I Want to Be the Girl With the Most Cake

Say what you will about that train wreck of a woman, but Live Through This rocks hard.

This is for Badger.

And speaking of Badger, let’s talk about make-up: I rarely wear it. And NOT because I have some sort of feminist objection to it (though I did indeed dig The Beauty Myth), but because I like wearing it for special occasions, so people will say, “You look great!” Conversely, if you wear make-up all the time and then are seen without it, people will think (if not say), “You look like hell!” This way I just look like what I look like, whether I’ve just woken up, or just got out of the pool, or just left for work. Does that make sense?

Your thoughts on this? I do keep make-up in my bag in case I find myself needing to get gussied up on the fly: I have brown eye-liner, black mascara, an Origins powder that covers beautifully, and a Burt’s Bees lip shimmer that is unfortunately named Rhubarb. Putting those things on my face takes about three minutes, and makes a vast improvement. Am I foolish to not do it all the time? Do you think my life would improve if I never left the house without first applying those four things? What about the looking-like-hell potential?

Let’s talk about books, which never make me look like hell. I read Terry Pratchett’s Thud over the weekend, and I really, really liked it. It’s a fairly simple story that I’m pretty sure has to do with others of Pratchett’s books/characters (but I don’t really know because this is the first of his Discworld novels I’ve read). The book was funny and surprisingly sweet and gentle, and I thought more than once of Jasper Fforde, which surprised me. I think Pratchett must be a very smart man, and someone I’d like to know.

I’m also reading Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder and Photoshop CS 2 for Dummies. Last Child in the Woods is okay, I guess. So far the author is bemoaning the fact that kids rarely get to wander around alone, just exploring woods and creeks and what-not. This is true, but . . . I don’t know. I can’t see myself letting Teddy just take off after breakfast and disappear until dinner. Wouldn’t Child Services take him away? (That’s assuming he weren’t kidnapped or worse, of course.)

Happily, Ted spends hours a day during the summer playing in a creek at his day camp. He and his friends build dams, catch fish and frogs, collect all manner of things, and generally do whatever it takes that makes them smell like crap. There are adults around, but the kids are playing on their own. He and I walk through the wonderful trails at our fantastic city park all the time, and I often take him and a friend or two to the park and let them wander and play—as long as they don’t get too far away.

So he gets a nature fix fairly often. But I think much of what Louv worries about is that kids are never playing/wandering around in the woods alone. As in without supervision. He worries that kids aren’t learning to rely on themselves, that they’re being cheated out of something they need to become happy adults.

I worry about this too. Am I doing Teddy a disservice by not letting him go into the woods alone? Am I crazy because I’d be terrified that he’d run into a pedophile? What do you guys think? What do you do with your kids? I know not all of you live in a city, and I suppose that makes a difference, but I’d still like to know what other parents are doing.

Oh, and one last thing: Teddy’s working on an independent math project having to do with tessellations. I didn’t even know that was a word! I thought Madeleine L’Engle just made up tesseracts from scratch. She is a brilliant woman. I, however, am not as smart as my third grader.