The Sadder But Wiser Princess

Have you ever thought, "Hey, those Disney princesses: They're all right, I guess, but shouldn't they be sexier?"  Have you ever wanted to see them in strapless dresses with heavy makeup and a knowing come-hither look?  Have you ever wished you could see what they'd look like if they were all invited to a party by Carrie and the Sex and the City crew?  Well, today is your lucky day!  Follow this link, and be sure to watch the video!

Honestly, the concept art is lovely on these, even if the physical dolls don't quite measure up, but it's deeply creepy to see Disney princesses as sex kittens.  And the foot long eyelashes they have are just weird!  I'm quite certain that Snow White has had some work done because there's no way she fills out that dress as originally drawn.

P.S. The misspelling in the ad is Disney's, not mine.  Way to not use spellcheck, marketing e-mail people!

Serendipity

I turned off the computer to get ready for bed last night just before I remembered I hadn't posted in the blog.  Didn't go back and boot up again, so I'll be making up with a Saturday post again this week.

I took Faith to the periodontist this morning.  Her gums have been perpetually inflamed above her top front teeth for a few months, so her dentist referred her to a periodontist to have her checked out.  The periodontist thinks it's probably a combination of her breathing through her mouth when she sleeps and drying out the gums and her top front permanent teeth not being fully in yet, so there are pockets in the gums where they can't bond to the enamel.  To satisfy our dentist's curiosity we're paying $90 for that opinion, instructions to put Vaseline on her gums before bed every night, and a follow-up visit in a few weeks to see if there's any change for which we'll probably pay another $90.  (Vaseline doesn't stick to gums very well, by the way.)

As we were leaving the office, however, I noticed the building directory next to the elevator and saw Jessica Brigati, DDS.  There was a Jessica Brigati two years behind me in high school.  How many Jessica Brigatis could there be?  So we went back up to her office, and I asked the receptionist if the doctor was from Oklahoma City.  Turned out to be the same Jessica Brigati, with an office five minutes from my house!  If she hadn't kept her maiden name (for the sake of her practice, I assume), I never would have known.

Goodnight, Irene

Hoping everyone on the Atlantic coast is keeping safe, but I can't help wishing we were getting some of the rain they're having too much of.  We've had less than an inch of rain since the third week of June.  Watering restrictions begin tomorrow.  I've only been watering the lawn once a week anyway and letting it go brown, as I don't care to pay for enough water to keep it green, but I've been watering the flowerbeds every morning.  I put in some new plants in early summer, before the real heat arrived.  Two impatiens have already died and withered away; a hosta and hydrangea are looking pretty sick, and I don't know if they'll pull through.  Only the crape myrtle I transplanted looks healthy after the heat streak.  Until we get some real rain, we can only water two days a week.

Next!

Last Friday's Wall Street Journal contained a feature story on "the next Harry Potter."  Publishers are apparently desperate for the next fantasy phenomenon, throwing huge advances at new novelists with books that deal with magic and the supernatural.  Possible "next Harry Potters" listed in the article include dystopias, time-travel books, sixteenth-century witches, vampires and demons, an orphan struck by lightning, and a retelling of Cinderella featuring cyborgs.  The prime candidate to be "the next Harry Potter" is a book about dueling magicians in love in a magical circus whose supporting cast includes acrobatic kittens (really!).

There's a tiny slice of perspective in which this quest makes some sort of sense: The Harry Potter series created a new generation that has read for pleasure, and publishers want to sell them more books when they get done with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, before they slip back into TV and movies and (most likely) Harry Potter social media fansites and get out of the habit of buying books.  Most of these new (hopeful) properties -- many of which have already been optioned for films before even being published -- are for young adults, those who have grown up on Harry but are theoretically ready for less PG subject matter.

For the most part, however, these publishers are grasping at straws.  Do they not remember the absolute phenomenon that was Harry Potter -- a phenomenon precisely because there had been nothing like it before, at least since the dawn of Hollywood?  What was the previous Harry Potter?  Charles Dickens?  Are they willing to wait another 125 years at that rate?

I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that there will be no "next Harry Potter."  Whatever comes next will be  sui generis, its own creature.  It's like the quest for "the next Michael Jordan" that's been going on since the original retired.  From Kobe to LeBron, the question has always been "Is he the next Jordan?"  You know what?  No one's the next Jordan.  There is no "next Jordan."  Who was the previous Michael Jordan?  Wilt Chamberlain?  Then how come no one ever called Michael Jordan "the next Wilt?"

Table Talk

Overheard at our dinner table tonight:

Faith: Mommy, do you have a headache again? (as I sighed as I got up to clear the table; I had a headache yesterday that made me cranky most of the day)

Tommy: Most days, Mommy has two headaches. (referring to the children)

Me (from the kitchen): Sometimes three.  Two little headaches and one great big one.  (meaning Tommy)

Faith (confused): How do you get two headaches?

Me: Well, there's something called "the birds and the bees"....

A history of clutter

It's been just a few days over three years since my parents moved in down the street, which means it's been just about three years since my guest bedroom hasn't been filled with boxes of stuff from my childhood that I don't know what to do with.

How can you tell when a blogger is lazy?

She posts a photo of one of her kids and calls it a night!  This is Faith's new dress I bought her on back-to-school tax-free weekend; she wore it to church yesterday.

What Faith is reading now

Faith finished her latest book, No Flying in the House.  It's not one I read as a girl but was recommended by a comment in this blog!  Honestly, I don't know how I missed reading it as a child, except that my library must not have had a copy; otherwise, it would have been just up my alley.  (Actually, I can say with almost absolute certainty that my library did not have a copy: Apart from my own minute perusals of the J Fiction shelves, I also worked there as a volunteer shelving books for a few summers and never saw it.)  She has now moved on to the next Narnia book, The Silver Chair.  It was always one of my favorites.  I liked the quest format and the directions that looked very different when you got to them than you expected.  And who couldn't love Puddleglum?

More about Boys and Girls

Faith went on to explain that there were two types of boys: wild boys and calm boys.  Calm boys you can be friends with; you don't want to sit next to wild boys because you'll get hit.

Boys and Girls

I took the kids to McDonald's today.  The Playplace was busy, since school hasn't started yet.  Faith met a red-headed boy her age, and the two proceeded to spend the next 2 hours together, mostly sitting up in the Playplace and talking to each other.  I eavesdropped when possible: he asked if she'd ever had iodine put on a scrape -- "It's out a brown jar, and it stings" -- and they talked about Star Wars, the Lego video game variety, I found out later.  He must have been funny because she laughed and laughed.  It was like foreshadowing: both of them practicing for being teenagers.

Faith was eager to tell Tommy about her "new boyfriend" when he got home.  (She never bothered to learn his name, so she couldn't have gotten that serious.)  Tommy was less than thrilled to hear his baby girl was already interested in boys.  He reminded her of one of her favorite songs from Lego Rock Band, "Boys and Girls" by Good Charlotte: "Girls don't like boys, remember?"  She looked at him and told him bluntly, "That song is a big lie."

Another sleepover

Faith had another abbreviated sleepover with Olivia last night.  Tommy walked her across the street at 8:45 last night, and she came back this morning just before 9, when Olivia's mom had to go to work.  Easiest sleepovers ever, in my book.  Eric hardly has time to whine about missing her.

States and capitals

When my mom walked Faith back up the street after she spent Sunday afternoon at my parents' house, she was telling us how Faith was learning all the states' capitals from a puzzle of the United States she plays with there.  We spent some time quizzing her, naming the state and asking her the capital.  When we got to Nebraska, she paused to think for several seconds, then Eric yelled out, "Lincoln!"  (He plays with the United States puzzle, too.)

[As an addendum to Friday's post, we woke up Saturday morning to damp pavement and cool weather, with some misty rain still falling out of the sky.  It wasn't a hard rain, and it only made it more humid when the sun came out and it heated up again; but it was appreciated.]

Talking about the weather

A line of thunderstorms blew through to just north and west of us yesterday and broke our triple-digit-high streak two days shy of the record.  The temperature dropped ten degrees, and although the lovely wind smelling of rain and the clouds quickly dissipated, there wasn't enough time left in the afternoon to heat up again; we fell three degrees shy of 100.

We did make it to triple digits today, but around sunset, more teasing clouds blew in from the west.  There was lightning and thunder and even a few small drops that fell before evaporating on our driveway, but once again, no rain.  :(

Really-Not-All-That-Dramatic Home Makeover

Here is our house the day before they put on our new energy-efficient roof (you can see the roofing materials waiting prominently in the foreground):

And here (big reveal) is our house with the new roof and gutters (gutters were just replaced on Wednesday):

See the big difference?  Yeah, not so much.  But the roof is a little more interesting-looking with a speckly texture that seems to shift when you look at it from different directions.  (That's the reflective property in play.)  And it's a good thing that you can't tell the difference with the gutters: They had to match the paint with our siding and pillars, like the old ones.

(You can also see how much deader our yard got, fifteen days farther into a stretch of forty consecutive days over 100 degrees and no rain since I don't remember when.)

Sleeping over

Faith is at an impromptu sleepover tonight with Olivia, she of the lemonade stand.  She was outside in her yard when we pulled in the driveway this evening, so Faith and Eric ran across the street to play with her.  When it was time to come in, the girls came to me begging for Faith to sleep over at her house tonight before school starts for Olivia in a few weeks.  Fortunately, the almost-5-year-old directly across the street from us, Arianna, had come out in the meantime to play with Eric and distract him from the fact that Faith was going to get to go to Olivia's house and he wasn't.

It's nice to have a sleepover just a few houses down from us for a change.  No long drives or drawn-out, before-and-after playdates to justify them.  Just running across the street with pajamas and sleeping bag at bed time and coming back in the morning.

Belated birthday

Yesterday was Tommy's birthday.  It was a pretty low-key affair.  He went to work, I took the car into the shop, and I didn't bake a cake or even get him a card, although Faith made him one.  The only thing we did different was go out to eat in the evening instead of me cooking.  We didn't even go to his absolute-first-choice restaurant because it was too long a drive on too hot a day with too whiny kids who won't eat anything there.

He says I'm good, though: the PS3 I bought him back in June has me paid up through 2013, birthday-gift-wise.  ;)

Thwarted

On my last day of Zoo Camp chauffeuring duty, my Escape Hybrid stopped hybriding.  The battery stopped charging and assisting, and I was tooling around town on the undersized gasoline engine.  I called the dealership as soon as I got home Friday afternoon and made arrangements to bring it in this morning.

Now, here's what I planned on happening: I left the kids with my mom and drove up to the dealership with a bag full of all the magazines I'm still working on catching up on.  (Except for the new ones that keep sneaking in my mailbox and go on the top of the pile, I'm down to the seasonals now -- Spring 2011.  Light at the end of the tunnel!)  I knew that it would take all day and maybe more than that, but I went prepared to sit in the waiting room all day, reading magazines and watching the DIY network on the big TV.  (I've loved watching all the renovations and makeovers since Ty Pennington was only an occasional carpenter on "Trading Spaces.")  Me time!

Only the service guy would have none of it.  He told me he wouldn't even start looking at the car until 2 o'clock and offered a courtesy van to take me home.  I turned it down once, saying I'd wait and see what happened, but I couldn't come up with a good reason to refuse a second time.  "I'd rather sit and read magazines and watch TV in your waiting room all day" didn't seem like something I could try to explain.  So I came home feeling a bit sulky about my dream deferred.  Car is still at the dealership, at least overnight; they aren't entirely sure what's wrong with it yet.

Sunday blog

By the time I remembered I hadn't blogged yet on Friday, the laptop was powered down, and I was on my way to bed after a long week of driving back and forth for Zoo Camp.  One of the benefits of homeschooling is that I miss out on a lot of the chauffeuring mom-job, and I find it exhausting.

I dropped off both kids at the zoo at 9 each morning, via a carpool line, but Eric's camp was only a half-day while Faith's was all day.  Instead of driving home in the morning then turning around and going back at noon, I spent the mornings at the McDonald's nearest the zoo, reading the newspaper, working on catching up on my magazines, and taking advantage of the free refills.  (They keep it icy-cold in McDonald's, much as they did in the Dairy Queen I sat in when the kids were in Museum School.  I'm sure it's a way to dissuade people who do exactly as I do and sit for hours refilling my cup for the price of a single large drink.  I come prepared, though: in jeans and carrying a cardigan, as it's 110 degrees outside.)

At noon it was back to the carpool line to pick up Eric; then we'd go home, do his reading and math (Faith got the week off since she was out all day), get some lunch, and run any errands I had to do.  On Monday, I took Eric with me to pick up Faith at four, but he was tired and cranky and didn't want to wait in the carpool line again so the rest of the week I dropped him at my parents' house when I went to pick her up.  Thursday evening, the 3rd- and 4th-graders got to stay after the zoo closed and eat pizza and have a scavenger hunt on the zoo grounds, so we didn't pick her up until 8 o'clock.

So that's how I spent my last week and why I didn't come back and turn the computer on to blog Friday night.  I figured I'd catch up this weekend.  And I just did.  :)

Zoo Camp

August heat

The good thing about the kids going to Zoo Camp the hottest week of the year is that the traffic in the parking lot at drop-off and pick-up is virtually nil.  Wednesday is half-price admission day with free parking, and thus generally the busiest non-weekend day of the week, but even today, the parking lot was much less than half full.  The kids in Zoo Camp probably make up half of the crowd on the grounds at any given time.

Yesterday we set a new record with a high of 110.  Monday, after dropping the kids off, I saw a man walking out of a convenience store with two 10-pound bags of ice and he put them in the bed of his pick-up truck before driving away.  I'm pretty sure he got home with two 10-pound bags of water, even if he was only going a few blocks.  I can't imagine why he didn't put them in the cab where there would at least be air-conditioning.  I had experience in much milder temperatures last summer buying bags of ice to use on Tommy's knee after surgery, and even then I had melting issues by the time I got home.

Sage advice

If you set the bar low enough and only compare yourself with people who are spectacularly worse than you are, you can feel awesome about yourself without having to do the hard work of actually changing.

 -- Dave Meurer

Hot enough for you?

Today was day # 31 in a streak of triple-digit days.  (Don't even ask me how long it's been since it rained; at this point, it doesn't seem like it will ever rain again!)  Back in July, I kept thinking, "Well, it's hot now, but at least it has to break before the kids go to Zoo Camp in August!"

Well, this week is Zoo Camp, and it's predicted to be the hottest stretch of temperatures around here in more than a decade.  It was already 90 this morning after I dropped them off at 9 o'clock, and it's still 102 as I'm typing this at 8:30 PM.  The predictions for the rest of the week are highs of 109, 109, 108, and 107.  The fact that it's a dry heat is small consolation.