My daughter was playing with her play-doh.  She has a mold which makes cute little 3-D teddy bears out of the stuff.  I was sitting on the sofa and she brought over one of her play-doh teddy bear creations. I grasped it by the bottom and exclaimed, “Ohhh look, it’s a cute little teddy bear….” as I tilted the bear up towards its head, I noticed the entire space above the nose had been smashed in repeatedly with a pen, creating a mutant teddy bear with 8 eyes.  “It’s an alien teddy bear” my daughter explained.

I don’t recall laughing that hard in a long, long time.

 

 

For the second Thanksgiving in a row, my toddler daughter fell off a chair and injured herself almost necessitating a visit to the emergency room.  Falling out of chairs isn’t at all unusual for her, all last year she was falling out of chairs several times a week, but would always catch herself so she would get a bump and cry but no injury.  I was actually starting to be concerned that she had a neurological problem and/or a pathological need to test the limits of gravity.

Last year, just as we sat down to a Thanksgiving dinner for 16 people that I and several others spent all day cooking, my daughter fell out of the chair and SMACK on the ground, she started screaming and holding her arm strangely.  I thought she may have broken it, and screamed at my poor mother-in-law (who was having a conversation with someone else) to tell me where the nearest hospital was (more than an hour away), the result of which, on top of all the holiday stress the poor woman already experiences, caused her to burst into tears along with my daughter who as it turned out, didn’t have a broken arm, just a sore one.

This year, the night before Thanksgiving, my daughter fell out of my mother-in-law’s recliner, SMACK on her FACE.  She cut both lips, blood everywhere.  I thought she may have knocked a tooth out because I couldn’t see in her mouth very well.  We cleaned her up, she cried for an hour, her lips swelled up like Angelina Jolie on collagen, but they stopped bleeding and all her teeth were accounted for; she ran around chasing the dog shortly thereafter.  I, however, needed more than my share of holiday liquor that night.

Next year she is only sitting in bean bags.
 

I love my neighborhood for a variety of reasons, but the foremost one is my neighbors. They are hilarious. I had coffee this morning with the neighborhood ladies–all moms of small children like me–and we were talking about birthdays since mine is forthcoming. One of my neighbors who has 3 children under 6 just recently had her birthday, and related that it wasn’t exactly her best. She had just finished changing a nasty poopy diaper on her youngest when her oldest shouted “nasty poop alert” which caused her to shoot straight up with indignance, and forced a heartfelt cry from her tired mommy breast:

“I shouldn’t have to wipe asses on my birthday!”.

Amen sister.

This article at Salon I thought was very amusing

 I even wrote a letter, which was picked as editor’s choice

It has become my firm conviction that there is a gulf separating parents from non-parents that cannot be crossed with information of any type, only experience.  In my opinion, there is nothing that even comes close to as life changing as having a child (except, perhaps, death)–especially for women who leave their work to stay at home in this totally non-supportive culture.

I remember reading The Mask of Motherhood when I was pregnant and thinking how horrible and pessimistic it was.  I picked it up again six months after my daughter was born and thought-shit, this is so accurate but I couldn’t have known until I actually went through it.  That book made me feel so much better about feeling bad regarding motherhood, it was a lifesaver.  I’m willing to bet, as I wrote in my letter about the Salon article, that the author of that piece will look back at her naïveté with a chuckle several months after crossing the gulf. 

When you read negative things about motherhood when you are pregnant you think, “it couldn’t possibly be that bad!”, but, for a lot of women, it is and then some; but that’s OK, it’s normal and it will pass eventually as things get easier, every single new mom needs to have that drilled into her head.  Everyone spouts the platitude about how much you will love your child—and while it’s true—what they don’t tell you is that you will, on occasion, hate them too; that doesn’t make you a bad mom, it makes you a normal human being.

My husband is not a vegetarian. I am not a vegetarian. With a Master’s degree in ecology I am deeply familiar with and a big believer in the food chain. Humans are designed to be omnivorous. Should I feel bad about eating a cow? Does a lion? Of course not. I suppose it could be argued that lions, unlike (most) humans, don’t have a sense of morality, wherein lies my crux. In my house, we watch The Simpsons, a lot. I know it isn’t exactly appropriate viewing, but it’s the only cartoon besides Futurama (which we also watch) that I can stand, and that we can watch together without me wanting to stick my head in the oven.

I think The Simpsons is one of the best things American culture has to offer. It’s clever, hilarious, and subversive. No matter how many times I’ve seen an episode, I frequently find something new and funny that I’ve missed before, and I never tire of it. I also think Lisa, who is strong, intelligent, and skeptical, is a good role model. There is one particular episode however, that I blame for my current predicament with my daughter– Lisa The Vegetarian. As you can tell by the title, Lisa decides to become a vegetarian in this episode after bonding with an adorable baby lamb at a petting zoo. Marge serves lamb chops that night at dinner—which speak to Lisa “Lisa, I thought you loved meeeeee?” in a little lamb voice. Lisa declares that she thinks eating animals is wrong, and is a vegetarian in the series from that episode on.

Now my daughter has seen this episode at least three times, because I think it’s one of the funnier ones. However, when she recently claimed that she wanted to be a vegetarian (we hadn’t watched that episode in at least three months prior to this exclamation, but I can’t figure out anywhere else she would get the idea) I wasn’t so sure how funny I thought it was anymore.

Prior to this my daughter had eaten hot dogs, turkey, and ham with gusto. I was a little curious if she really understood what she was saying, so I asked her,

“Honey, what does being a vegetarian mean?”

“It means you don’t eat meat”.

“And why do you want to be a vegetarian?”

“Because I think killing animals to eat them is cruel”. She’s 4.

We then had a discussion about the food chain, but I can’t really argue with her logic. If she can articulate her objection that well, I am willing to support it, doing otherwise would become a power struggle and I want to encourage her to think for and express herself. From there however, we have gotten into a bit of semantics.

“Mom, where does milk come from?”

“Cows”

“Do you have to kill them to get it?”

“No honey, getting milk from a cow doesn’t hurt it, remember when you milked a cow at the State Fair?” (of course, this technically is true, but I didn’t tell her what happens to cows that run out of milk or where they go when they get old).

“Ok, then I’ll drink it”. She looked pensive for a few seconds and then said,

“What about eggs?”. Hello grey area.

Sept. 27th 2006

 Well her vegetarianism lasted about two months.  Today in the store she asked

“What are sausages made from?”

“Pigs honey”.  She looks thoughtful for a few moments….

“Well I don’t like pigs so I’ll eat that”.

 I then tried in vain to explain hypocrisy, but gave up.

Also the last episode of The Simpsons we watched mentioned “Hookers” since I don’t feel like explaining the meaning of that word to my very curious 4 year old we will no longer be watching it.