Yow! This morning when the alarm went off at 6-oh-fucking-early-o’clock, I reached out an arm and smacked it, but somehow managed to turn it OFF instead of hitting the snooze button. The next time I pried an eye open and looked it was a QUARTER TO EIGHT!!! Aaagh!! Kids still sleeping, Anders still sleeping… 20 minutes of panic racing around throwing clothes on kids and jumping in and out of the shower… good thing I had a massage scheduled at 9 a.m., is all I have to say about that.
I’m in the middle of reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. So far, it’s dreamy. His writing is just wonderful, full of unexpected loops and twisty metaphors and he fully expects you to keep up with him. I read his first book, The Virgin Suicides, with mixed feelings: loved the writing, was uncomfortable with the subject matter. I’ve never been able to bring myself to see the movie, as I’m pretty sure it would be a fairly gratuitous take on the events in the book.
Work is insanely busy, but I’m sneaking in 5 minutes to write this anyway. For you readers out there, just found this wonderful website: ChickLit. I know, I know, I’m SO behind when it comes to the internet. There’s a thread on the forums there, entitled “Should We Burn Babar?” discussing the pros and cons of reading our favorite children’s literature to OUR children, when so many of them have bits that are not politically correct in this day and age. Fascinating reading anyway. Someone brings up the minstrel show in one of the Little House on the Prairie books, and denounced it for portraying African-Americans in a negative way, but to my way of thinking, this was an autobiography! That’s how things were. It’s history. Same thing goes for class differences in Victorian children’s literature. We can tell our children that some attitudes are outdated or just plain wrong, but I don’t want to deprive my children of, for example, Enid Blyton or E. Nesbit, because they had Irish maids in their stories and had storylines involving girls not being allowed to do boy things. And I certainly don’t want to deprive them of Curious George or Babar or any of the other wonderful children’s books that may have something in them that we now consider to be a no-no. Many of the things people object to nowadays are a fact of life. Or were. If we don’t learn history, we are doomed to repeat it, n’est-ce pas?
Anders has started tiling the little bathroom because the tile guy finked out on us, claiming sickness. hmph. Anders will do a better job anyway, and we’ll save money, to boot. He worked for 4 hours last night and got nearly half of the tiling done. It looks SO cool. And the best part: TWO toilets in the house. 🙂 just in time for Christmas. And my moose collection will finally have a home again.
Speaking of TWO, our other big news (relatively speaking) is that Martin is very likely going to lose his two bottom front teeth before Christmas. I can’t wait to play the song for him. 🙂 He’s so excited, because most of the other kids in his class have already lost a couple of teeth. You can see one of the adult teeth pushing up BEHIND the baby teeth (which I’m not so thrilled about because the word braces keeps flashing behind my eyes). Martin told me last night he wanted to wait until all 20 of his baby teeth had come out and put them under his pillow all at once for the tooth fairy, but I told him she was too little to carry that much 🙂