The word for the day is: ugh.

I am having a hard time this week pulling it together, folks. Today I forgot to pack my lunch. I've certainly never forgotten to eat, so forgetting to pack my lunch... how is that possible?

I had to sit down yesterday and try to explain to Spawn why I find Bratz dolls unacceptable. Do you know how hard it is to explain to a six-year-old the concept of "tacky"? Never mind the whole idea of "sexy" because at this point members of the opposite sex are still fairly cootie-ridden and there is no way to explain that someday the two camps are going to notice one another without freaking the kid out.

Oh, I so remember this from my own childhood. Except for me it was a purple coat. (Funny, the things that your mother will deem unacceptable.)

As a child, I went shopping with my grandmother every so often and on one occasion I found and fell in love with a purple coat. So my grandmother bought it for me. And my mother, finding the color of the coat to be "tacky", made my grandmother take it back. I remember being quite heartbroken.

Some thirty-odd years later I understand the concept of tacky, even though at the age of seven all I knew was that my best friend's favorite color was purple and my mother was a great big ol' meany for not letting me keep that beautiful purple coat. Apparently, in my mother's mind back in the early 70's, purple was a color that "nice" girls did not wear, at least not as an overcoat.

Funny, how you become your mother even though you try not to.

Spawn was out shopping with my mother yesterday and somehow managed to wrangle a new umbrella out of her, a Bratz umbrella. I have a strict no-Bratz policy in our household, because I find them trashy and oversexed and the tacky third cousins of Barbie. And make no mistake, I played with Barbies myself as a girl. I didn't understand the feminist backlash against them then, and to an extent I don't now. Maybe it's because I've not attached a sexual meaning to Barbie's huge hooters, despite dressing and undressing her thousands of times.

As adults we get hyper-vigilant about all things sexual when it comes to our kids, and that causes even somewhat rational people like me to come down hard on oversexed Barbie knockoffs like the Bratz dolls. It's just not an image that I want Spawn to think is okay.

And lest you think I'm a huge, latent feminist nutball, looking for sexual meaning in children's toys, let me tell you that my sensibilities get offended by other things, too. I also banned Barney from ever entering our house when Spawn was a toddler. Because I thought Barney was simpering and I could not stand that goofy giggling voice.

I am weird, I know.




-- Mox