Man vs. Rhino

Last night I was chased by a slow, lethargic, sweaty rhino, thinking I should probably be very afraid. My man took no chances, and to save me, shot the animal. Our community claimed he had killed the last rhino on Earth, and for that we were going to be excommunicated. A strangely vivid, mysterious dream.

I smell

"I smell," my daughter says as she crinkles her nose. And she begins to cry. "I smell poop." It's because Mommy tooted, little one. My farts are so stinky they make her cry.

Nisa-the-Pooh

It was a warm day, and he had a long way to go. He hadn't gone more than half-way when a sort of funny feeling began to creep all over him. It began at the tip of his nose and trickled all through him and out at the soles of his feet. It was just as if somebody inside him were saying, "Now then, Pooh, time for a little something."

Anisa has started to occasionally ask for something. When she says, "Mom, I want something, pleeeeease," or, "Mama, can I have something?" she scans the kitchen counter and the top of the fridge in case she sees a snack she wants up there. By something she really means a treat. Hello, Nisa-the-Pooh?

"What about a mouthful of something?"

Pooh always liked a little something at eleven o'clock in the morning.

- from Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne

Slick

My baby is slick! I took him shopping with me and loaded the cart all around his carseat, which I placed in the middle, with groceries. When we got home, I found a triangle of brie cheese tucked under his blanket in his seat. We apparently snuck that one out of the store. Good one, son. Good one.

Bad car, ma

We've had the worst car karma this entire calendar year so far. Cars crashed by "friends" and strangers, cars broken down. . . The front of our house is starting to look like a wrecking yard. Please put a good word in to the car gods for us. We need this trend to reverse itself. Or, solution pictured?

Dander zone

You know you need to plan a serious intervention when your baby gets snowed on as you lean over him for a little bit of coo-nversation--you know that infant-mama back-n-forth? I saw the dander falling on my baby's perfect skin as I smiled at him from above and thought, oh no. This dandruff problem I have is out of hand. And guess what. I gave into a TV ad and got myself some Head & Shoulders shampoo. (They should be paying me for this.) In the shower, still with the foam in my hair, I became the girlfriend handing her boyfriend the shampoo with a disapproving face and simultaneously her man closing the shower curtain and reappearing with a huge smile and a smooth scalp. Surely enough, the shampoo worked instantly! I mean, where did all those truckloads of dandruff go (besides on my baby's belly)? It's truly a mystery. I'm a convert now. Head & Shoulders is pure magic at work.

Awkward

This is the awkward stage when I still look five months pregnant, my boobs are big enough to feed an army of babes, and my hormones are wreaking havoc on what used to be a head of thick, luscious hair. Ladies and gentlemen, I am afraid I'm going irreversibly bald. Will you still love me in a wig?

Wordiac

At 24 months, the average toddler is supposed to know between 50 and 75 words which the child is beginning to string together into two-word verb-noun "sentences" such as "baby sleep" and "want milk." Well, my daughter is way ahead of time, as you can see here. Yesterday she asked her dad, "What time is it? Is it six o'clock?"

There is a girl at her daycare who is about three months older than my daughter. Our daycare provider always raves about how this little half-white, half-Asian girl knows her ABCs, children's songs, and now her shapes. Anisa knew all of that when she turned two as well... besides the shapes. Maybe I'm overly paranoid or hypersensitive, but my half-black and half-white girl is as smart and equally verbal as the other girl, and my fear is that the daycare provider, who is otherwise kind, generous and loving, does not see that because of my daughter's race. I worry that at age two she is already being underestimated as a learner.

This possibility has inspired a strange reaction in me. I'm thinking about the long road ahead of us on which we may be forced to prove others' assumptions about our daughter's intelligence wrong. I am noticing around me the manifestations and defiances of the myth of white superiority, Asian model minority and Black inferiority. I have never been a drill sergeant-type mama; I never felt the need with my white son. So, I hardly recognize myself already starting to feel protective of my mixed-race daughter. I'm seeing how bias, albeit unconscious, could hold her back in the future and I'm feeling the urge to compensate for this. Should I be more deliberate and structured about her learning, already at age 2, than I ever was with my white son who is about to turn 10? Should I start teaching her some explicit lessons besides casually teaching her words in Czech? For instance, teach her the names of shapes and the sounds of letters which is not something I worked on with my son at this young age because, since he is white, the thought of having to prove anything about his capabilities to anyone had never occurred to me? I wouldn't want to do this to burden her. We would have to have fun as we do this--my criterion. But it somehow feels important to arm her with quantifiable knowledge for the long road ahead. Is that what King's father was thinking when he and his son embarked on Learning Time with Daddy?

My 3yr is a whiz kid. Is your Three year old on this? and he just turned 3#father#power#eachoneteach2
Posted by Donald Hill on Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Rotten

I just discovered some rotten baby spit up in my infant's neck folds. No knowing how long this moist residue has been there. Am I a bad mama?

How long?

How long is it going to take for my belly to deflate?