Good news! It’s been a year now since I last got pregnant, not that that worked out, and I think I may actually finally be mildly interested in getting pregnant again! After the miscarriage I was stunned, then overwhelmed with the move, then apathetic and frankly too busy at the beach to care, then in a bit of denial, and now a little ready.

Not that it matters, since I won’t. I mean, hello, we’re in the middle of an international move. Sweden’s national health plan also won’t cover your pregnancy if it starts before you get enrolled. And just a few months after getting there I’d like to start an intensive year-long course in Swedish, after which I’ll need to go through the teaching (re)certification process. And then there’s the renovations we want to do. And passing the Swedish driving exam. Plus learning how to drive manual. That last one’s like a full-time job. Not really a good time to see about creating new life to care for.

But Little Girl’s three-and-a-half already. And let’s see, we wait another year-and-a-half or so to try, I get pregnant in a reasonable time-frame, I actually stay pregnant and don’t have to start over, then the baby’s born…I don’t know, that’s a lot of math, but that’s a really long time from now! Little girl’s car seat will totally have expired by then. I don’t want to buy a new one! I don’t think you realize how expensive that thing was.

And I’m starting to like babies a little bit (blame our one friend here; she has a two-week-old that never cries! It just gurgles and grabs your finger! Aww!). I’ve looked at old videos of Little Girl, too. She was so cute! If you leave breastfeeding out of it, maybe babies aren’t so bad! They can’t run away when you want to cuddle them!

Even if I decided not to do such a hardcore Swedish language program, which is my main mental obstacle to getting pregnant in the next year-and-a-half, Husband isn’t anxious to have babies. He wasn’t with Little Girl, either–it wasn’t an unbearable need for him like it was for me–though of course she’s the absolute center of his life now. Her fleeting preschool whim is his command. I’m not worried about that. He’d get on board.

But there are a lot of potential pitfalls here. The isolation of a new baby (not that I had that with Little Girl, but I have no idea about Sweden) wouldn’t be a good combo with a new country with a foreign language. Hello, postpartum depression! And Husband is having a hard time finding a job there (he’s been looking) that doesn’t require a lot of travel. Can you imagine–winter dark and cold, preschooler with cabin fever, no friends, stupid incomprehensible language, can’t drive, half-finished kitchen, bathroom with no bathing apparatus, all alone in the countryside, fussy newborn who fears and loathes my breasts? Holy shit.

That’s the worst-cast scenario. Maybe things could go differently. It’ll be a while before it makes any sense to roll the dice on this one, anyway. But it feels a little healing to want to hold a baby, even if I still have to hand it back immediately if it starts to even look like it might want to fuss.

1. Little Girl’s new tangle-preventing hairdo

2. Enjoying our new dirt pile

3. I was just about Little Girl’s age in that photograph. The older girl was my step-cousin (there are not a lot of people on my mom’s side of the family so we make the most of what we have).

4. Shiny new tricycle! That helmet has already proved its necessity.

5. Ginger-bread house!

6. Really, REALLY, into, not a Christmas toy, but making robots out of Tinker Toys from 1982.

2009 has been rather dramatically unpleasant for us. I even kept a list of reasons why:

high-risk and expensive pregnancy
extended and expensive miscarriage
weird and expensive horseback-riding situation
moved
moved really quickly
got rid of most possessions
left friends
left good teaching job
Husband traveling all the damn time to Europe
Husband commuting five hours every week
Husband work stress
my work stress
realtor problems
lost lots of money selling house
cat Tang died
Husband car accident
moving to Sweden stress and worry
roofing scam
lemon dishwasher
driveway problems
lost my glasses
constant construction/yardwork etc. noise in neighborhood
beach house living weirdness with mom
chronic arthritis pain
grandmother’s Alzheimer’s decline
granddaddy’s strokes and decline
money continually going away
two speeding tickets
broken washing machine, useless dryer

Nothing on here about Little Girl, though. So that’s good. On to 2010! It has its own massive set of risk factors, but I guess it might be okay.

It’s the end of the year and it seems like a good time to clean out my Drafts folder again and try to figure out, from cryptic notes and sometimes absent titles, what I meant to post about but did not. Usually very sensibly:

Ersatz
It starts like this, “A friend of mine, way overeducated for it, is a nanny. Her current employer has gotten all whack-jobby so she wants something new but, due to the above-mentioned whack-jobbiness, she’s nervous about” and there I stopped, below it posting a redacted version of all the back story my friend wanted to me to use while I was being her fake job reference. I had no problem with the lie: the details were what made me nervous. I’ve actually been a fake reference before, for a friend who was applying to the police force in NYC! Neither time was I called. It’s been a bit of a let-down, really. I remember once when I was doing hiring for my social work job, I called a reference and it turned out, I could tell from the answering machine, that the applicant was using her roommate as her “former boss.” The best part of this story is the social work agency was so hard-up for employees they hired the unsavvy fake-reference lady anyway.

Sick
“Omigod, I have some horrible illness that just causes high fever (102!) but no obvious symptoms (no coughing, sniffling) so no one is sympathetic. Not that it matters, since Husband had to go out of town for work again anyway. I’ve got my fever down to 100 so at least I no longer feel like I am near death.” That was a really brief illness because I think I was better within six hours of starting that draft. But I really did feel bad!

Correct
“I correct other people’s children.” Yep, it’s true. I was probably going to to on to describe specific incidences of this behavior. Hm, maybe that’s why we haven’t made any friends here.

Really good gossip about people you don’t know
Wow, I really wish I knew what this was supposed to be about! I love gossip!

Evolution
Aha, I’m not going to reprint it here, but you can imagine what follows: I’m trying, but not too hard, to be sympathetic to evolution doubters, and to explain why they are wrong. But that was way too overambitious for a post.

Passport
Oh, this was supposed to refer to this excellent post about infertility and expound on the comment I left there: “I’m a mother after infertility (2.5 years) and loss (one) and am more bemused by all the effortless fertility around me. However, the more I talk to people (and I am really open about the infertility–I always mention it in the kinds of conversations you mention above) the more I see many other people have had those problems, and if not those, then others. And I don’t feel like I am less a member of the motherhood community. Honestly it makes me feel MORE like one–like for crying out loud I WORKED to be here, I deserve it. Now when I was going through infertility, I was totally miserable and uncomfortable with fertility, but now I’m like, eh. And I’ll be honest about something else: I am a little happy that I am not so fertile and don’t have two under two accidentally now or whatever. There are some benefits!”

Religion: I just don’t get it
Again, obvious. This is how I started: “As Steven Weinberg said, ‘With or without religion you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.’ “

Awesome and Swedish all at the same time
Let them sing it for you!

What’s on her mind
A transcription of one of Little Girl’s monologues

(no title)
“At just barely three years old, Little Girl has caught on to irregular past tense verbs. “You bought that at the store, mommy!” When talking about our late cat Tang,” and that’s as far as I got. I guess writing about irregular past tense verbs is boring.

Help
Oh yes, I remember this. I wrote this whole long post about something from my past and then realized I’d already basically written that post before.

Seattle trip 2009
This is a bunch of pictures that I worked on uploading and ordering forever, before realizing I wasn’t uploading them to the private blog I keep for family.

Public work
Here we have a comparison of my two jobs and an inevitable complaint. I bet you are super-disappointed I never posted it!

Defending Sweden
Well, that certainly doesn’t sound like me.

Scary
Again something positive about Sweden. When did I write all these posts? “You know, none of this emigrating-to-Sweden business was intended to be analogous to the I’m-gonna-move-to-Canada musings many people professed during the Bush years, but it’s starting to be very troubling, even frightening, to me that right-wing domestic terrorism is, like, normal now. I feel compelled to point out that you don’t see liberals killing people who work perfectly legal jobs that they nonetheless don’t approve of. These hate-filled murderers are, to my mind, unable to cope with modernity, so act out in primitive ways.” But that’s a little mean, so I didn’t post it.

Mice on bikes*
?????????

Good things
You know me, so surely you aren’t surprised I didn’t have any actual text to go with that optimistic of a title.

The Handyman
I was writing about the handyman at the beach house, and how, in Husband’s absence Little Girl was getting attached to him and how sweet that was, but then I got all pissed of at how slowly he works and didn’t want to say anything nice.

You can’t bring it with you
Things the internet says you can’t buy in Sweden:
Adult-size broom
Large trash cans and garbage bags
Underwear if you wear over a size 10
Baby powder
Chocolate chips
Ziplock baggies
Baking soda

Posting to other blogs
Before my camera broke, I was getting really into taking pictures of things and sending them into snarky blogs. Like this one about apostrophes.

Okay, I am getting bored with this activity. There are 51 drafts left! If I posted as often as I began a post I would break the internet!

PS: Bloglines seems to be pretending my blog doesn’t exist again, but it really, really does!

Little Girl received that dress, size 18 months, as a hand-me-down at birth and I’d never found occasion for her to wear it. My mother keeps her in a constant supply of fancy clothes (they may secretly be a campaign for us to go to church; it must be working as we are going to the Christmas Eve service for the exclusive purpose of showing off the red velvet holiday dress my mom got Little Girl). Then I hit upon my plan, brilliant but frustrating (aren’t they all?) of requiring us all to wear “ocean tones.” The bottom part of my outfit was not successful so that’s why we’re cropped at the waist. We didn’t get one photo where we all looked our most attractive, alert, and cheerful, but since I’m the one who does all the work relating to Christmas cards, I picked the one in which I looked best. That’s the rule. I also get to claim all the change I come across when doing laundry.

So I haven’t been posting under the “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” guide to human communication. Just a lot of stress and illness here. Money worries. Work issues. Nothing major. It could be worse, but when did knowing that ever make anyone feel better? So my gift to you is not to moan biliously all over your holiday spirit, should you be possessed of any.

+++

Little Girl is doing well. She now likes to assign rotating names, like “Steeny, Ganina, Sito, and Loli” to her toys. Lately she’s been talking a lot about “Fweeden” and our various relatives there, with whom we’ve been talking on the webcam more often. She and her four-year-old cousin A have managed, characteristically of children, to play together despite physical and linguistic boundaries, and that’s neat to watch. Little Girl really has quite the imagination; she can be entertained merely by her own two hands for twenty-minute stretches at a time, in which they talk to each other (did you know her hands were boys?) and gambol about.

Originally, she has wanted a a remote-control helicopter from Santa. When we saw such an item in action at a family party, though, it was clear this would not be the right toy for her, and since she was kind of scared of the thing in close quarters, she agreed. Instead, she wanted a cow. Uh. So I suggested what I, as her mother, know would be a big hit with her–a baby doll you can wash in the tub–and, possessed of a high order of self-awareness, Little Girl wholeheartedly agreed. We “called Santa” to change her order. After quite a lot of research, I settled on one and ordered it and it came and I am SUPER, SUPER EXCITED about this dolly. She’ll love it.

She’s taken after my grandmother, who is constantly calling out “yoo hoo!” when she’s looking for my grandfather (which is her primary occupation, never remembering where he is if he’s not right in front of her). Now when Little Girl wants attention, it’s “hoo hoo! hoo hoo!” until you pay it. It always works since I find it so endearing.

Oh, and I discovered a solution to her tangly bedhead hair and the complaints I get when I comb it out: a braid at all times. My little girl has a hairdo! So grown up!

By pushing my craftiness to the limit I was able to produce a dress and crown for Little Girl to wear to celebrate the Swedish Christmas holiday of Luciadagen, or Santa Lucia Day. The particulars and wherefores of this custom are not especially clear to me, frankly due to a lack of interest on my part, but I understand that in Sweden the oldest girl of each family, on December 13th, wakes up the household at some godawful hour of the morning wearing a white dress with a red sash and a crown of greenery on her head lit with candles and carrying a tray of coffee and special buns called lussekatter. I also believe there’s some special song involved.

Since we’ll be attending an extended family get-together on that date (my family, obviously, since we’re in the US) I decided to torture myself by arranging for Little Girl to do this herself–complete with hand-made accouterments. But in the afternoon, and without the fire on her head, and with the buns in a bag and not on a tray, plus no mysterious song. Making the dress was such a trial (the crown was actually kind of fun) I deliberately measured it too large so as to save me from having to sew another one for a few years.

To make this event extra-stressful, I waited to inform Husband, who is sick and a big baby about it, of his requirement to make the complex saffron-infused, cat-tail shaped buns until this evening. I’m not sure how they’ll turn out, but the nice thing about putting on this performance for neophytes is that they certainly won’t have grounds for complaints as to the authenticity of the affair or the texture of the buns. Maybe rock-hard is just how they like to eat things in Sweden. Who would know?

In years past Little Girl has not been enthusiastic about Santa. The first year she was tiny and didn’t notice him. The next two years she tried very hard to pretend she was not in his lap and avoided assiduously any eye contact and did not speak to him.

But this year–this year she was into it. We’d been prompting her for weeks to think about what she’d like Santa to bring her, and after considering cows and pirate ships, she settled on a helicopter. (I think she means a remote control one like she saw at the mall; when pressed for details, she wants one “with a button” that “flies and flies and flies” and is “super big!” Also: purple.) So today when we went over to the touristy marina we visit at least once a week (it’s pretty, there’s a toy store you can spend hours in playing, and a fantastic playground) to see Santa (it was a little weird that it was warm enough to visit Santa outside; in fact, Little Girl only has her coat on for the green color it was so warm, as I inexplicably neglected to dress her festively for the occasion) she was prepared.

My Little Girl (who is unbelievably old enough to be seeing Santa for the fourth time in her life already) was happy to go to his lap, having business with him, and immediately pressed into his hand the crumpled yellow leaf she had selected from the stairs at our home for him (she is forever gifting people with “beautiful winter leaves” and twigs). She then bravely answered his questions, ever so softly or by nodding: What do you want for Christmas? Have you been a good girl? Do you help your mommy?

And then she hopped down, at my prompting thanked him and wished him a Merry Christmas, and proceeded to make lots of happy faces at us.

And then she wanted to know where her helicopter was, because, duh, hadn’t we told her Santa would give her what she asked for? Poor disappointed bunny. Three weeks has no meaning to her. But it’ll give us time to find a remote-control helicopter a three-year-old can use successfully. Hahaha!

We’ve had a roof leak much of the time we’ve been here. (It took me a while to figure it out; I just kept thinking Little Girl had had an accident, since the leak is in her bathroom). We’ve had it fixed. It still leaked. We had the roofers out again. It’s still leaking. Apparently the roofers suck. And I can’t get them back out here to work on our roof–they keep lying to me and blowing me off. (I feel like the person who complains that the food is bad, and the portions small. But I really want the same company to fix it because, you know, I already paid them to do so. Surely they know how and are just being lazy).

My keyboard has started randomly, intermittently, of its own volition, typing series of Ts. I have to reboot to get it to stop. It’s so frustrating. And kind of freaky.

Next week I have to go take care of my grandparents while my mother has a little vacation. I’m happy to help, but I’m not actually able to do so. I can’t get them to take their meds. I can’t get my grandmother to use her walker. She won’t let me change her (I know, change!) or dress her. My grandfather won’t let me cook for them. And Little Girl always gets into trouble for doing regular little-kid stuff. But if it makes my mom feel better, I’ll go. But it’ll suck. Mostly I don’t think my grandmother knows me anymore, and when she does, she just gets pissed I’m living at the beach house, and keeps asking me when we’re leaving. That or she, in her forgetting-how-to-walk Alzheimer’s way, will keep fleeing whatever room Little Girl and I are in, confused by us, I guess. And they’re both so complainy and sad. But we’ll go.

I have too much work and I can’t get it done and it’s performance review time so I can’t say no to tasks and I keep volunteering to do shit I don’t have the time or interest to do and it’s really stressing me out.

As per my mother’s request, we are getting a new driveway here. After much prep, the concrete should be poured tomorrow. I am not altogether thrilled with how it is turning out, though I think it’ll be fine. The problem is that it’s all on me since I’m the only one here. I had to get bids, I had to pick one, I had to get approval from the architectural review board, I had to work on the plans, I had to answer all the questions (“Where do you want the 4-inch sleeve?” Uhhhh…), I have to live through the work. Sometimes I really wish Husband were around more. For the roof situation, too. Partners are useful.

As a sub-topic to that, I am super-excited about the landscaping opportunities the new driveway (which is in a different place from the old one) will provide, but then we only have a few months more here and they’re mostly in winter so it’s sort of like the gardening version of blue balls–all anticipation and work and no payoff. And that’s no fun.

Our one friend here is about to have a baby and so we’ll be down to no friends at all, since obviously she’ll be in the newborn hole for at least six months.

I’ve been trying to eat really, really well, and tonight I was compelled to purchase donuts. I ate two. (Little Girl had one and a half). They weren’t even good. Now I’m irritated with myself.

Let’s see. There’s more, but they’re in the vein of “I have to move to a beautiful country with a high standard of living and omigod peanut butter is expensive there!” and “My toe hurts” so I’ll just stop.

We’ve been here over half a year and only made one mother/daughter friend combo. Our social life is a far cry from what we had before, and sometimes, like right now, that makes me sad. I’m pretty sociable, and Little Girl is, too. I’ve said it before: I miss our old friends, and I miss having friends in general. I can get by okay by talking to my friends on the phone, but it’s just not the same as getting together with another parent and his/her kids for playdates, park trips, picnics–the assorted pleasant activities you do to entertain small children and oneself.

It’s not that we haven’t met people. It’s not that I haven’t made an effort. Mostly I think it’s that we’re here temporarily, and when people find that out, they don’t want to make an effort to get to know us.

Which I get. Which is why I only just last week told our one friend that we’re moving to Sweden. We’ve been getting together frequently for months (they had just moved here, too, so she was just as eager to swap phone numbers as I was when we met at storytime at the library), but I just never brought it up, and since the move is one of the big things going on with me, that means we talked a lot about her instead, which made her like us even more. You know how everybody likes to talk about themselves.

When I finally did inform her we were “thinking” about moving to Sweden, it was calculated. We’re firmly friends now. She’s heard about the difficulties we’ve had living in a family house. She knows Husband’s unhappy with commuting five hours each way every few days and wanted a new job. She knows he has a big family. It sort of made sense in the narrative of our lives I’ve disclosed to her, even if the idea of the move as a new theory is false. She wasn’t surprised to hear it. They’re even thinking of not staying here permanently themselves. Maybe she was hedging the same way I was.

All this time I was uncomfortable with keeping our plans from her, for not being authentic, but I wanted Little Girl and I to have some buddies even more. We needed them. As it happens, we just met a new mother/daughter pair that could potentially work out great, too, but I’m not sure I even have the energy to try to strike something up, though we did exchange numbers. I really liked the mom, which makes me even more discouraged: why make friends if you just have to leave them, anyway? We don’t have much longer here. Maybe I’ll should save up my friend-making efforts for Sweden, where it will be even more difficult to connect, for so many different reasons. But is that any way to live? Putting off happiness for convenience’s sake?

My grandfather was a surgeon and another close relative is a pediatrician. I never strongly considered medical school myself, mostly knowing I was not up for the gargantuan effort, and besides, I was jonesing for a baby as early as late college, but I appreciate medical arts and sciences and have had good experience with its practitioners and, yes, pretty much believe most of what my doctors tell me.

Sure, I wish medicine were more evidence-based and scientific and I recognize the unfortunate influence of drug company lobbyists (while being grateful for medications themselves, one of which, metformin, I take daily and which has hugely improved my health), and I know that my c-section wouldn’t have been considered necessary in many other countries, and that sometimes doctors make mistakes or don’t keep up with current research and have biases and strong attachment to preconceived notions just like anybody else.

Yet on the whole I am very cognizant of my good fortune in having access to experienced, educated, and kind medical practitioners, and I believe they mean my family well (insurance companies not so much). Medicine is one of the big perks of being human, and I see it as one of the super-neato ways that human intelligence and capabilities have developed in such a way as to guide our further evolution. No longer does shitty eyesight mean starvation! No longer can a small cut you weren’t able to keep clean potentially spell death! Now you can (sometimes) reproduce even against your body’s own inclination! Now, conceivably, we could be selecting for more subtle traits (in practice, though, the typically more scaled-back fertility of the more successful population–by some definitions–is the antithesis of how natural selection usually works. Now it’s survival of the least-apt to use contraception).

My appreciation of medical advances extends to topics like immunizations, so when the pediatrician finally got some H1N1 vaccine in, I immediately made an appointment. Little Girl’s not in school or around society at large much usually, but we’re about to go on a multi-state, multi-hotel, multi-tourist trap Thanksgiving trip, so I’m glad to offer her some additional protection. And to participate in the larger societal effort to reduce disease.

Husband and I both work from home. He’s physically in the office three days a week, and I am physically in the classroom three hours a week, but for the remainder of the time for him, and about 20 hours a week for me, we’re laboring over our laptops at home. Of course, he works during normal business hours, while Little Girl and I go to storytime and put away the laundry and whatnot, and I generally toil away from bedtime (8 PM) until, occasionally, the early morning.

That totally sucks, by the way. Since Little Girl doesn’t nap, that means I don’t get that much-vaunted “break” during the day, and then I don’t really have any free time at night, because even when I cut myself some slack on my research job, I really ought to be preparing for my class, the curriculum for which is entirely new and up to me. I am often pretty tired, too.

Work is even busier for me right now (both jobs) as I’ve been asked to create and present an in-service to the other instructors on, basically, how to be as totally awesome an ESL instructor as I am. This comes as a result of my recent teaching observation, and is of course wonderful and flattering, but is a whole extra bunch of work and stressful to boot.

And things with my research job are basically fine, but right now there’s a joke about my doing “participatory research” into the use of a newly-popular mind-altering substance among the VPs (all I said was maybe we should add it to our list of substances youths abuse if it’s common enough even I’ve heard of it!), and plus I’m having to hammer out this contract with this really problematic vendor we have to use for stupid political reasons, and I also realized that I really ought to be higher up on the totem pole, job title- and compensation-wise, so I’m gearing up for my arguments on these points in my upcoming performance review.

So with all this my work is spilling into my days, which equals Little Girl in front of the television, because no other method of keeping her quiet during conference calls or careful parsing of phrases in important emails works as well. And that’s the exact opposite of how I want work to fit into my life. I want it to be this thing I do she knows nothing about, that affects her in no way, while nevertheless affording me monetary and self-esteem gains as well as an increased feeling of security and progress and, well, fulfillment in my professional and intellectual lives. I want to be an attentive full-time mother but also something of a career woman. Keep dreaming, Antropóloga.

I don’t know, I guess I developed some sort of allergy or something, but a few years ago I started being insanely irritated by wearing earrings, and I eventually gave up. But I’d like to wear them, you know? For one thing, people keep giving me earrings, so I have tons. And some I actually like.

But then I had a new problem: I couldn’t get an earring in my right ear even when I tried. And the left ear was no picnic. The holes had filled back in.

So I decided to get them pierced again. I’d had this plan in the back of my mind a bit–not like it was urgent–but last week, the day after my birthday, while running some errands, Little Girl and I passed a store that advertised body piercings. Hey, a real piercer! That sounded good! We went in and a hot Israeli guy said he could probably stretch the holes for me for 15 bucks. Sold!

So Little Girl and I followed him back to a the piercing room, which was wallpapered with photos of young ladies of dubious reputations showing off their belly-button piercings. I wanted to show Little Girl what I meant by pierced ears, so I took her over to the little display of fake body parts with piercings in them, when I realized that there were no regular ear piercings in evidence. Sure, there are noses and eyebrows and lips and other kinds of lips, but no ears, so I quickly redirected her attention.

Explaining that the piercer was “like a doctor” (she likes doctors, and plus he had on latex gloves; they were black, but still) and he was going to fix my ears so I could wear earrings, she held my hand while he stretched one hole (OUCH) and had to pierce anew the other.

Little Girl was cool with it. She asked a few times if she could have her ears pierced, too, but was satisfied with my answer that she’d have to wait until she’s 10, or maybe even 13. (She is familiar with this sort of answer as she gets it when she requests to drive the car. Also, I have no real reasoning for those ages she has to await, except that I myself had to wait until 13 and that seems…sensible).

From a mommy standpoint, I felt a little uncomfortable with the slightly sexual ambiance of the piercing parlor, though Little Girl didn’t seem to notice. The piercer’s attitude towards Little Girl was one I like, though: he neither fawned over her nor ignored her, was just matter-of-fact that she was a small person who was accompanying me. Anyway, it was hardly that transgressive a place to take her, nestled as it was between a Bed Bath & Beyond and an Old Navy.

And my ears are healing nicely, thank you.

1 vague geocaching intent
0 geocaching experience
0 geocaching plan
1 fussy three-year-old
2 lazy dogs
0 strollers
0 containers of water
0 snacks
0 maps
and…
1 faulty motherfucking GPS device

This post writes itself, right? You can probably even infer the huge fight in the middle of nowhere after wandering around for two hours and arriving absolutely nowhere.

There’s a happy ending: Husband can run really fast, so he finally went and got the car so we didn’t have to drag ourselves all the way back, and then later we used his cell phone, which has GPS that actually functions, to, uh, drive to the spot, two miles away.

Little Girl does a lot of make-believe play with various little toys (or, if we’re outside, pine cones and sticks and rocks and whatnot) where the elements talk to each other. Sometimes they’re calmly informing each other, often inaccurately, of each others’ colors, and discussing where they will go and recounting exciting trips to the playground. But often they are castigating each other vehemently: “You need to be a good listener!” And occasionally they even veer into shocking territory with their diatribes: “I don’t like you! Go away!”

What?!? Where did she get that? I’ll admit I sometimes get irritated and go off the rails a bit, but I have definitely not said that. Goodness.

Anyway, I can’t decide how to respond. It’s basically just thoughtcrime. And I know her play is where she practices life. I want to let her have her space and not feel like she has to keep tabs on where her mother is because she can do as she likes only when she has privacy (ahem, I may be projecting from my own childhood). At any rate, I’m uncomfortable with requiring her to censor herself as she plays alone at age three.

At the same time, sometimes I can’t help but pipe up in reaction to both her nasty words and her unpleasant tone. “Is that how we talk?” I’ll say, and try to figure out what prompted the outburst on her, uh, toy’s part. What do you think this is all about, and how should I respond? She did try a similar line on her father once and he totally let it slide but I made a huge deal about it and required her to apologize, but it’s less clear to me what to do when it’s part of play.

PS: Regarding my last post: fairy ballerina.