  On the other hand, he is 70+ years old, has been doing this a long time, and might be tired of fan letters already.  I was not surprised to see the letter in the mail, she was thrilled and we just love everything about him extra-plus-plus now.    

blur

We made it, the four of us, through another Family Observation of the ballet class.  I almost did not make it.  Last week, I spent a lot of time, crying and crying, because I realized that Fillette would next year be in the Big Girl Class, no more Baby FunTimes Ballet.  Two classes every week, de rigueur, no longer in a pastel leotard.  I do not want this for her, we do not want this for her.  It is not our idea of a life well-lived, but it is not so much our life.

This, for us, is where the parenting rubber meets the road.  We have this child who so clearly, so zealously, wants to do something that is so alien to us, and we have to say yes.  People have asked why we do not tell her no to ballet.  We did put her off for quite some time, not saying no, just somehow not hearing her when she asked.  She was four and did not have the world's best follow-through; it did not matter.  Between four and five-and-a-half, she started to show herself as a fearsome kind of all-around athletic type in all the usual ways -- soccer, monkeybars, playground asskickings -- and still, once a week the subject of ballet would come up.  There was talk about duct-taping toe shoes -- had she secretly been watching Fame in the night?  Mari and I had many raised eyebrows at each other over dinner conversation, she never equated the dance with princesses or fairies or ponies or that sort of bullshit, and so finally we relented.

Those Who Know have sweetly told Mari and I that we are exactly, perfectly, a Ballet Parent Type.  The parents who have a little girl who is driven to dance who has parents who are pretty much, "uh, wtf?  why??"  We were relieved to hear there have been millions before us.  I am by myself one of the perfect Ballet Mom Types, mine sort of an anti-Stage Mom who regards the whole business as more than a slight threat to her baby and if there is one false move, I am going to cut some motherfuckers.  That is pretty much, yes, the truth. 

We are learning:  the proprietress of the venerable pointe shoe boutique in our town here has been the sweetest treasure to me; the administratrix of the ballet school has a thing or two she knows about the game.  So, ballet seeps into our family culture a little at a time.  I am shocked to realize that the NYT has a story or two on ballet at least twice a week during the season.  Surely they have always been there, but I have never noticed.  We took the children to the ballet in October and apropos of reading the Playbill, Mari said, "Is Christopher Wheeldon important?"  And I said, with an audible inhalation, "Oh, god!  Yes!!" 

Um, how the fuck I even know anything about Christopher Wheeldon is so far beyond me.  But there he is, rightfully placed in his place in contemporary ballet culture, right in my knowledge bank.  Instead of a delicious book waiting for me on our sideboard about Conquest and Spices, I am slogging through the new Kavanaugh biography of Nureyev.  It was interesting to me, already, in a fun, retro, Cold War way, it is excellently well-written, and then at the moment of this defection, names start turning up that we know.  Dancers who teach at her former school, the woman who owns her current school.  This ballet is small-group stuff, taught hand-to-hand in direct lineage.  Weird.  We had no idea.

Still, it is not really our thing.  But it is her thing, so we have made room.  She knows that we do not love it, but we love her and love that she loves it.  As a girl cut from her father's same sinewy, ectomorphic cloth, they tell us, she is perfectly proportioned for this endeavor.  (They rave, actually, and have inaudible gasping, these ballet people.  I fight back tears.  My baby.)  It is a challenge for her, already.  Because she was waved along a ballet-grade (she is apparently quite good, they told us, then I cried), next year she will be taking class at a time when I would rather she be in the bathtub.  There is a big cultural difference, let alone developmental, between 7 years and 8.

It is always the bun that kills me, that starts the killing.  Last year, when we all decided to switch her to a school with no performance, she immediately asked for a haircut, since she doesn't need all that "ballerina hair" anymore.  We never got one.  One thing leads to another, she could not decide how short she wanted it, etc.  As long as she has two fistfuls of it, we have to secure it.  I hate the hairdo, always whisper to Mari in a hissing way that it makes them look like robots.  Also, complain that it looks like nothing, this hairdo that takes three hands to properly cement in place.

 

The only good thing about this hairdo is when I pick her up from class, all flushed and a little sweaty from the exertion of ballet plus getting dressed in street clothes again in the 80-degree locker room, she will be tired and let me scoop her up for a minute of the recharging on mommy that most kids her age still need.  I can stick my nose right along the nape of her neck, all uncovered, almost behind her ear in the hairline, nibble her tiny earlobe, and catch the tiniest whiff of what little is left of her baby smell.  Only once a week, but still. 

slipstream

Last week, Filette and Garçon were with me in the grocery, which almost never happens, so the result was that they were loitering around produce, fascinated by the inventory as if Soviet defectors, and did not hear me when I said, "I'm moving on." 

The result of that was them rushing up to me (finally!) while I was on line for the register, "Mommy!  We couldn't find you!"  I had another errand to run in the store next door to the grocery, and as old as they are, I was certainly going to abandon them into the grocery and come back for them later. 

Whatever.  They knew where the car was parked.  I was in a hurry.  The knitting mines have been the least of it, but just because of that, calls have not been returned, all communication has been shorthanded, emails have been totally ignored.  I have been trying to get it on when I can; watch the mails.   

Legwarmers for a little ballerina.  From the Hoverson Last-Minute Knitted Gifts book using Araucania Nature Wool and Madil Kid Seta, both from stash.  The book is way the fuck wrong about how long they take.  I almost did not make the deadline.  Cheers. 

stitch and bitch

I knitted some little fingerless mitts from Melanie Falick's Weekend Knitting over the ... weekend!  I like the idea of that book much more than I have actually knitted anything from it, though I have been feeling much more knitty confident lately about abrupting actual patterns and their technical instructions in order to get what I want instead of just writing my own pattern based on an idea using the simple techniques I already know.  Well, and my technical knowhow is expanding necessarily as I go along.

Anyhow, I do not like them.  I mean, whatever.  They are fine.  But I would have liked them to be longer on the wrist edge.  They were fast, about 4 hours for the two and that includes a. distracted knitting and b. knitting the first one on black needles.  Dumb.  Dumb!!  I'll just keep tugging on them until they get longer on the wrist edge.  I used a worsted weight wool/alpaca blend from Nashua.

Yesterday I stopped by the LYS near the children's afterschool program and had a go at Agressive Knitting Chick who works there.  She wanted to have a unsolicited discussion about gauge.  These people.  I mean, I know there are people who always use the yarn used with the pattern in the book.  I know there are and go with god, little knitters, but I cannot.  It is hard for me to describe what I am after when I decide on fiber or whatever, but I want what I want.  I can feel it. 

In this case, I wanted to use Debbie Bliss's Baby Cashmerino to knit the legwarmers in Weekend Knitting.  Largely because the color was just exactly right.  AKC came up to me in an accosting way and told me I could nevah use that yarn because it would never be the same.  Well, what?  And why are you talking to me?  I mean, these are legwarmers for Fillette for her dancing endeavors.  I wanted them to be serious and also year-roundish (she currently does not study in the summer, but I pre-emptively rue the day) 

AKC was very concerned on my behalf about the product of the Falick pattern and the Baby Cash.  I could tell that AKC has never never frankensteined a pattern in her life, mostly because when she said, "this knits at a gauge of 25st/in and the pattern calls for 18st/in."  I said, "Um, on 3s?  I plan to use 6s or 7s?"  In the end, I did not feel like the microfiber (of which Baby Cash is 15 or 18%) issue anyhow, because it is a great deal spongier than I felt I could predict, although this is hardly the only pair of legwarmers I see myself ever knitting for my tiny dancer.  So, I ditched the Baby Cash for an xf merino with a label from Sublime (though I suspect it is all milled by Rowan.  Rowan is like the Anhauser-Busch of yarn). 

While still holding the Baby Cash, I did have this very satisfying exchange with know-it-all AKC:

Me:  well, I don't see what you mean that the gauge will not be the same; this yarn has the same specs as the yarn in the book.

[I frown at the yarn specs in the book -- 145yds/2oz]

AKC:  [pertly] Fifty grams is one and three-quarter ounces.

Me:  [unable to suppress an eyeroll]  Cha, I know.  [more frowning]  That means the equivalent yardage for a 50g ball is ... one ... one hundred twenty ... seven?  Point ... seven?  Five-seven?  Is that right?  [AKC shrugs]  Well, that's too bad for you, huh?

I actually wasn't sure about the .757, I just was being an asshole.  Hahaha.  Actually, I wouldn't swear to those numbers at all, because math in my head, but just from eyeballing it falls out between 115 and 128, most definitely.

Alex, I wanted to use y0ur line:  This is why no one loves you.  But maybe that would fall within your moratoria for 2008?  I must disagree on one thing regarding customer service, because it is my favorite complaint:  Fuck a bunch of self motherfucking checkout.  If I wanted to be a cashier, I would get a job as one.  Also, the very least a company can do is have someone available to take my money and thank me!  The very least! 

There is not an advantage for me to ring my own purchases, all it does is save the company on their labor costs and what do I get in return?  Heckled by the person whose job it is to assist.  Fuck it.  I do not care about standing on line, that is what the tabloid magazines are for.  Also, the knitting of tiny things like socks, mitts, and legwarmers.      

#51

The children were eating lunch together.  All of a sudden we hear this screeeeeeam! from Fillette.  I looked at Mari, we were upstairs.  Mari said, "He stabbed her!"  We were all quiet in the house and then we heard it again, EEEEEEEEEEEE.  She came running upstairs, talking around a large bite of hard-boiled egg, blood everywhere, dripping over her lips, she was panicky, had seen the blood, I am bleeding!  Mama!  Mommeeeeeeeeeeee!! 

Mari took her into the bathroom and started her spitting out all the food into a kleenex, then rinsing.  It turned out to be that baby tooth, which has not been coming out!  I had to reach in, grasp it firmly, and pull it out!  Too late, I remembered that dental extractions are not really my area!  Ew!!  Blood everywhere!  Oh, man! 

She is elated.  The tooth fairy is so ready.  (Thanks, Daria!)

Earlier today, I set something of a PR for swearing while knitting.  Because I am a genius who was using black needles to knit black yarn.  I bought those Black Lantern needles because they are so pretty.  Rosewood is a lot smoother to knit with than bamboo, not so grippy, but after the 45th time I called my 3-needle bind-off a motherfucking motherfucker in fewer than 20 stitches, it dawned on me that I just could not see ... ohhhhh.  Dumb. 

Speaking of a PR (and motherfuckers), I wish these New Year's resolvers would go the hell home already from the gym.  They have made the Sadist quite cranky.  In an effort to separate the wheat from the chaff, he has turned up his game so high that I can only walk without actually lifting my feet of off the ground.  It is ridiculous.  I skipped his class Saturday, which was good in the end, because I happened to be at the gym later instead, in time to watch a football game that was happening [breathless] in the snow! 

I have never been a Packers fan, really, because a. from Chicago and more importantly, b. their uniform colors hurt my eyes, but in the past 14 years, I have been less of a hometown girl and more of a homelander.  What a fucking ass-whipping.  Suckas better recognize. 

exhibit a

Wednesday it "snowed," which is to say that there was something in the air, but what landed is not even enough to bother scraping from my car's windshield.  This is why a car is equipped with a windshield wiper.  Whatever.  While it snowed, Fillette and Garçon crowed and wished and hoped for "real snow," which has entered their lexicon as our children.  Whenever they complain about the "cold" or exclaim over the "snow," I vow to take them to Siberia.  They used to be afraid of it, but lately they get excited.  The thing is, Mari does not want to go to Siberia.  "It's cold there," he says. 

The funny difference between he and I is that he does not miss the weather back home.  He scoffs at the simulacrum of winter here, but at the same time he is grateful that he does not have to haul out his cojones and face weather well below 0 for a quarter of the year.  This is why every winter I am wracked by a tubercular homesickness and he just steps around me where I am prostrate with longing so he can cheerfully get into the car and enjoy the driving off without scraping.  He cannot fathom that I would want it to be 5 degrees below 0 just for old times sake.  Not to mention -40 just for a lark -- just in case we go soft. 

We just straightened this out, he and I, because Fillette was expressing a wish to learn ice skating.  I told her that it was not possible.  Mari interrupted and pointed out the indoor ice rink on campus.  I stared, speechless.  Surely I have driven past it a million times and never once equated the Indoor Ice Rink Building with, uh, ice skating.  Because, I explained to him, that is for hockey and also, Olympians, obviously. He laughed at me, while I sat there, stubbornly trying to reconcile "indoor" with "ice skating."  It seemed pitiful to me.  Much as an indoor swimming pool must seem to people from Southern California.   

I explained to my deprived child my life on ice skates.  When I was a girl, growing up not so far away from where her father was a boy, I went ice skating nearly every short afternoon all winter long with an assortment of cousins and neighbors and pals.  The park near my house then, very much like the park near her house now, had a large depression in its landscape.  The fabulous Chicago Park District filled it with water every year and we skated, all the time.  This was in the late 1970s, when even young children in big cities were allowed to go outside and play without the smothering of constant caregiving. 

I was as old then as Garçon is now, and he is barely allowed to play in front of the house with his sister.  Not because I think it is unsafe, because I do not.  They live here.  It is perfectly appropriate.  They are not the heir and heiress to a vast ketchup fortune or anything.  The problem is that the culture says that children must be smothered by my constant vigilance every minute of every day.  So, it is a good thing that the ice skating is indoors where one needs to pay admission, for her father can take her.  Indoor ice skating would certainly break my heart.  Plus, I still think it is pathetic. 

In the area of burden of constant supervision, there was a heinie-showing incident last week at Fillette's afterschool program.  I sure do long for the days when age-appropriate developmental sex play used to mean a box of condoms, a latex dress, an innocent affect, & a fifth of Wild Turkey.  Life was so simple then.  Now there has to be handwringing.  Parenting is so difficult, not for the snap decisions I have to make.  I handled that fine, even though she made her confession while I was trying to read the Sunday magazine section (unfair!  so unfair!) and have a cup of tea.  I could not have been less prepared, unless it had been Garçon, really.  In her words:

Mama, last week?  When I was in the bathroom at [Coyote Ugly]?  My friend [Exhibitionist], showed me her butt.

[I do not hit the ceiling, but instead have spurious reaction of raising one eyebrow while not looking up from newspaper, so she goes on, gathering steam.]

Then she said I had to show me her butt back, I mean show her my butt back.  I told her it was bad behavior, but she said, uh, she told me that no one would find out and I wouldn't get into trouble, so I did.

Then I had to say something.  That is my least favorite part of parenting, the part where the child is waiting and I have to say something. No staging area!  Also, I was minding my own business, reading the newspaper.  Go talk to your father!  I mean!  I settled for saying her name in that way that mothers have, that Garçon imitates so excellently when she is on her last chance with him, all the syllables clipped off and the last long vowel taking a whole breath to get out.  She tucked her head down, "I know, I know!  I am sorry!!"

God.  Anyhow, she got a calm chatter from me about how she already knows that the least she can do to keep safe is to keep her self to herself.  Plus, "no one will find out" is the biggest flag that waves to warn of big trouble ahead.  Also, that she is at the start of a very long road of telling her friends "no" to things that she knows are bad behavior.  Last, that I know it is hard to say no to friends, that it takes great courage, but if she is brave enough to confess bad behavior to her newspaper-reading (!!) mother, that she is way brave enough to say no to her friends, for god's sake.

Her consequence was simple and direct: she could not attend her program for a week.  It was the same consequence -- albeit a longer sentence -- with the same explanation -- children who cannot take care of themselves do not get to be by themselves -- she had for the clothes-on offense of sunburning herself with delinquent sunscreen application at camp last summer.  I did not feel like I was overreacting.  My whole thing about this was to keep it simple.  Upbeat!  Sex-positive!  Which was not my midwestern nor catholic childhood experience at all.

This is why although things are good in my own home, I may be a little rolly inside.  I feel all feeling-y because yesterday, while picking up Garçon, I mentioned to the program director that there was a little heinie-showing incident.  She asked me with who and I said, obliquely, waving it away, "Just girls.  In the bathroom."  But when she asked me who a second time, I caved and gave up the name.  I have no experience in this arena of dealing with administrator types, I tell myself, I told myself.  But a cursory glance at any of my behavior with other "administrators" and "experts" even in the recent past reveals that to be a pretty fat lie.  I ratted the kid out. 

After we left last night, I heard the program director calling the girl's name across the hallway.  I felt so bad.  Because I really want to believe -- I really do believe -- that this incident is not a big deal.  I think that the issue with Fillette is not about heinies, but about her being able to resist the considerable lure of peers.  The complementarity of my children is thus: Garçon wants to please no one, at the expense of himself, and Fillette wants to please everyone, at the expense of herself.  I am much more worried about her long-term resistance to peer pressure than any kind of showing her butt.  This incident was hardly made about bodies at all, except for the larger issues around safety and secretkeeping. 

I have a terrible feeling that this child's mother is not going to see this in the same way.  I am trying so hard to keep my upbringing out of my children's life, but I think I just served it up to someone else's.  This is one of the great misgivings of parenting I think that people without children have -- this idea that one raises their own children, in a deeply-personalized fashion, and no one else's children are any of their concern.  Which is complete bullshit.  Parenting operates within a culture, just like all the rest.  Mari and I have opted out of so much -- institutional schooling, television programming, toys that get on my nerves -- and still, we get hamstrung and caught up by ballet and ten hours a week in a recreational afterschool program.  I can no sooner say that no one else's children affect my parenting choices or my children or my life than I can walk down the street sneezing on people and not expect it to influence my lifetime rate of contusions received.

But whatever.  Judging from the reactions we get on the regular, Mari and I are at the far reaches of still-civilized parenting, verging on the feral.  We let our children call us by our first names.  !!!  So, I guess Ratted-Out Child will have to bloom where she is planted.  I did, once.  I do wish the weather were cold enough to be purgative.  Then I wouldn't even need snow, no.  Just a nice dry day's high in the low teens would suffice.  But!  I am still less homesick than I typically am in these conditions, inside and out.  It might be time to go to the gym, anyhow.  Finally. 

          

baby sharkmouth

Fillette is dreadfully sad, for armed with a panoramic x-ray, the orthodontist reported that the right central incisor will erupt in just the same fashion.  Additionally, the upper central incisors (aka "two front teeth") will erupt in the same shark-toothsome manner, but on the front, instead of against her tongue.

Oh, she cried when I explained this to her tonight while I washed her hair --  Well, but it was ok to have one shark tooth, but not a whole mouthful!  I just want a loose tooth like everyone else!!  I feel sad for her, but not that sad.  I was sympathetic, held her a little, but told her that it was just the way it was.  We talked about how bodies do not always do what we want.

This led to talk of ballet and a tale of Madame Anna's Ballet Smackdown on a girl who was sticking out her butt while doing demi-pliés, during which talk Fillette illustrated something ballerinariffic and so pointed her toes.  I was shocked, for the child can practically fold her foot in half.  I mean, like something from The Good Earth.  This helped me do great work in the area of the dangers we court and the opportunities we refuse when talking about ideas such as "normal," "regular," and the pernicious "everybody else."  I think I did ok.  I did have to drive around late in a foggy night, alone, listening to Tom Waits, but I think it was preventative.  We should all hold for a while.