If Only Everyone Loved the Gift of a Rhino

The squeaker says that I can’t eat his toes (piggies) because he needs them to walk. He’s very earnest in his argument, so it’s hard to pin him down and threaten to attack them anway.

He also managed to talk us into buying him a rhino to add to his vast collection of animals at a toy store in Fell’s Point, Baltimore, even though he already has TWO rhinos at home. He said firmly, “I definitely want this rhino.” We tried to sell him on the unicorn, the mama lion, or the anteater. “No,” he said. “I only want this rhino. I know I have one at home, but I want THIS one, too.” We felt silly trying to strong-arm him into getting a unicorn when the kid wanted a rhino, and yet it was painful to spend $8.50 on a plastic toy WE ALREADY HAVE. (We'd promised a toy of his choice, so buying nothing at all wasn't an option.) The squeaker is SOME negotiator. His papa and I were left exhausted by the diplomatic efforts, and the squeaker left the toy store the proud owner of a new rhinoceros just like the one he already has. We should send the kid to the UN or something. Sheesh.

Now he sits on the floor of his room and plays “Fell’s Point” with his matchbox cars. This consists of making the cars drive around endlessly looking for a parking space, and then visiting the toy store. Fell’s Point, which is a waterfront district in Baltimore full of bars and touristy shops, as well as some nice places frequented by the locals, must have made quite an impression. Or at least its parking situation did.

Speaking of negotiations, I've tried to start a conversation with my many siblings about what we're doing about Christmas this year. Every year, we draw names in October and then exchange gifts on Christmas day. But I'm kind of tired of doing it, and I don't really enjoy a close relationship with many of my brothers and sisters right now. So getting them a gift would mean choosing a CD or DVD off the list they give me. Whee. And for crying out loud, we're atheists!!! I don't mind some kind of winter celebration (the solstice is a great excuse for a party, in my opinion), but I think it's time to let go of the silly Christmas present thing.

I've proposed getting together to have dinner at a fine restaurant, having an evening of board games with lots of food and drink, going out to a movie or having a movie night, or even doing some more fun variation of a gift exchange, like a chinese gift exchange. No thrilled agreement from the siblings, though. Anyway, I'm telling you this because maybe you have some better ideas. Do you?

Night in the Country

I've lived in the suburbs my whole life. Very densely populated suburbs, in fact. I grew up on less than a third of an acre a block north of the city line of a major American city. And my last house was on .07 acres. I've always lived surrounded by street lamps and store signs and glowing traffic lights.

Let me just say that in the country, it's really really really dark. Really dark!!

There used to be a street lamp in our driveway, but it was so bright that we couldn't see the stars, and there was no switch, so we asked the power company to disconnect it. Instead, we installed a motion-activated light that turns on easily when there is a breeze, but that stubbornly stays dark even as I wave my arms frantically in front of it.

When I walk to my car before dawn, it's inky black all around me, and I can hear lots of hurried shuffling and leaf-crunching in the trees and bushes around me. And on some mornings, I hear this owl hooting alarmingly in the darkness.

In the evening, If I get out of the car alone with the squeaker after dark, I have to be the grown up. I can't run pell mell towards the door, scrambling to find my keys and murmuring "Don't eat me, don't eat me!" to the night creatures hiding in the shadows. I have to walk slowly, purposefully, confidently, while he whispers anxiously in my ear, "Mama, is that sound a mountain lion? Are there hyenas out here? Do owls eat little boys?"

Awwww....

The squeaker has learned to express his appreciation for cuteness. When he sees a baby animal in a book, for example, he’ll point it out and say, “Awww!” The kid who has never cared what he wears suddenly wants to wear his rhino shirt; he picked it up yesterday and said, “Aww! This rhino is so cute!”

Anyway, when he says “awww,” I think it’s so adorable that pick him up and squeeze him and kiss him. This probably means that the awing won’t last long…

Creative Squeaker

This past weekend was an extremely busy one for the squeaker. Saturday, we visited the zoo with his cousin, the supercute baby G. This visit prompted one of the squeaker’s increasingly common narratives.

He wanted to take a toy alligator with him into the zoo, but we told him it wasn’t a good idea. He thought about this, and said, “Maybe I would drop it, and it would bounce into the lion’s cage, and the lion would see it and say, ‘What is this alligator doing in my cage?!?’ Is that right?”

“Um, yes,” his papa said. “So it would be better to leave it in the car.”

Sunday, we visited the Smithsonian Natural history museum to see the dinosaur bones. He’s always impressed by this experience. Beforehand, the squeaker ran around on the grassy national mall while his papa got him lunch. I sat on a bench and watched him run across the grass, figuring that he wouldn’t go far. But he kept going and going. He chased a butterfly for a while, but even after he abandoned pursuit, he kept running. I finally got up and chased him when I saw that he was making a game of weaving among the pedestrians walking on the pebbly paths of the mall. They would try to avoid running into him, but since he was trying to swerve in between and among them, it was nearly impossible for them to dodge him. He would practically run into their knees while they skittered around him looking perplexed at the single-mindedness of his mission. I don’t think they fully appreciated that they were effectively inanimate obstacles in his own private game of weave-among-the-knees.

Anyway, the squeaker has had lots of mama time, which always makes it hard when I go back to work. Last night, he fell asleep with his little arms around my neck. He patted me and told me I was “such a beautiful mama.” I love that kid.

Musings on Muslims

I heard this interesting interview on NPR this morning with two young Muslim women. You can listen to it here. Assia and Iman Boundaoui are smart, reflective, articulate young women.

They were talking about the hijab, or scarf, that they wear to cover their hair. They wear the scarf every time they step outside the home, even if they are just getting the mail.

They talked about how many Americans don’t really understand what the scarf means to them, and how they’ve had people say that they’re in America now, and can take off their scarves – suggesting that many Americans mistakenly view the scarves as a symbol of the oppression of women by men. The young women argued that the scarf isn’t about oppression at all, but rather about emphasizing their ideas over their physical appearance.

I have to admit that I also see the scarf in a negative way, though it’s not exactly because I perceive it as a symbol of oppression. Instead, it seems to me to be to be indicative of a religious culture that finds the physical appearance of women so distracting or so titillating that women feel that they must hide their hair (or more) beneath a scarf to be taken seriously. The scarf strikes me as a symbol of the fragmentation of a woman’s public self in that certain aspects of her physical identity are considered best hidden in public.

Certainly any woman who doesn’t run around naked in public all day acknowledges that fact to some extent. For women (and maybe men, too) overexposure risks inappropriate sexualization, and thus a woman thinks about how she wants to be perceived in a particular environment before she chooses what she wears in that environment. And in contrast to the modesty associated with the scarf, many American women go through tremendous efforts to actively promote their sexuality through their appearance despite the risk of sexual objectification.

I’ve always rejected that approach because it also seems to be a kind of fragmentation of the self in its excessive focus on physical appearance and sexuality. I consider my physical self – including my sexual self – to be an essential part of my identity, and thus I don’t try to overemphasize it or to hide it. I just am.

The justification for the scarf disturbs me because it seems to assume that features of a woman’s body are inherently so sexual that they must be hidden if a woman is to be taken seriously. It’s disturbing enough that my own culture treats mere nudity as sexual, but to extend that thinking to a woman’s hair or face – or to the exposure of any skin at all, in some Muslim countries – seems to me to be oppressive indeed, especially when Muslim men do not view their own hair or face in the same way (though there are restrictions on Muslim men's dress, too).

That some Muslim women feel “empowered” by actively hiding their hair, faces, or bodies is ironic indeed, for such empowerment is premised on the notion that their natural physical selves distract or detract from who they are, rather than the idea that one’s physical self is an integral and essential part of one’s public and private identity. To me, the Muslim woman in a scarf is as willing to fragment herself as the American woman in an excessively revealing blouse and too much makeup, though she takes exactly the opposite approach.

I was intrigued to note that according to the NPR site, Assia decided in the months after the NPR interview (which was apparently conducted in June) that she would no longer wear the hijab, though she offered little explanation.

Buy me! Buy me!

It's been raining for days on end here. We had such a dry summer, and now September has just rained endlessly.

To combat the squeaker's boredom, we offered to take him to Michael's, a craft store that sells the small plastic animals the Squeaker collects. We asked the squeaker if he'd like to get an animal to add to his menagerie.

He got very excited and shouted, "The animals will say, 'Squeaker,* buy me! Buy me! Take me home!'" And apparently they did, because we acquired a starfish, some eels, a seal, and an octopus. I didn't hear those animals appealing to the Squeaker to be bought, but one never knows.


* Except that you know he didn't really call himself "Squeaker," right??!

Poor Molly

I sang "Molly Malone" to the squeaker as we curled up to sleep last night because we'd heard it earlier in the day on a CD, and he liked it. Though the song tells of Molly's death and of her ghost, I didn't worry too much about the lyrics because I didn't think he'd really understand the song. I figured the concepts behind key words ("fever," "died," and "ghost") were abstract enough that he wouldn't know exactly what the story within the song was.

But when I was finished, he asked, "Are you sad?"

"Why would I be sad?" I responded.

"Because of Molly," he said.

Never underestimate the squeaker, I suppose. I told him I wasn't sad, because it was just a song.

Then we talked about how I would have to go to work the next day, and he told me he was sad.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because," he replied. "You're going to left me, and I'll miss you." (Those tricky irregular verbs sometimes give him trouble.)

Being Dragons

A few weekends ago, we took the squeaker to an arts festival in the small town north of us. There were balloons, face painting booths, and lots of lots of paintings, drawings, and photographs.

The squeaker was unimpressed. Because I had made the mistake of calling it a “fair,” he wanted to know where the cows, pigs, and sheep were. In fact, he spent most of his time looking behind the booths for the hidden animals despite my explanation of what the “fair” was all about.

So I think we’ll be going to a fair – WITH ANIMALS – this weekend, so as not to disappoint. I understand that this fair even features small pigs racing for the reward of an Oreo cookie.

I just hope he realizes that dragons will NOT be featured at the fair. He’s become extremely interested in dragons lately. Much of the time, he and I are actually supposed to BE dragons. I blush to report that my dragon name is apparently “Daisy,” a moniker that is entirely my own fault, since I invented “Daisy the Dragon” for one of the many stories I have made up for the squeaker.

When I am “Daisy,” the squeaker is Daniel the Dragon, and he’ll take my hand while commenting that Daniel the baby dragon would like to hold the mama dragon’s claw. I try to play along as much as possible while milking the arrangement in any way I can (“Eat your spinach…Dragons love spinach!”), but the squeaker is apt to abandon his dragon-ness when it suddenly becomes inconvenient (“No spinach! I’m NOT a dragon, Dais…mama…”)

In any case, I will be more cautious from now on when making up story characters. Daisy is here to stay, and he will sometimes ask for stories about “Mog” (Smaug, from the Hobbit). There's also Peter the Elephant and Batsy the Bat. At least we get to stomp around a lot and roar loudly while we are Daisy and Daniel.

Pay Attention!

Apparently, I would do well to heed my own blog posts.

Yesterday, the squeaker said he wanted a nack. I was baffled, and he was frustrated with my confusion. A nap? A knot? A what?!?

Why, a snack, of course. Duh.

Sssssssssssss

The squeaker has some trouble with the letter "s." He has no difficulty with some "s" words -- he can pronounce "see," "sauropod," and "stop" perfectly.

But at night, he wants to nuggle with me. And alligators live in wamps, according to the squeaker.

Best of all, he reminds me that he is, as I often tell him, my weetpea.