Kiss My Knits!

The last time I used Spanish on a regular basis was when I was freelance editing at Canal de Noticias NBC. They went under in 1997 so that tells you something.

Em’s party invitations went out today. I’ve looked up some phrases in Spanish that may come up should any parents call to RSVP me instead of the school parent guy, just in case. Fasten your seatbelts, this could be a bumpy flight.

Lots of other stuff to update on, including an appalling lack of yellow yarn (come on, Brown Sheep!), last week’s D&D session and some really amazing gift mail, but I’ve gotta go get Em. ¡Adiós!

Edited to add: Em came home and asked for one more invitation, for another girl. Apparently this girl asked if she could come and according to Em, “I said, ‘Let me think about it.’ ” So Em has decided she can come. That’s great! If this girl asked if she could come, I take that to mean that the other girls were excited about the party. This bodes well!

This morning I went to the doctor to get my blood pressure checked after that high reading last week. It was a good 10 points lower in the doctor’s office, back out of the OMG HYPERTENSION range. Clearly I was more “het up” about standing up than I thought, and chugging that coffee probably didn’t help. We’re just going to keep an eye on it for now and when I go in for my next physical in a few months we’ll discuss it again.

Fishwatch 2009: Two days ago I changed Kathleen’s water. After the change, while I was out of the room, Em got the net and transferred the fish back into her original bowl and scraped off a tiny piece of fin. The fish seems fine, but I’ve made it clear now that moving the fish is my job. It could certainly have been worse. I’ll be showing Kathleen a little extra TLC while he recovers.

Later that day, Kathleen was very angry, puffing and displaying at me whenever I got near the bowl. I was very surprised that he would have that kind of a memory. Kathleen must be some kind of fish genius!

Then I realized that I was wearing a burgundy shirt that was the same color as he was. I took it off and he calmed down. Then I held the shirt up to a different part of the bowl and he ignored me and flared his fins toward the shirty intruder.

Kathleen thought the shirt was another betta. Genius my eye.

This year’s birthday party has been a major source of anxiety for me. You all remember the awful party-that-wasn’t that happened when I tried to invite her kindergarten class to My Gym. But then there was the triumph of last year’s party when we got three kids to show up and they all had a good time.

This year, I had no idea what to do. Em’s going to Sunday school now but we don’t really know those kids well enough to think that they’d come to a party. And she’s in a new Girl Scout troop now, and I don’t think those kids would come either. I’ve had zero luck with the schoolkids, but in fairness I haven’t tried to contact them this year for an outside event, either.

Em really wanted a party, but I was stumped. My husband made the excellent suggestion that I write to her teacher and ask for ideas.

The teacher (best teacher ever) just wrote back. She talked to the principal (best principal ever) and they’re on board with me giving them the names of the girls Em wants to come and having their parent advocate (best parent advocate ever), who does a lot of Spanish translation for them, call the parents and explain the invitation since English is not the first language in those girls’ homes and my Spanish stinks. The principal said it was fine for them to RSVP to the advocate so they’d be more comfortable speaking in Spanish. Em has five girls that she wants to come, and the teacher says “I know with parent permission those students would love to come and be a part of her birthday.” Furthermore, the teacher is willing to help with transportation on that day if it’s an issue for the parents.

I’m going to have invitations to send with Em tomorrow so we can get this show on the road.

I swear, this school is the best kept secret in Charlotte. Take your high-falutin’ rich kid schools, I’ll keep mine, where the teachers work extra hard in the face of great obstacles to improve the lives of their students.

This would seem to be a good time to mention again that Em’s school has a proposal up on Donors Choose called “Help us improve our reading comprehension!” I say again that if you ever find yourself with spare money burning a hole in your pocket, you could do a lot worse than to help out this school and those teachers.

Did I mention that we have the best school and best teacher ever?

Oh, and on another high note – remember how the playground got torched last year? Well, the burned section was finally replaced this moth. Em and her friends can race on side by side slides again. Yay!

Emily loves M&Ms. Actually, she doesn’t care about the candy, since she’s not big on chocolate (how can she be my daughter?) but she loves the characters.

The main M&Ms site has a link to other corporate M&M sites in other countries. Emily particularly liked France’s flashy site. It has various commercials and fun animations of the M&Ms doing interesting things.

However, one of the interesting things the M&Ms do is pole dance. You heard me. The M&Ms strip. And I get that it’s a cute idea – they do a dance on the catwalk and then unzip their shell and walk around as just a big piece of chocolate. I mean, they’re big round candies, not people, and Em doesn’t get anything about sex yet, so as far as she’s concerned, they’re just dancing and doing something unexpected in removing their shells. However, Em loves dancing so she has REALLY glommed on to this.

Add to this that we’ve recently been talking about money and where it comes from, and why people get paid and it leads to this statement from this morning:

“Green got paid for doing her striptease! She took her shell off.”

I very casually asked her not to say that in school. The last thing I need is a reputation as some kind of deviant mom. Em is always very concerned when I ask her not to say or do something, because she hates to think that she might have done something wrong. I didn’t have time to get into the whys or wherefores of it before school, so I told her I wasn’t upset, it was just that it was a kind of naughty kind of dancing, so perhaps we shouldn’t talk about it at school.

So to placate me, she said, “Green doesn’t really like stripteases, but she has to do it if she wants to get paid.”

And

Em: “Red likes Green with her shell off.”
Me: “Oh, Red likes Green with her shell off or with it on?”
Em: “Yes. That’s why she does her striptease, Red likes her with her shell off.”

Great. Just great. So now Green has to strip to get paid, and she also does it to please her lecherous boyfriend, Red. There’s nothing on the French M&M site about getting paid or about Green being attached to anyone, by the way, so those are just Em’s interpretations of why Green might be doing something that I have said is naughty.

I have no idea how to begin to tackle this. I blame France.

This morning, Em asked me if she had to wear leggings. She favors short skirts for school, and when it’s cold out, I want her to have something on her legs. We checked the weather forecast. 47 right now, warming up to the high 60s in the afternoon. I said that while it was going to warm up later, it was cold this morning, so yes, she needed leggings. I could see that she was bummed but would comply, being a sweet child.

A few minutes later I found her standing in her room wearing her leggings, but no skirt yet. She looked up at me.

Em: Sometimes some other kids don’t wear something on their legs.
Me: Aaaah, I see, so some of the other kids don’t so you don’t want to either?
Em: Yes.
Me: Hm. Well, as long as you understand that you may be cold at playtime, then I think you can do without leggings today.

I didn’t even have time to finish before she shucked them off. We were ready to go within five minutes. Kids are not big on considering consequences.

This marks the first time I’ve gotten the “but everybody else is doing it!” argument and I could not be more thrilled. For most parents, this would seem like no big deal, but it took tremendous effort it took for her to express a thought of that complexity. Those thoughts are rolling around in there, mind you, but it’s easy for us to forget that when she’s not able to share them.

So yes, I am happy to roll over and acquiesce once in a while as a reward for her effort. Besides – she’s still got a sweater and a jacket. I’m only a little crazy.

Here’s what Em bought yesterday, wrapped in the Sunday comics, and stashed in the back room.

The two-disc Special Edition of Howards End.

According to Mr. Tvini, she scanned the shelves and without hesitation, selected the 2002 remake of “The Four Feathers” and this. On her own, she quickly picked this as the better of the two. She’s very decisive. Also, Mr. Tvini says the reason she picked up “The Four Feathers” was that she misread it as “The Four Fathers” and had to look at it more closely to figure out what the heck that meant.

I LOVE Merchant Ivory dramas, and believe it or not, I’ve never seen Howards End. It’s been on my list forever, but somehow I’ve never gotten around to it. Also, I’m a sucker for special editions, and eagerly pore over every little extra that’s included. How did she know? Wouldn’t you expect a kid to pick “Elmo in Grouchland” or something? The girl’s uncanny.

She and Mr. Tvini are at the grocery store, where she is selecting a cake for me. When you are nine, all birthdays must have a cake. I predict another home run selection – there are no bad birthday cakes.

The dance went great. Story and pic below cut.

Apparently Em’s school is having a dance tonight, and Em wants to go.

There will be pizza and drinks and a small prize, and I assume, dancing. Parents will drop off their kids.

So tonight Em goes to her first dance party. My baby, my baby!

Em’s school is doing testing this week. She climbed into the car after school today and we had this conversation.
Testing conversation.

“Kinzey-Lindsay likes Ben Franklin and Benjamin Banneker and Martin Luther King Jr. and John Adams.”

Well, you can’t fault Kinzey-Lindsay’s taste.

Yesterday’s snow day threw off the Jayne hat schedule. Today I have two hats to ship to New Jersey, another to finish for Illinois, and two kits to pack up for Colorado and Finland. It’ll be a busy morning.

Let’s close with a little wackiness. “Today is a good day to hand over all your cash!”

Qapla’!