ma jolie fille

i want a babycenter blog!

there are two active baby journals up and running at baby/parentcenter, and i want my own column. why should joyce and catherine have all the fun and income on the side? i have a two-year old and besides, i’m freaking mentally ill, wouldn’t that be a hook? yeah ok, i’m medicated, but still.

this weekend my dad and stepmom came out to visit. they hadn’t seen duckie for a few months, and the first thing j said was, “look at all your pretty hair!”

it’s true – duckie’s hair has just blossomed over the last few months. a blessing, sure, but only if she lets me detangle it in the mornings before school. some days she wakes up with hardly a hair out of place – and other days, like this morning, she stumbles out of her bedroom with the equivalent of a small white nuclear explosion on the back of her head. “rat’s nest” doesn’t begin to describe it. she has definitely inherited her daddy’s hair. at least this summer we won’t have to slather her whole head with sunscreen – that stuff is awfully hard to get out of hair, especially when it’s mixed with the sand she likes to dump over herself. toddler concrete. three washings, easy.

we marked her height again this weekend and she’s grown more than an inch since Christmas. when i went on my last sundress rampage i got 2Ts – which works for some styles, but not for the shorts – she’ll be out of those in a couple of months.

i’ve always thought of her as a small child, and i supposed i figured she would be fine in 2Ts through the end of the summer. but she’s growing so fast these days that my mental image can hardly keep up with the reality of her development.

she woke up sunday morning having taken another one of those disconcerting developmental leaps – this time linguistic. it may have been the presence of her grandparents, and having to communicate to a different set of ears, i don’t know. she sat up in bed (*blink, blink**grin*) and said, “wake up, daddy! get out of bed!”

totally not interested in laying in bed to cuddle. hey, at least it wasn't me trying to get brian out of bed.

before duckie was born, sam passed along a little ottoman to us that was perfect for the big rocking chair. my legs are entirely too short for this chair, but the little footstool was great. said footstool may have to be put in temporary storage, because duckie has been using it to climb up onto her changing table and investigate the small shelf above it.

there’s nothing there terribly dangerous – and so far she hasn’t tried to get down off the table yet, which ought to be interesting (and should probably be avoided for obvious reasons). i keep a scented candle on the shelf to dispel the rather foul vapors that emanate from her diaper pail, and sometimes i'll stash my earrings there.

these earrings are special – i found them several weeks ago at gypsy rose, this little hippie shop in downtown Hendersonville. they’re delicate hoops with a turquoise drop in the center, little drops of half-twisted silver and turquoise hanging from the bottom half of each loop. delicate, shiny, and they go nicely with everything i own.

i work in a manufacturing environment, so i’ve spent a fair amount of time over the last seven years bemoaning the safety regulations that restrict jewelry to the bare minimum. stud earrings (what’s the point?) and plain wedding bands (give up my celtic knot tourmaline engagement ring? no WAY). so there was hardly any point in buying such fripperies – i couldn’t wear them to work, and i certainly couldn’t wear them at home – they would have been ripped out of my ears in all of 30 seconds.

duckie’s grown up a little, though. i was on my way out the door a few weeks ago on a non-work errand and i had stopped to give her a good-bye kiss. she gave me a huge grin and said, “you pretty? i see!”

she was talking about the earrings, so i bent to give her a closer look. of course she wanted to touch them. *sigh* ok, well, let her know the rules and see what happens, right?

“these are be-gentle, sweetie. you have to be very very gentle and you can’t pull on them, otherwise you’ll hurt my ear. OK?” she said OK, and i subjected myself to her curious examination. i tried not to twitch or wince in anticipation – and to be honest i was more worried about my precious, delicate $9 earrings than i was about my ear. an exercise in trust, to say the least.

but she did fine. over the last few weeks we’ve had fun with the earrings. she gave them to brian one morning last week and said, “here, mommy wear them.” he passed them along to me and i dutifully wore them on the ride in. (it’s hard to resist when your child thinks your earrings are pretty, you know?)

pretty (adj.): pleasing by delicacy or grace (MW). duckie uses this word to describe something that’s beautiful and unusual. not just lacy things, but how a person looks pleasantly different in them. the new black bra i got a few weeks ago is just gorgeous, and she won’t say the bra is pretty or that i’m pretty, but when i put it on in the morning, she says, “you pretty!” so anyway.

yesterday i was pitzing around in the kitchen and i heard a distinct lack of noise coming from my daughter. nine times out of ten it means that she’s Up To Something. i poked my head into her room to be startled by a pair of equally wide blue eyes focused intently on the shiny pair of earrings in her hand.

i said, “oh, honey, my earrings!” this, before i even thought about how dangerous it was for her to be on top of the changing table at all (monkey.)

tunrs out i was a little hasty in my concern. she was looking at them, but she wasn’t whipping them around or throwing them – she was treating them with genuine care and gentleness. to her, they were pretty, precious things that her mommy really likes – and they sound fascinating when they jingle, too.

so i got her down off the table even as she was protesting. “i wear! i wear!”

er… i’m all for indulging my daughter’s harmless whims to a reasonable extent, but i wasn’t about to take her to the mall to get her ears pierced. not on my watch. a brief consideration and i thought we could maybe fake something. the earrings were those typical drop-style hanging loops, and they fit quite neatly over duckie’s ears – not terribly securely, but then she wasn’t about to go clubbing, either.

my daughter is beautiful no matter what she wears – really, she can be running around the house in a spaghetti-stained t-shirt and she’s still glorious. i like that about her – i think it’s kinda cool that she won’t wear hairbows and prefers sweatpants, eats dirt sometimes and has two boys as her best friends at school.

but i will have to shift again in my perceptions of her. now she’s enjoying dressing up and occasionally she’ll even leave a ponytail holder in for a few hours. last friday night she pulled down this little pink satin ballerina dress and insisted on sleeping in it (how the tulle skirt didn’t keep her awake from the scratching is beyond me.)

and i have to admit that when we dropped those little silver and turquoise earrings over her ears and put her in front of the mirror, she transformed, just like that, into a girly-girl. she was just stunning – the silver shine in her eyes caught by the brilliant sparkle of teal-blue drops, her smile wide and her happiness pure when she declared, “i pretty!”

pretty, indeed.