Miss Baby loves My Little Ponies. We have books ponies, tv ponies, and ponies (Miss Baby tends to put her adjectives after her nouns, as though she’s speaking French). Remember these inane pastel ponies? They have names like Pinkie Pie (Miss Baby’s favorite), Scootaloo, and Rainbow Dash. I figure, they’re better than Barbies, and much better than Bratz, even with the flimsy plots and characters. It seems that she likes them for little girl reasons: they are pretty and colorful, live in fantastic castles, sometimes fly, and are ponies on top of everything.
The odd thing is that the Little Guy likes watching the Pony cartoons. There are evidently various incarnations of the cartoon, and we’ve downloaded several from youtube. He always insists on watching them with his sister. We’re not bothered by the gender thing, but I have been wondering why he’s interested. He acknowledges that he likes the ponies, and is aware that it is a little unusual for a boy of his age to enjoy cartoons about dancing pastel ponies.
I have a theory, of course. Pony plots tend to focus on emotions: the unicorn whose horn lights up feels unhappy because she’s different, but learns to understand that her difference makes her special. The Little Guy is concerned with these kind of issues: he gets bullied at VBS, but goes back and makes friends with someone else and they stand up to the bully together. Substitute pink and purple ponies and add some cheesy songs, and there you have it.
It’s interesting; he’s the kind of boy who gets picked on by older boys, but he doesn’t just take it. When he got picked on at VBS, I told him to lie low, stay quiet, and they’d go pick on someone else. He responded, “I don’t want them to pick on someone else. I want them to learn their lesson.” Now he’s going to the Thursday events at church (fishing and the like); last week, he got picked on, but this week he made a friend, and they were silly together all day. Last week, the bully went after him by calling him stupid, and telling him he didn’t know anything about trains (the kids know what’s important to the Little Guy). He responded by telling him, “Stop it,” every time the bully said something to him. It’s interesting; he’s not a tough kid, but not a doormat either.
So, ponies all around.
Payday = Trader Joe’s run.
The Little Guy and I picked up Miss Baby at day care and headed north. We told her we were going to Trader Joe’s, which she associated with Monkey Joe’s. That set her off: “Miss Baby go to Ponies Joe’s. Little Guy go to Train Joe’s. Mommy go to Trader Joe’s.” We asked about Daddy, who was at home working, and she said, “Daddy be right back.” Very cute. But she kept talking about “Ponies Joe’s” for the next hour, which became wearying. When we stopped for dinner at Waffle House, she burst into tears because it wasn’t Ponies Joe’s. (How on earth I was supposed to find Ponies Joe’s, I don’t know).
After some chocolate milk and bacon and eggs, she didn’t want to leave the restaurant, and had to hauled off. However, she recognized Trader Joe’s as “red carts” and eagerly pushed her little grocery cart through the store, getting two of everything and putting one item in her basket and one in the Little Guy’s. When we were almost done, I realized we had no rice, and we went back to look for it. We found it on a shelf on Miss Baby’s eye level, and she happily loaded up.
As we left, I complimented both of them, in very specific terms, on their helpful behavoir in the grocery store. Miss Baby was clearly pleased with herself, and added, “And Miss Baby found the rice.”
On the way home, she was very silly, calling horses “cows.” Then we passed a field with several trees, and she said, “Look, Mommy, cows!” I told her they were trees, and she laughed and called them cows again. We went back and forth like this for some time. She has a very eccentric sense of humor.
So: a mostly good trip, with some troubles caused by the absence of “Ponies Joe’s,” but exhausting overall. However, now I have wine.
Poor Little Guy — he was bullied at VBS today. He’s among the youngest in his rather large class, and the big boys picked on him all day. When the teacher said something, they lied to her and said they weren’t laughing at the Little Guy. He was bothered that they would lie to the teacher, and a little relieved when I told him the teacher hadn’t believed him. I know this, because the VBS director called us to discuss moving the Little Guy down to the K-1 class. The thing is, he thought he’d had a nice day, aside from the bullying, and it never had occurred to him to change classes or not go tomorrow. We’ve discussed how he can respond to the bullies tomorrow, and he seems sanguine about it. My Little Guy is definitely going to have to learn to deal with bullies in his life, but I wish he didn’t have to do it at church.
The thing is, one of the big themes of this VBS curriculum is community. Even the Little Guy could sense the irony in the fact that they discussed trust today.
Miss Baby had her big day today. She woke up to balloons tied to her chair at the breakfast table. She ran around the house with them, sharing eagerly and willingly with all of us. The sharing was not optional, btw; I ate breakfast while holding onto mine. She had worn herself out so much that she had a little meltdown during children’s church, but lunch and a “nap” settled her enough that we could celebrate as we’d planned. We took her to Monkey Joe’s (Mookie Joes, as she puts it), which is essentially a large room with half-a-dozen bouncy houses/slides. This is the smartest business model ever; keep it clean, pay the electric bill for all those blowers, and rake in the cash. They jumped for nearly 2 hours, then we left for dinner. She was eager for burritos, but spent the entire time at the restaurant going to the bathroom. Not actually using it, just visiting. She’s got this whole Lady MacBeth thing going on. She watched Brazil beat Ivory Coast on Telemundo, which pleased her. (My rules are simple: Dodgers in baseball, Brazil in World Cup; everything else is up to you).
We came home for purple birthday cake, which pleased her tremendously, even though she didn’t eat much of it. She did try to eat the candle, though. Then: time for presents. We had Father’s day presents and birthday presents. Miss Baby was delighted with everything; she played happily with the dolls and furniture she got from her Mammaw and Pappaw, identifying with the baby and calling the older girl “Cousin Jessa.” She shared the coloring book he gave her with her brother, and went outside to hit baseballs with her tee-ball set.
She was exhausted by bedtime, and fussed at the kitten when he wouldn’t cuddle with her.
It’s hard being four, and by the end of the day, she was insisting that she was three.
I’m reading a new biography of Clarice Lispector. I love Clarice, and her biography has long been somewhat shrouded in mystery. That was largely her doing; she would lie about her age and ethnicity and all kinds of things in interviews.
That said, I’m having mixed feelings about this biography. He gives a lot of historical context, which is actually quite nice, but goes about it in an odd way; he’ll write about events in Clarice’s life, then spend a chapter on the Brazilian politics of that period in which he doesn’t even mention Clarice. Sometimes it feels like he’s alternating chapters between two books; one on Clarice, one on 20th century Brazil. He also quotes Clarice a lot, which is great. Sadly, his prose doesn’t stand up well next to hers. That’s not really a criticism of his writing; few writers can stand up next to her, in my mind.
All in all, I’m enjoying the book, but it makes me wish I were reading Clarice instead.
Miss Baby is hitting the age where she’s starting to think about gender. When the Little Guy was this age, he took to vacuuming to prove his masculinity (my DH vacuums; I don’t).
Miss Baby delights in identifiying the gender of family members: “Daddy, boy; Little Guy, boy; Mommy, boy.” I’veexplained to her that I’m a girl, and she seems willing to accept that. Normally, she identifies herself as a girl, but tonight, she tried something else: “Miss Baby, half boy.”
Hmmm. To be honest, she is a bit tomboyish; we agreed that she’s got it about right. But a comment like that suggests that Miss Baby has some interesting ideas about what it means to be a boy or a girl.
She does like to vacuum.
I often think my children take after their father’s side of the family far more than mine, but this evening the Little Guy was very Walterish.
He chose to skip watching TV so he could have extra time to read his book on the history of railroad signaling with his visiting grandparents (my dad and his wife). We were passing the book along the couch, each reading one page. Grandpa commented that it was a long book, and the Little Guy said, “Yep, 158 pages.” Grandpa had the book in hand, and checked; indeed, there are 158 pages. He decided to quiz the Little Guy: “What’s on page 150?” to which the Little Guy wisely answered, “Railroad signals.” Grandpa flipped to page 150, and held it up: two photos of railroad signals. The Little Guy glanced up and said, “Those are Griswolds,” which impressed Grandpa. Grandpa, however, doesn’t like to be shown up any more than the Little Guy does, so he said, “I know those are Griswolds.” The Little Guy didn’t want to be topped, so he added, “They work by counterweights.” Grandpa knew that too, which impressed and surprised the Little Guy. At this point the conversation deteriorated into: “I knew that.” “I knew that also.” “I knew that also also.” “I knew that also also too.”
For the record, yes, Griswolds work by counterweights, which flip the sign so it can be read by the passing train and by the cars on the road.
Every summer, we try to get the Little Guy to do something athletic. Last year, he did baseball camp for two days; as far as he’s concerned, he can cross that sport off his list for life. This summer, he says he wants to do golf. Golf camp at my school is pretty expensive, but we found out that there’s a less-expensive golf camp through the city, so we’ve signed him up. He has a number of reasons for choosing golf. He played it in school, and enjoyed it. His dad plays it, and so does the dad in FoxTrot. Both are role models. The biggest reason seems to be that it is “nature-ish.” As he says, “It’s more nature-ish than any other sport I know.”
My DH jokes that, between golf and the model trains, the Little Guy is having his retirement now.
The Little Guy is also excited by the prospect of owning his own golf clubs. Me, I’m counting the days until Miss Baby finds them and whacks him over the head with one, not out of rancor, but just because she’s the sort of person who will look at a golf club and think it’s made for whacking.
We decided that it was about time to start training Miss Baby to sit in church, at least for the first little bit until the children’s sermon. She was delighted; she sat down to color the little children’s program, which was happily full of sheep. She turned around to admire the very large stained glass window of Jesus the Good Shepherd. “Baby Sheep! mommy, can you count the baby sheep!” (Many, if not all, animals are “baby” to her.) So we talked about how Jesus takes care of the baby sheep; she seems to have assumed that the guy depicted with the sheep was Jesus, and if he was OK with the sheep, he was OK with her, and she repeated, “Yeah, Jesus cares for the baby sheep! Good Night, baby sheep!” She was impressed with the organ, and when the choir sang, she sang along, making up her own words: “Baby sheep, baby sheep…”
I went down front with her for the children’s sermon, and she insisted on sitting with her brother in his class the whole time, which was OK, since she just kept coloring. Normally, she goes to the nursery for a little kid’s lesson, but not today.
So, there you have it: Miss Baby went to church and was as happy as a baby sheep, which is apparently pretty happy.
Filed under: ramblingPosted: April / 25 / 2010
On Wednesday, people kept telling me how tired I looked. When I got home, I found out why– I’d forgotten to wear makeup. I never realized it made any difference at all. I mean, yeah, I put it on in the morning and I can tell the difference between before and after, but I generally assume it wears off by lunchtime. No, I’m not going to go to the trouble of re-applying midday; I don’t even bother with lipstick. Folks may not notice when I do put it on, but apparently they do notice when I don’t. The next day one of my colleagues brought me her herbal sleep remedy. Hey, I’ll try it, and it was nice of her. It’s touching that my colleagues want to take care of me.
I also have a newish pair of shoes — navy heels. They turrned out to be a bit higher than I thought they were (I put them on, stood up, and bought them). They’re not even 2 inches high — OK, maybe 2 inches high — so we’re not talking about something shocking. But I’m very aware of them when I wear them. They’re tiring, for one, but — and I hate to say this — they do feel a bit empowering. Something about being taller, I guess. I stomp around, hoping I’m striding, but by the end of the day, I’m ready to kick them off.
