I biked to work despite my rusty chain, inspired by Chummy, my favorite character in the amazing TV series Call the Midwife. It's a BBC production but in the states it airs on PBS.
We don't have cable or a digital converter box on our TVs, so we can only watch DVDs and VHS tapes on the four sets that were given to us by friends and family. No worries. I checked out Call the Midwife series one on DVD from my public library, and series two is on order, so I got in line for it. Instead of waiting for the library's DVD set to arrive, though, I'll probably watch series two online. It's available to stream for free until June 18, 2013 on the PBS website.
If you can't find it for free at your public library, you can watch series one on Netflix, if you're not a total tightwad like me who doesn't like to pay for what I can get for free. Although it's good to support PBS, so maybe I should buy it from them. The show is so good, the kind of thing I'd like to watch over and over, that I might end up asking for the DVD set for--dang it, I missed Mother's Day. What's the next occasion where I can ungreedily ask for a present? I know: our anniversary. If I'm still as obsessed with the show in October as I am now, I'll ask my hubby to buy the complete series for my anniversary gift. To some girls, diamonds are a best friend. I prefer Chummy.
Or maybe we should save our money so I can fix up my old, rusty bike:
My old, rusty bike is pathetic, but at least I have the luxury of riding it on solid pavement on a quiet street. It's just under one mile from my house to my job, and I can take side-streets all the way. At least I'm not dodging cameras and lighting as I ride my bike on cobblestone like the actors have to do in Call the Midwife:
When I first got my bike, when it was not old and rusty but shiny and new, Will installed the basket in the front so I could haul my books back and forth to work at the library. I was up early, not knowing how long it would take to ride it to work. I'm not normally a morning person, but on this day I was fresh as a daisy. Excited to contribute in my small way toward saving the planet by expending my own energy to get to work rather than by burning fossil fuel in my car.
I took off down the road. It's true what they say about how you never forget how to ride a bike. It felt like I was flying. Free. With the sun shining on my smiling face. It never occurred to me that, as a frumpy, middle-aged woman, I might look like a total dork to some.
A couple of blocks into my route, I approached two tweens walking to school. I'd seen these girls in the neighborhood before, but I don't know them. Still, without thinking, I waved to them and called out a chummy "hey".
They did not wave back. The two girls looked at each other, looked at me, and then looked back at each other, bursting into a fit of laughter.
As I rode past them, at first I just kept smiling, not quite getting the joke. Then I realized they were laughing at me. A frumpy, middle-aged woman on a dorky bike that has brakes on the pedals and one gear.
But you know what? I didn't let those mean girls stop me. I certainly don't bike to work every day. I've got a compulsive lateness problem so I'm usually in too much of a rush to get to work on time to bother with airing up my tires, finding my bicycle lock, and huffing away to work. It's faster to get in my car and go. But I ride my bike to work when I find the time, or when I'm inspired to, like when I saw the wonderfully awkward Chummy learn how to ride a bike in Call the Midwife, not letting the mean neighborhood children taunt her into giving up.
Kids, get out of the way. Chummy and I have important work to do.
This 33-year-old man who doesn't know the difference between the words "siblings" and "offspring" is "winning" at life's biological race because, as of this moment, he's fathered twenty-two children, give-or-take--"roughly eighteen" he says in this video--and I've only been able to have one child.
I know, I know. Life is not a competition. But it feels unfair that in fifty years, in one-hundred years, in a thousand years and on, this man's genetic legacy will be much bigger than mine. If his kids and my kid only reproduce one kid of their own, think how much bigger of a genetic mark he'll leave on this earth than I will. This man who loves his children but who can't afford to pay for their care, leaving the state with an over $7000 per month tax burden to make sure his kids have food and shelter. This man who says he's ready to, in his own words, get "fixed". This man who named all his kids but who only gets to see about half of them one weekend and half the next. Or is that the mothers of these children he's talking about? I'm confused. I'm not the only one. This man who claims to be able to name all of his kids--remember, he named them himself--but who appears to have forgotten about half when asked to recite them.
And here I am with my one kid, Katie. Unable to reproduce another. Some days I feel like the universe is laughing at me.
Shut up, Universe. I'm the lucky one. Me with my one, wonderful kid whose existence fills me with pride and wonder and amazement and gratitude. One is enough for me. I get to indulge her with my time, guide her with my words, model behavior and teach her what I know about the world. And learn what she teaches me.
To a child the definition of a parent has less to do with whose loins they come from than whose arms consistently hold them. My genetic imprint might not be quite as large as this man with "roughly eighteen" or twenty-two or who knows how many kids, but my influence will nonetheless be impressively molded into my one, wonderful kid.
Katie had over one of her best friends for a sleep over the other night. This little girl is obsessed with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. When school was in session Katie would come home from time to time, telling me about how she got to play "Donnie Tello, because he's the smart one" with her friend during recess. But Katie never showed much interest in TMNT until her friend slept over.
Will hooked them up with an old school Nintendo version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game on the TV in Katie's bedroom. By the time Katie's friend left the next morning, Katie was jonesin' for more. She stole my tablet and watched TMNT videos on YouTube until she was quoting from them as she acted out the dramas in our living room.
"Mom. I only want green clothes from now on."
"Why?"
"Because green is my favorite color."
"Oh yeah? Remember when your favorite color was blue? When you were four? And then you turned five and started kindergarten and you heard your friends say that blue is a boy color and so you changed your favorite color to pink? But now you're changing your favorite color to green? Now that you're almost seven, you've decided to try out a new favorite color?"
"Yep."
"Why can't you just say all colors are your favorite?"
"Because my favorite color is green!"
"I see. So green is your favorite color now?"
"Yep."
"Because of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?"
"Yes! Mommy, did you know my two favorite things are green? Link wears green in The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are green!"
"Well I can see why it's your favorite."
I'm not going to run out and buy her all new, green clothes, though. A month from now she'll latch on to some other obsession. I remember what that's like. Getting Hollie Hobbie sheets for Christmas the year after your friends had all moved on to Barbie. Bragging about your new Big Wheel when your neighbor got a new two-wheel bike with a banana seat and tassles on the handle bars.
The problem with Katie's new obsession is, now I've got this song stuck in my head:
It's not a bad song. It's just not a song a 42 year-old mom can relate to. I can to this day pop in a Smiths cassette (yes, I still have a boom box) and sing along with Morrissey about how heaven knows I'm miserable now, even though I'm not often miserable any more. It's fun to relive my past, to remember my sullen teenage years with pride. I was a brave girl. I was awkward and different, but in the most endearing way now that I look back on it. I want to go back in time and kiss my fourteen year old face. I'd have to spit a glob of pancake makeup off my lips. Note to fourteen year old self: no makeup is best!
The reason this song is stuck in my head is because Katie has played it a thousand times since she found it yesterday. She raises the volume, holding the tablet on her knees as she sings along to the song: I woke up it was 7 I waited till 11 Just to figure out that no one would call I think I've got a lot of friends but I don't hear from them What's another night all alone? When you're spending everyday on your own And here it goes
I'm just a kid and life is a nightmare I'm just a kid, I know that it's not fair Nobody cares, cause I'm alone and the world is Having more fun than me tonight
And maybe when the night is dead, I'll crawl into my bed And staring at these 4 walls again I'll try to think about the last time I had a good time Everyone's got somewhere to go And they're gonna leave me here on my own And here it goes
I'm just a kid and life is a nightmare I'm just a kid, I know that it's not fair Nobody cares, cause I'm alone and the world is Having more fun than me
What the fuck is wrong with me? Don't fit in with anybody How did this happen to me? Wide awake I'm bored and I can't fall asleep And every night is the worst night ever
I'm just a kid [repeat x5]
I'm just a kid and life is a nightmare I'm just a kid, I know that it's not fair Nobody cares, cause I'm alone and the world is Nobody wants to be alone in the world.
I'm just a kid and life is a nightmare I'm just a kid, I know that it's not fair Nobody cares, cause I'm alone and the world is Nobody wants to be alone in the world Nobody cares, cause I'm alone and the world is Having more fun than me tonight
I'm all alone tonight Nobody cares tonight Cause I'm just a kid tonight
Lyrics source: azlyrics.com
Wow. Those lyrics sound like something coming out of Morrissey's mouth inside my bedroom when I was fourteen, not six. Dang, kids grow up fast these days. I wasn't expecting to deal with depressive pop songs for at least eight more years.
I asked Katie, sitting on the futon part of her bunk bed in her room, why she likes this song so much. She said this, which sums up pretty nicely why I layed on my bedroom floor listening to The Smiths for hours at a time:
"Because it makes me feel like I'm part of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle family."
We all want to belong to something. I'm not often miserable any more for many reasons, but my favorite one is because I feel like I belong to Will and to Katie.
It reminds me of this blog post I wrote. To me, the fact that so few "obese" people have "good numbers"--blood glucose, blood pressure, cholesterol, and other internal measurements of good health--tells us that too many fat people are discouraged from participating in healthy activities.
While visiting my mom last summer, we were discussing how exercise might help with blood circulation and improve the edema that gives her fits. I asked her why she doesn't like to go for walks around her neighborhood. What she said stunned me at first, and then I just felt sad.
"People will think, 'What's that fat old lady doing out there exercising?'"
To my mom, and I'm afraid to many others in the heavy-set crowd, health is an entitlement only thin people deserve.
But that way of thinking is unhealthy. Fat people, thin people, short people, tall people, all people deserve health. A fat person should not feel so embarrassed by her body that she's ashamed to move it in front of other people.
Fat people, like gay people before us, come out of the closet!
The fresh air and sunshine and fun things we can do with our bodies is amazing once we get over the fear of other people's judgment. And it's not just a health benefit for ourselves. We can change the world. Sure, I can exercise inside my own home where no one else can see me. But when more fat people get out and say, "Hey, I'm fat AND I'm healthy" and feel confident enough to swim and dance and move our bodies in pleasurable ways for the whole world to see, it can create a cultural shift in attitudes toward fat and health.
It's scary though, to be brave in the face of adversity. Especially about something so personal as your own body. So I don't blame fat people, or anyone who has body shame issues, for not wanting to get out and flaunt it. It takes time and hard work to feel confident about your body in our dysfunctional society. I still struggle with it daily. But, as the gays say, it gets better.
June is Gay Pride Month. What month should we designate as Fat Pride Month? I can't wait til the day I see a bunch of radical fatties marching down the street, flabby-arm-in-flabby-arm, fighting for our right to live and love and be who we are, free from other people's judgment.
Do you suffer from SDS? Here's a brilliant TEDTalk by Golda Poretsky. You will shake your head and say, "yes" out-loud as you watch it.
"This year alone Americans are going to spend sixty-two billion dollars on diets and diet products."
"Accepting your body just as it is, to me, this is one of the greatest peace movements of our time. Because if you can let go of the judgment around your body and other peoples' bodies, if you can stop denigrating your own body and saying negative things about yourself, it creates an amazing sort of peace."
Got Scale Dependent Self-esteem you can't seem to shake? The cure is body love. Shake it no matter what your size or ability! Be proud of your vessel. When you love yourself others become more lovable. Spread the love!
Wouldn't it be wonderful to wake up tomorrow and we all decided to love ourselves and each other?
One of Katie's classmates had a birthday party in her back yard last week. It was so cool. They had one table set up for the kids to tie-dye a shirt, another table set up for the kids to create their own picture frame, and another table set up with the grandma doing face painting. But the coolest part of all, I thought, was the tree house. The dad built it himself and it's a glorious thing. I never had a tree house growing up and my inner six-year-old gasped when I first saw it. They filled up water balloons with paint and let the kids place canvases on the ground and then climb up to the tree house to drop the paint balloons on them. My inner Jackson Pollack gasped when I saw the first paint balloon drop. It was so freaking cool.
Katie would have none of it. She did think the tree house looked cool, from down on the ground. And she enjoyed watching the other kids drop their paint balloons onto their canvases below, but after a few half-hearted attempts to climb the ladder, never getting past the second rung, she gave up.
"Don't you want to drop a paint balloon onto your canvas?" I asked, trying to sound more encouraging than critical.
"Nah. I'll just put my canvas down there and let the other kids splat paint on it for me..."
Katie is terrified of heights. She's always been on the cautious side physically--she was "late" to roll over, sit up, crawl, walk, toilet train, swing, slide, roller skate, ride a bike--but she always came around to these activities in her own time. We read the book Leo the Late Bloomer together a lot when she was younger. Mostly as a reminder to me to stop worrying, that my sweet cub is perfectly fine just the way she is.
When Katie was three she fell off a four-foot wall at the park. She wasn't physically hurt, but it freaked her out. Maybe that event made her extra cautious about heights. She'd been chasing after another girl about her age. Back then other kids' activities-- even fearless things like walking along four-foot walls--could make Katie forget her worries and join in, but now her temperament seems more fully developed and she's less inclined to follow others into what her brain interprets as imminent peril. My kiddo might be a scaredy cat but at least I know she's no lemming.
Katie's acrophobia might come from the early trauma of falling off that wall at the park. Or maybe it's just the way her particular brain is developing. Maybe it's genetic and it just skips a generation. My mom is also terrified of heights. Not only for herself. She can't even stand to watch others in situations where they could fall from a great height. Mom hardly ever bossed me around or corrected me. The word "scold" is not in Mom's dictionary. But whenever we'd go to the mall, if I came within a foot of the guard rail that protects people from falling off the opening to the floor below, Mom would yell, Get over here! like the most overprotective parent on the planet.
So when Katie and Will decided a few days ago that it was time to get a bunk bed for her room, just in time for summer sleepover season, I countered, "But what about your fear of heights? Are you going to be able to climb up to the top bunk?"
"Mom! I've been to the top bunk on Jonathan's bed a thousand times already! A bunk bed is not as tall as a tree house," she insisted.
So I dropped it and we got her a bunk bed. I doubted seriously if she's really been to the top of her cousin's bunk bed a thousand times, but if that's what it took, telling herself this white lie to get over her fear of heights, that's fine with me. I lie to myself as a form of encouragement sometimes too.
Will installed the bed and Katie slept in it all night. She loves it. She didn't even get out of bed at 4AM to crawl in bed with us like she usually does if she hasn't just fallen asleep in our bed from the start. Long after Will went to work, when I woke up sprawled out in our king size bed, alone, I smiled and thought to myself oh our big girl is growing up!
Then I heard her calling for me in her room.
"Mom! I think there's a bee in my room."
"It's just a fly, Sweetie. I saw it last night," I assured her. I was surprised our big dog Earl hadn't hunted it down and eaten it yet.
"Come check," she said.
I heaved myself out of bed and walked into her bedroom. I heard the fly before I saw it. "I can tell it's a fly by the sound it makes," I said.
"How do you know?" Katie asked.
"Forty-two years worth of experience with summer flies," I said.
She smiled and sat up. She slept all night in the top bunk, unafraid. She had even crawled up the ladder all by herself like she told me she could.
"My big girl! Sleeping in the top bunk all night!" I said.
"Uh, Mommy. Where's Daddy? I need help getting down." She smiled like she was asking for a gift she knew we couldn't afford, like the time she told me she wanted that child-size car that runs on batteries and costs $600, more than my first real car, a 1974 Super Beetle we paid a friend of my mom's $500 bucks for because it had a bad catalytic converter and made my clothes smell like rotten eggs.
"Daddy's at work. You need help down?" I asked, trying to sound encouraging and not critical.
"Yeah. I can get up by myself but I'm too afraid to climb down."
"How did you get down at Jonathan's?" I asked.
"Well, he put some pillows and blankets on the ground and I just jumped down," she explained.
"A thousand times? You did that?" I asked.
"Well, no. Just once. It was too scary to do it again."
"I see. Well, do you want me to put some pillows and blankets down for you to jump onto?" I asked.
"No! Can you just hold me while I try to climb down?" she asked.
"Sure, Sweetie."
We tried that for about fifteen minutes. Finally, she gave up. It was either trust in her mother's strength or a full bladder, but she let me hold her by the armpits and pull her down.
"Wow, Mommy, you're strong!" she said.
"Yep, I can be if I need to be, " I said.
"I'm sorry I can't get down myself," Katie said, looking down at the floor.
"Oh, Sweetie," I said, touching her chin to raise her eyes to mine. "You don't have to be sorry for that. I'm sure as you practice and get bigger and more used to it you'll learn to climb down by yourself in your own time."
"Why can't I do it now? Why am I so scared?" she asked.
"Ah, Sweetie, you just have a special brain that thinks a lot. Your brain warns you about danger faster than some other people's brains do. It's good to have a brain that thinks a lot. You come up with great ideas all the time. The flip side is sometimes you think about scary stuff a lot. Just try to take deep breaths and you'll get there with time, like you always do."
"But what if my friends tease me because I can't do it myself? Millie made fun of me yesterday because I'm six and I still have training wheels on my bike and JC is only four and his bike doesn't have training wheels!"
"Well, I feel sorry for Millie that she doesn't know people learn things at different rates and that we're all special and we all do things differently. She's going to have a hard time making and keeping friends if she keeps making fun of people for doing things differently. She's got a lot of learning to do."
"But why can't I ride my bike without training wheels but JC can and he's two years younger than me?" Katie buried her head into my armpit.
"Sweetie, I bet JC can't read as well as you can. But it's not a competition. We all learn things at different speeds. Do you want to take your training wheels off your bike and try to ride it without them?"
"No! I want to ride my bike with training wheels until I'm a grown up!"
"Ok," I said.
"Really?" Katie took her head out of my armpit and looked up at me. "I can ride my bike with training wheels until I'm a grown up?"
"Yeah. Why not? Some people never even learn how to ride a bike with training wheels. We all do things differently. In order to be a happy human being you don't have to learn how to ride a bike at all, or climb down from bunk beds. I mean, if you want to do those things you have to practice a lot to get good at them and giving up won't help you learn them, but no one says you have to do those things to be a happy person."
"Well, I'm going to be a happy person who rides a bike with training wheels til I'm a grown up," Katie insisted, with confidence in her voice.
Five minutes later, after a bathroom break, I heard Katie calling from her room again.
"Mom, can I have breakfast in bed today?"
I walked into her room and she was sitting, smiling proudly, on the top bunk again.
As a sixteen year old girl I saw the Swedish film "My Life as a Dog" at the Fine Arts Theater in Mission, Kansas. At the time it was one of my favorite films, and although I have grown attached to far more movies than this one since then, it still retains a special place in my movie-going heart. It's been twenty-six years since I've seen it and I still recall scenes from time to time.
I've been blogging a lot about body issues lately. I've become friends with several fat activists. Big bodies have been on my mind. So I've been thinking of "My Life as a Dog" and how it was one of the first times I remember watching other people respond favorably toward a large woman.
The artist's model Berit, played by Ing-Marie Carlsson, is, in the parlance of the urban dictionary crowd, a BBW--a big, beautiful woman. All the townsfolk are hot for her. The twelve-year-old protagonist nearly kills himself falling through a roof trying to peep on her during a nude modeling session. Already wide-hipped at sixteen, I vividly remember sitting in the scratchy seats under the big screen thinking to myself, "Wow, if I lived in Sweden in the fifties instead of Kansas in the eighties I'd be a beauty queen."
Here's the trailer. Warning: contains brief female nudity:
Watching this now, Berit doesn't seem that big to me at all. I'll have to go back and watch the movie on DVD and see how I respond to it as a forty-two year old woman who has learned to love her body, rather than when I first saw it, just five years after my sweet little fifth-grade self was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa after having been sent to Weight Watchers in third grade. Is it a case of I'm older now so things that seemed so big when I was a kid seem small now? Or were the pickins so slim for American images of BBWs in the eighties that I was too quick to lump not-really-all-that-big Berit into that category?
Me: "Come on, turn off the TV. It's time to fix your hair."
Katie: "But, Mooooooom. I want to finish 'Ponyo'. It's almost over."
Me: "No, it's time to fix your hair now, not later."
Katie: "Why don't we do that thing, you know, that thing? Where you hurt two birds with a rock?"
Me: "Kill two birds with one stone?"
Katie: "Yes! Kill two birds with one stone. You can fix my hair while I sit here and finish watching the movie."
Me: "There you go again. You and your good ideas."
When I was a young woman my therapist told me to "envision the life I wanted to live." She said if I could picture inside my head what I wanted my life to look like, I'd have a clearer understanding of what I needed to do to achieve those goals. It sounded to me a lot like what us laypersons call "fantasizing" but heck, I'd give it a shot.
My three main goals at the time were this: find a life partner, have a kid, publish a book.
That was twenty years ago. I'm pretty pleased with my slow, steady progress. After about a decade of being single and "working on myself," I found a life partner when I was 31. I had a kid at 35. And although I haven't published a book, at age 42 I downloaded the app to Google Drive so I can read the manuscript of the memoir I wrote, Unashamed: From Anorexia and Anxiety to Body Acceptance and Bravery, on my Google Nexus tablet as if it's an ebook. When I read it and pretend it's an actual, published ebook, it's not petty child's play or fantasy: I'm envisioning the ebook I want to publish.
Back in my younger days, when I was envisioning the life partner I wanted to have, what I saw was this: a black guy, or maybe a biracial black and white guy, with long dark hair, who was tall and kinda looked like a cross between Anthony Kiedis and Lenny Kravitz. I'm superficial, what can I say? But no, my "envisioning" went a little further than looks. I imagined this life partner of mine to be a high school teacher at some impoverished inner city school who, in his free time volunteered for Big Brothers and Big Sisters and scooped poop at the local animal shelter on the weekends and visited elderly patients in nursing homes and read them the paper or from one of their favorite novels or just sat around and chewed the fat with them and let them tell him about the good ole days. I wanted him to be the kind of person I wanted to be if I could figure out a way to heave myself out of my depression bed.
I don't know why I envisioned my future life partner to be black or biracial. Probably because I have daddy issues and I wanted to marry someone who looked the polar opposite of my own father, who is white, short, and bald. I dated a black woman for three months back in the day, but I've never dated a black man. Well, there was that one boy named Michael who in high school gave me a ride home and then kissed me on my front porch, but that's as far as I'd ever gotten romantically with a black guy. I started to say "with someone of African descent" but we're all of African descent if you go back to Mitochondrial Eve.
As things go, my life partner turned out to be tall, yes, and with long hair, yes, but he's even whiter than me. Blond hair. Blue eyes. No matter what your therapist says, no matter how much envisioning you do, you cannot predict who you will fall in love with. I lucked out. Will's better than my wildest dreams.
I still have an affinity for black men, though. Some black men walk into the library and they have those long dreadlocks or braids and I'm like, mmm hmm, that's what I'm talking about. I would never cheat on my husband. I'm not a multitasker. I can only handle one lover at a time. But come on, no matter how solidly monogamous you are, who doesn't notice attractive people? I know Will thinks lots of other women are hot and I don't feel threatened by it. If anything I feel honored that of all the hot women in the world he chose to stick with me.
I kinda feel like Jerry Seinfeld did in that one episode of his eponymous show where he makes a statement about loving Chinese women and Elaine calls him on it. Isn't that a little racist? And Jerry's all, if I like their race how can that be racist?It's not like I'm attracted to all black men. Or that I'm not attracted to white guys or men of other race and ethnic groups. Obviously. My lily-white-assed husband is who I picked to stick with partially because I love his lily white ass.
What I really love is when I see a hot black man come into the library with his white wife and their biracial kids because then I get to remember my long ago envisioned future and pretend that's my family for a minute. Just yesterday there was this family that stopped in front of my desk. The dad was black. The mom was white. The kids were biracial. And there were two grandparents with them, both white. The white grandmother pulled out a small bottle of hand sanitizer and bent over to gently rub it into both her grandkids' hands. The contrast of her old, wrinkly, pale hands against their young, smooth, dark hands was a thing of beauty.
I remember when I was a kid and we drove by the high school one day to pick up my brother and we saw a black boy and a white girl on the steps outside, kissing. My mom made a comment about how that never would have happened at her high school, that it was only in her junior year that her school was forced to become integrated and three black students began attending classes with her. I think about that time, when I was sitting in the back of my mom's Vega, the vinyl seats sticking to my thighs as I sat with the window rolled down, looking out at the world.
The times are changing. For the better. Slowly. Now it's commonplace to see white grandmothers holding their black-and-white grandkids' hands. In Katie's class last year there were twenty-two kids. Out of those twenty-two kids, eleven had white skin and eleven had brown skin, and many of those brown-skinned kids have one white parent. Katie has two classmates in the same grade, one white boy and one black boy, who are brothers. The white boy's mom is white and she had him with another white guy before she married her husband. The black boy's dad is white, so I'm assuming his ex is black, or maybe the boy was adopted. So when the white boy's mom and the black boy's dad got married, the two became brothers. This is the world we live in now. And that makes me happy.
That's why I'm disappointed to read about the Cheerios ad with a biracial couple in it that had its comments feature disabled on YouTube because so many racist rants were popping up. Bad Internet! When a hero like Charles Ramsey gets songified for his comment about how you know there's something wrong when a pretty little white girl runs into a black man's arms, I don't know whether to be happy that that Internet feels comfortable enough about race relations that we can joke about it, or to be disheartened that the Internet continues to be a cave for anonymous trolls to hide out in. But man, the song sure is catchy.
Katie has a Play-doh kit that has these three spatulas you can use to get the Play-doh out of the molds and to cut it in wiggly lines. When I was in bed with a migraine the other day, Katie was left up to her own devices.
She got out her Play-doh set and soon realized all the Play-doh was gone - dog ate some, some dried up, most of it just got used over time. Without complaint, she took the three spatulas, colored them, and taped them together to make a butterfly.
I love that she continued to use the parts of the kit to create something long after some might think the kit was worthless. I mean, who can create a butterfly using a Play-doh kit that's run out of Play-doh? Katie Bug can! The butterfly is proudly displayed, taped to her bedroom door.
