Don't tell Z.

Pirates stole an oil tanker off the coast of Kenya.

I'm just wondering what kind of an operation you would need to dispose of two million barrels of crude.

Fall

That's her pirate sweater. In case you couldn't tell.

Principles

So, Z.'s favorite thing about morning playtime is dress-up. She makes a beeline to the dress-up cubbies when she walks in every morning, and she squeezes herself into a pink tutu that is more than two sizes too small for her, because it is all pink tulle and sparkles. There is a pale, pale blue nighty of many flimsy layers. There is a red-violet velour dress with little silver hearts instead of polka-dots. There is a green floral smock. There is a row of purses, on hooks. There is one floppy hat.

And there is a basket of plastic, high-heeled mules, sized for preschoolers.

Dress-up has been bothering my inner feminist zealot for months now (c'mon, you know you all have one). Granted, these are discarded real fancy clothes, and there are no Disney logos, but there is also no boy-gendered dress-up, or even any non-frilly dress-up. I know that our children are geniuses of invention, but the costumes don't offer any obvious path for role-playing--no pirates or doctors or witches or firefighters or cooks or cowboys. There is the opportunity for fabulousness, and I'm not knocking that. Fabulousness is fun. But fabulousness all by itself is not very interesting. Do you keep telling stories about tea parties, and ladies who lunch?

And the shoes. The shoes. The shoes.

They drive me fucking nuts.

But I never said anything, because somehow, I had this idea that Z. wasn't wearing them. I dunno why I thought that. Of course she was wearing them; this is Z. we are talking about. Today I saw her putting them on as I was putting her lunchbox away. I went over to give her my goodbye hug and kiss, and I talked to her about how those shoes weren't good for walking, and weren't comfortable, and weren't good for her feet or her legs.

And then I asked the teacher if any other parents had said anything about the shoes. She said no, and the shoes had just come with the room, and she'd never given them much thought, except to tell the girls they could only wear them on the rug because otherwise they fall too much. (They fall too much!!! Of course they do, they are three-year-olds in HIGH HEELS!!!) And then I told the teacher (who dresses like an old school dyke, even though she is not one) that it would make me happy if the shoes were phased out.

And the teacher was totally fine with it.

So now I think we are honor-bound to buy some good pretend-play costumes for the classroom. Z. is thinking pirates.

Pirate captains.

The pirate's mama and her bandaid

Even pirates' mothers scrape their elbows from time to time.

Z. got a pirate ship for Christmas. I got a new computer. With Photobooth.

Hey, everyone.

Havdallah in November

So I realized this daily November blog thing is going to be easier for me than it would have been in, say, June, because shabbat ends before I actually feel like it's late. But then it got late, anyway.

So here I am, cheating for the first time this month, by putting up pictures that were already sitting, unblogged, in my flickr account. I uploaded them recently, but they're from September.



This is Z.'s first self-portrait. The mysterious piece of cloth is the pirate hat she wore to school on September 19th--this was kosher because our synagogue, which is where she goes to daycare, actually sort of celebrates International Talk Like a Pirate Day. After all, it's a secular holiday, unlike Halloween. (Really! Costumes only go to school on Purim.)

The tiger's name is Bannister. Every pirate needs a tiger. The arnica is for treating the bumps and bruises every pirate incurs. The tea party is just what pirates *do* at the end of a long, hard day. C'mon, everyone knows that!



Self-portrait by me, on my morning walk, at a place where the path is wide and the trees are thin. At the time of day when I'm there, almost all of the rest of the woods are too dark for my camera to manage natural light, but as the leaves come down, I may have more to show you.

Spying on myself

Okay, okay, I broke down and signed up for google analytics.

I've been puzzled by how people find me on searches (and not many do) because I figure I'm just so far down, how would you ever get to me?

A couple of the searches make sense. Two people googled the name of this blog, so of course I'm going to come up right on top. (If you're interested, the next hit is the Wikipedia entry on words in English that "may have no rhymes." The hit after that is a glossary of pirate terms suggesting "ravelin" as a rhyme for javelin.) So that's google as the blogland phone book.

Someone found me with helen hill murder, so they were also looking for me, in a way, but so many people have written about it that you'd have to be really dedicated to find a site this low-traffic (less than 100 visits this week, and that's counting all of my own). I get what's behind that search, though, since I've been through a lot of screens of google results trying to find every scrap that was written about her. Helen inspired that kind of dedication. Being touched by violent crime inspires that kind of obsession. (And if you found me that way and you're still reading, I consider you a friend.)

Others are baffling. How long would you have to plug away at "her cast" to find me? The same with stitches pediatrician.

Here are two that I couldn't guess where I'd be on the line-up, so I tried them myself:

oxygen rhymes, I'm towards the bottom of screen number four.

and, drumroll please,

if you google poopy pie, I'm smack-dab in the middle of the first screen. And as soon as I publish this I'll probably be even higher. I guess this is a mommyblog.

Z. still occasionally tells Puppy Pie "I put you in a poopy potty," and goes from there.