Tag Archives: kids

WMS, Beauty and Loving Your Hair

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Today I visited Worthington Middle School to take a picture of the awesome kids and staff, who are hard at work raising money for breast cancer research. (Look for the photo in the Daily Globe tomorrow or the next day.)

One of the girls there looked at me and told me I was pretty.

This made my day. She had an awesome pair of glasses and she was wearing a pretty cute outfit herself, I might add, and I would have told her so if she hadn’t wandered back into the lunch line, but at least I did say thank you.

This is the second time I’ve been told I was pretty in the line of duty. The first time I went around all day telling everyone a cute Latino boy had told me I was pretty, only explaining that he was about 3 years old after people looked impressed.

These days it’s hard even for beautiful people to think they’re pretty. Apparently Barbie is the ideal for this, although I don’t remember ever thinking Barbie was the icon of beauty. I had another fashion doll I liked better.

In fact, I had two. One was named Whitney. She had the longest, most beautiful dark hair, far longer than the hair of any of the blonde Barbies I had, so you could turn it and twist it into ornate updos the blondies couldn’t manage. The other one, I think, was a Teresa doll, although I could be identifying her incorrectly. I haven’t been able to find any pictures of this doll online, but she had dark hair, too, slightly reddish. It was also crimped. This was back when crimped hair was cool.

Neither of my favorite dolls was blonde. Maybe I was just a weird kid, though. Or maybe my mom (and her light brown hair, which was just as long as Barbie’s would have been in real life) has been and always will be my standard of beauty.

Why am I yammering on and on about hair, you may ask. Well, this isn’t an issue I’ve ever had to deal with, but apparently hair can be a big problem for African-American girls, or anybody whose hair has a different texture to it than the hair people think of as “normal.”

So much so that Sesame Street is doing a segment on it, with a cute little muppet with adorably frizzy hair. Watch it. It’s pretty cool.

Celebrating Things that Go Bump in the Night

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From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!
— Traditional proverb

I’ve always liked Halloween, even though it involved wearing approximately 10 layers of clothing and wandering around half-blind in the snow for hours on end, followed by watchful parents in a cozy van.

Maybe it’s because of all the free candy. Even as an adult, there’s just something about free candy. Despite the fact that as an adult, you can buy all the candy you like and eat it ‘til your teeth rot out of your head and the last time you remember coming down from the sugar high was 1991, Halloween candy still has its allure.

It could just be the variety — I can’t remember a time other than Halloween that I’ve possessed malted milk balls, caramels, chocolate bars, peanut butter cups, and Sugar Babies all at the same time, much less eaten them all within a few hours.

It’s definitely not because I like being scared. I hate being scared. And all the scares of Halloween really pale in comparison to gang wars in America, nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, civil wars in Africa or even simply the magnitude of my student loans. Pretend things just aren’t as scary as the real world when you’re an adult.

The best part about Halloween is probably that it’s “come as you’re not” day. It’s a topsy-turvy day, when people won’t think it strange if you wear spider earrings (ew!) or a wig two feet tall to work. If you want to wear a black cape and fake fangs, you can, but you can just as easily dress like a fairy princess.

I dressed up as all kinds of things when I was a kid — a polka-dotted ghost, a beauty queen, She-Ra… I think one year I was even Charlie Brown. When my cousins were fairy princesses, I decided to one-up them, and told my mother very firmly that I wanted to be king that year.

Lately, though, I’ve just been dressing all in black, wearing black lipstick and a long black wig. The effect is surprisingly unsettling, and I’m not sure I like it when small children look at me worriedly.

This year, maybe I’ll be king instead.

Lollipop Girl

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I was finally able to get this picture of a little tiny girl eating a lollipop while rocking out to the music of the Ditch Lilies.

Currently Patchouli is playing. They’re kind of a folk music group with a modern sound to it.

Another picture taken just after it stopped raining. Right now that table is chock-full of kidlets painting and having a great time.

Bear All at the Library

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For decades my parents have threatened to lock me out of the house and skip town, and today, after plenty of fair warnings, they finally did.

(They tell me they’ll be back in an hour, but I have my doubts.)

So instead of hanging out at their house, I’m sitting in a comfy chair at the library, right in front of a giant window. It’s a little distracting, but it’s fun watching the little kids go by, chasing each other, delivering Girl Scout cookies or avoiding the perfectly clear sidewalk in

order to stomp on the crunchy snowdrifts.

Some things never change. The boy across the room is reading a Berenstain Bears book I might have read when I was little; we seemed to have an endless selection of them and I went through them like messier children went through tissue paper.

The boy seems to have a much better attention span than I do, though, and isn’t looking up to watch the semi trucks and tractors go by. Shouldn’t a child have a shorter attention span than an adult? And mine continues to get worse with age. By the time I’m 90 I probably won’t be able to finish a sentence, much less a paragraph. No doubt this will be a relief to everybody else.

Other things do change. I’m typing on a laptop that weighs a lot less than the previously mentioned child, and it’s connected to the internet. When I was the boy’s age, we were impressed by computers with colored monitors and fought to finish assignments first so we could get one of the three copies of Oregon Trail.

Now I can sit here in the library and work on stories and look up the Berenstain Bears, as well as doing more traditional "library" activities–reading newspapers, browsing through magazines or wandering around the bookshelves.

Today I learned about the newest member of the Bear family, Honey, who was born in 2000, long after I’d stopped reading about the popular children’s series by Stan and Jan Berenstain. The first book in the series was written in 1962, and now there are more than 300 of them.

Of course, these things are nice to know but they’re fairly trivial, too. What’s important, though, is that when a little girl in a pink sweater and pigtails walks over to me and points at the Bear family, I can tell her who they are, and maybe when she’s learning to read, she’ll remember the Bears on my screen, and pick out a Berenstain book.

Because sometimes things don’t change, even when they do.

Babes Go Bowling

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I was invited to a five-year-old’s birthday party Saturday, and ended up spending about two hours watching tiny children bowl.

It was a little like watching an episode of the Three Stooges, but without all the violence, because the siblings were shockingly nice to each other and even the owliest child there didn’t poke anybody’s eyes. She cried a lot, but then somebody gave her some green grapes and suddenly all was right with the world.

Her grandfather ended up with a handful of green grape skins and toddler spit, but he seemed all right with it.

I miss the days when green grapes were a sure-fire cure for crankiness.

The fun started with the other, less cranky 2-year-old, who did manage to get her bowling shoes to stay on, despite the fact that they were probably twice the size of her tiny feet. They reminded her of her tap shoes, so she kept dancing in them, or at least, jumping up and down, and she kept trying to walk out into the ultra-slippery bowling lanes, which in all fairness were extremely shiny. Her mother and other random adults at the party had to work hard to keep her corralled.

Neither of the littlest two cared much for the actual bowling process, though their mothers helped them push bowling balls out into the lane a few times. These rolled at approximately .002 miles per hour and occasionally stopped or started rolling backwards, so that somebody had to edge carefully along the lane and help the bowling balls reach the pins with a firm push.

The older boys, including the 5-year-old birthday boy, both adored the bowling process almost as much as they liked the machine that spat the bowling balls back up. I’m still surprised nobody ended up getting a hand pinched between the heavy objects, but there were three or four adults for every small child.

To me, that seems like about the right ratio.

The boys loved flinging the bowling ball down the lane (usually with a shockingly loud WHOMP as it hit the floor), where it ricocheted off the bumpers at least three or four times before it made it to the pins, by which point the bowler was usually not even watching anymore. They weren’t keeping score. I’m not sure they knew that bowling has scores, actually.

And when the bowling ball finally made its way to the end of the lane, they were happy when it hit a pin at all. Every pin was a victory, and every bowler got cheers and clapping from the little ones any time they hit anything and sometimes even when they didn’t.

Which is good, because I was the semi-official Queen of Gutterballs Saturday, and there’s nothing that makes you feel good about your horrible bowling like the adulation of cute, happy, and fortunately, inattentive 5-year-olds.