Two Short Stories About the Mermaid Girl

1. She had this "All About Me" project for school, in which she had to collect a bunch of things that "symbolized" her as a person and explain her connection to them in detail on index cards. This took days and days and occasioned much drama, of the "I don't knooooow what to doooooo, it's too haaaard" variety. And she only wrote like one brief sentence on each card. Some of them were pretty...enigmatic. So I was going over it with her and trying VERY VERY HARD (and with only moderate success) not to be a helicopter parent and tell her what to write.

One item she included was a beloved sparkly sequinny too-small shirt, along with a card that read, in its entirety, "I chose this shirt because it reminds me of my old school and of my Uncle Skaterboy."

Me: So...the shirt reminds you of your old school?

MG: Yes. Because one time I was wearing it and I bit one of the sequins right off. And that was at my old school. So every time I look at it, I think of my old school.

Me: That's a great story! I bet the kids in your class would love to hear that story!

MG: And you know why it reminds me of Uncle Skaterboy. [He gave it to her.]

Me: Sure. But your classmates won't.

*pause*

Me: Don't you want to write on your card that...

MG: NO.


2. MG was having her bath, and I was rinsing off her hair, and she was not happy.

MG: *whining like a kid much younger than 8* I want my maaaamaaaa!

Me: Yeah, I know. But I'm the one who's here, so there we are.

*pause*

Me: So...what do you say when you're with Mama, and she does something you don't like?

MG: *with matter-of-fact equanimity* I say, I want my mommy!

Me: Huh. So, what do you say when we're both there and do something that makes you mad?

MG: *quite cheerful now* I say, I wish I didn't have any parents!

Me: And what about when you're with someone else, and we're not around?

MG: *positively chipper* Then I say, I want my moms! I want my Mommy, or I want my Mama. Whichever I think of first.

Equation for a New Day

What do you get when you combine

The Mermaid Girl's newfound obsession with the movie Mad Hot Ballroom and all related dances, especially swing, merengue, and rhumba

+

The adorable orange ukelele that the Renaissance Woman gave me for Jul, after I saw another librarian singing and playing one to excellent effect at a storytime workshop and became convinced that I Must Have one

+

A happy sunny relaxed Sunday morning when none of us had to go to school or work

+

This priceless typo-d headline, and the inspired comments below the post?

Well, I'll tell you what you get. You get RW and MG dancing a box step rhumba around the living room, while I strum along to accompany them (F chord, G chord, C chord, F chord) and we all sing, to the tune of "Guantanamera":

"GUAN-tan-na-mo Bay,
I'm closing GUAN-tan-na-mo Bay,
GUAN-tan-na-mo-o-o-o Bay,
I'm closing GUAN-tan-na-mo-o-o-o Bay!"

[pause for giddy peals of laughter, and repeat]

Not dead!

You know it's been too long since you've posted when you start getting concerned e-mails from friends asking if you're dead.

I'm not dead! Not yet! I feel happy! Think I'll go for a walk! [<--Geek alert: note gratuitous Monty Python reference.]

Nope, nope, not dead this past month, just crazy what with the snow and the holidays and the running off to Florida to visit my brother, barely getting to the airport in what was I swear the very last taxi in town the morning of January 5th, and there was a REASON it was the last taxi, the driver was busily day-trading on his handheld computer as we slid through the snowy clogged streets until RW and I put on our I-Mean-It voices and made him stop. Still harrowing, though, and traffic was so nasty it took over an hour to get there and we barely made it onto our plane...

Well, anyway, we did make it to the plane, and got to Florida, and came back, and have been catching up ever since. It's almost like those lovely ten days were just a beautiful faraway dream, now it's all homework and laundry and dishes and frantic hunching over the computer on That Job. And the fog rolls in every night and sometimes during the day, so that we can't see the street corner, even, and I start to have near panic-attacks about being surrounded by haze forever.

But the snow is slowly, slowly melting, even though there are big dirty gray chunks of it still hanging around on the edges of the streets.

And this morning we gathered 'round the computer and watched as the 44th President of our home country was sworn in. For eloquence about that, I'll just point you here and here and...well...just about everywhere, today. If I try to do justice to how it feels, I might just give up altogether and then someone will have to send out a searching party to verify my continued existence. So I'll just say...it was good to see it, even on jerky live-streaming in a tiny window on the screen. It was really, really good.