The line

(I need to start out this quick entry by noting that Dessa has been in her crib for the last hour and I don't think she's shut up for more than two minutes straight. She is, to put it delicately, avoiding her nap.)

I know there are parents out there who disdain all character based toys, clothing or other accessories. I'm not especially one of them, loving Disney as I do and having a particularly warm spot in my heart for Sesame Street. But I do understand their point - there are a lot of companies trying to make a buck off your kid in whatever ways they can. They're not concerned about the messages they're sending and they're not staying awake at night worried about whether their offerings are turning kids into vapid little consumers.

But as with anything, there is a line to be drawn. I was raised to be skeptical of extremes. To claim that all character based toys are bad is just as goofy to me as saying none of them are. It depends on the message, the meaning and the timing. And the decisions about those elements are the job of the parents. Abdicating that responsibility by painting a broad brush stroke over every character-based item seems lazy.

I do and will continue to avoid some of the Big Nasties. If your kid loves them, more power to them, and you, but I have issues with them. For example, I'm not a huge fan of Barbie. Should Dessa come to love that particular franchise, I'll re-evaluate, but she'll have to come to it on her own. I don't intend to encourage it. There are the body issues, and the materialistic bent that old Barbie has, and a host of other quandaries that she raises for me. So if I can avoid her, I shall.

The entire Bratz franchise is verboten. Period. Those big-headed freaks just scream "junior high ho" to me. Why does a child require a doll dressed like a prostitute? Answer: she doesn't. There's enough out there to do battle with; a skanky doll I don't need. A skanky doll that idolizes boys and focuses so much energy on the state of her hairdo? Blech.

'Course, by the time Dess is the target age, I suspect the Bratz will have been supplanted with something else. One can hope it won't be even worse (though the rival "Flava" toy faction, with it's dolls in ripped jeans, leopard print tops and accessory graffiti wall makes me physically ill).

Fortunately my own private war on fashion dolls is some years away. These days, deciding what to let Dessa see and play with is pretty easy. I'm not a fan of any cartoon franchise whose sole aim is to sell toys. I don't know anyone who provides toys for Dessa who is. If the cartoon came first and was established and then there were toys? Not such an issue for me. And there are about a million marvelous educational toys out there that focus on the Right Stuff (counting, alphabet, vocabulary and the like). Plus Dessa doesn't watch a ton of TV and what she does see I watch with her. It's fun to sing along and count with the Count and find other things in the room that are red. We clap when Eve the squirrel finds the hidden acorn (on the aptly titled "Find the Acorn" on BabyFirst TV) and I follow up on Harry the Bunny's lesson regarding "behind" and "in front of" by showing Dessa the same concept (again, Harry's on BabyFirst - it's a subscription channel, no commercials, and the programming is either original or from other countries and dubbed, so no merchandise. We like it at our house.)

Of course, there are the classics.

I know Elmo has been merchandised to death. I just... don't have so much of a problem with him. I think he's pretty cute, for a furry monster (I'm still a die-hard devotee of Cookie Monster, myself, but I can see the appeal). His little 15 minutes on Sesame Street are sweet and educational and fun. And Dessa, as I've mentioned, loves him. She has a few Elmo outfits and two talking Elmo toys and several Elmo books and, yes, we have an Elmo flag flying on the front of the house from her birthday because I like to see my girl light up and point to it when we pull in the driveway.

I hope that we can stay open about consumerism, my daughter and her Dad and I. I hope I'll be able to explain why I find certain toys inappropriate and I hope more that Dessa will, if not agree with me, at least understand that I'm trying to do my best by her.

But more than that I hope that she'll keep showing her own good taste. Because I've gotten sort of fond of that little red monster myself.
Posted by GoddessKristin on 07/21/08 at 12:41 PM [link]

What's that kid been up to?

Quite a lot, actually. Apparently, you hit a year old and things really start cooking. Today I was thinking about all the new stuff Dessa has started doing in the past month and it just blows me away.

She can, for instance, get into all sorts of things she probably would be better off leaving alone:

I love the "Who me?" look on her face.

When we redid the kitchen last year, I paid particular attention to what would be in the lower drawers. I was only about 4 months pregnant at the time, but I knew that the pending baby would be mobile eventually and plastic containers seemed the logical thing to put in a drawer that would be so accessible. Turns out to have been the right move, but it's wild that the time has come so soon. This kid moves. She's gone from a few tentative steps just before her birthday to zooming around the place with that funky half-falling walk that toddlers have. She'll walk around in circles just to be moving.



It is due in no small part to Riley that Dess gets around the way she does. Even before she could walk, he would sit about 2 feet in front of her and watch her struggle to get to him. Then, when she was mere inches from touching him, he'd stand up, saunter another 2 or 3 feet away and sit down again.

My cat is a jerk sometimes, but he's pretty funny with the baby.



Riley is not the only animal that thrills Dessa to pieces. My mom's dog, Sally, is as much a fan of Dessa as the other way around. They get on quite well, as you can see from this picture from 4th of July. Dessa can't say "Sally" yet, but she did start saying "Puppy" last night (which sort of freaked me out because I haven't been teaching her that one and she was holding her "Puppy Love" book and bringing it to me to read when she said it).

Her vocabulary is growing. Besides "Mommy", "Mama", "Daddy" and "Nana", which were her longtime staples, she now says, "Puppy", "Mandy" (which comes out "Manny") and "Ella" (which she pronounces "Ewwa" and repeats ad infinitum when Ella is actually in her presence). When Elmo comes on (or even when she sees his picture) she cries out, "Mo!" as if they are very tight friends. She says "Moo" when she sees a cow and will buzz like a bee if you prompt her. The buzzing was particularly entertaining when she wore this outfit for the day:



The dress just cracks me up. She looks like Lucy Ricardo on drugs.

What else. Oh, Dess has been signing "more" when she's eating and I have to give myself a pat on the back for teaching her such a polite sign. This way, you see, she doesn't talk with her mouth full.

Aahahahahaaa! Yes, she does. Don't listen to me. The child stuffs her mouth with Cheerios regularly and then tries to communicate verbally, dripping cereal as she goes. My aunt got her this thing called a Munchie Mug for her birthday and if Dessa were Oprah, this would be one of her Favorite Things and everyone in her toddler audience would have one. I hand over the Munchie Mug, Dess sticks her hand in and withdraws a honking handful of Cheerios, which she stuffs in her face and then she toddles away. It's a hilarious thing to watch, but if I have to get the vacuum cleaner out once more this week, we're going to have serious issues.

Around here we refer to the Munchie Mug as the "gom jabbar". Make of that what you will.

Dessa's great love these days is books. She has her favorites but will page through anything you give her. One of her latest faves is one that her Auntie AC got her for her birthday. It's a very short (4 page) story about a tiger ("Tiger is king of this jungle" (turn the page), "One day he decides to go for a walk" (turn the page), "A banana falls on Tiger's head! (turn the page), "Monkey acts innocent" (and there's the monkey up in a tree looking all, "Wasn't me, man. Must have been a banana plane flying overhead"). The great attraction of this admittedly basic plot is that there's a button in the lower right hand corner of the book that, when pressed, emits a tinny tiger roar that Dessa is fascinated by. So I leave you with this, a short lesson in taking the simple things to heart:

Posted by GoddessKristin on 07/10/08 at 11:47 AM [link]

So thanks for that

huff, puff, wheeze

No... time... to post...

Must get back... to Facebook. Waiting... for confirmations... of friends... wheeze, puff. Will update... later. Maybe. Unless I find more friends...

(Big old shout out to Brat, who is the major reason that my laundry is left, unfolded and underneath a cat, on my couch. Thanks for inviting me to join this particular time sink!
Posted by GoddessKristin on 07/09/08 at 01:11 PM [link]

Fireworks? No thanks, I already ate.

So I took all these great pictures and video from 4th of July and of course I left both cameras at my Mom's house last night. The funny thing (or the pathetic thing, depends how you look at it) is that as I watched my Mom move the cameras from the table whilst prepping it for dinner, I thought to myself, "I should put those in the baby bag because I'll forget them on the entertainment center if I don't move them right now."

And then I reached for my champagne glass and did not move myself, let alone the cameras.

Ah well. It's not like they're far away. A 15 minute drive would retrieve them.

Eh, maybe tomorrow.

In other news, Dessa did not like fireworks one bit this year. Last year she was only 5 weeks old and didn't notice them. This year we thought she might be interested, if she was awake, and she was, so we took her into the front yard to watch our neighbors set off their Safe and Sanes. We're too cheap to buy any ourselves, but my Mom's next door neighbors treat the whole block to a pyrotechnics show, and are extremely safety conscious.

However, Dess was very unnerved by the entire spectacle, and rather than scar her for life we opted to remove her to the safety of the front window. She watched for about 6 seconds and then toddled off to the back of the house where there were no fireworks at all thankyouverymuch. Thus it was that a wide variety of lovely sparks and flames were going on outside and we were stuck in the living room watching 1776.

Did you know that the voice of KITT is in that movie? That was enough to unnerve me.
Posted by GoddessKristin on 07/05/08 at 11:43 AM [link]

Greetings

Scene: The greeting card aisle of my local mega-mart. I saunter down the aisle to the "Birthday, Humorous" section and begin picking cards at random, hoping to score a good one for my best friend's belated birthday. There is a woman a few years older than I am about three feet away, also browsing.

I pick a card, read it. I grimace. Replace it. Pick another card. Read it. Frown. Replace it. I repeat this at least half a dozen times. Where is the advertised humor? I can either guess the punchline ahead of time or it's so awful I'm glad I didn't think of it myself. Soon I notice that the woman near me is doing the same thing.

"They should hire me," I mutter. "I could do better than this."

The woman next to me looks up. "I know, huh? It's all bathroom jokes or over the hill junk. Neither of which I'm giving my Dad."

I momentarily think of my own Dad, who appreciated the good bathroom joke. I'm sorry that I can't be in this aisle trying to select just the right potty joke card for him. I'd happily pop $2.49 to make him laugh again. To see him laugh again. But I know what she means.

More tense silent reading of unsatisfactory cards. Finally, I choose one. Read it. Snicker.

The woman near me looks up hopefully. "Find a good one?"

I shake my head, even though I did. "Not for your Dad." Inside I'm thinking, "But mine would have laughed" and I wonder which of us is luckier - me, who had a Dad who laughed at bodily functions, or her, who still has a Dad to buy cards for.

I tend to think it's me, but if it is, why don't I feel so lucky?
Posted by GoddessKristin on 07/01/08 at 10:48 PM [link]