Girls Just Wanna Have Fun — or would, if they weren’t feeling sklunklish

I have a good friend who had a girl for her third child, after having two blondie boys. All three kids wear glasses now; it’s adorable in a sort of a smart-Barbie-and-Ken way. She was so excited about the whole pink thing that she sometimes had to try multiple outfits on her baby before choosing what she’d wear each day. I am obviously missing some girl gene, or am just lazy, because it’s all I can do to keep my kids in clean underwear.

But on Saturday I finally found the Pocahontas costume I bought for 97 cents at Old Navy after last Halloween (2006) when Spot was two weeks old. We only missed this Halloween by 73 days, and there is no way Spot is fitting into this costume next year, so I made her wear it all day and even took some pictures.

We can pretend this is Spot at 1 year on Halloween, but really it’s Spot at 15 months with her very special (meaning she doesn’t have to share it) baby doll. She was not impressed by the authentic Native American headdress; one second after this picture was taken she ripped it off for the millionth time.

The costume really wasn’t bad as a regular dress. It’s soft and warm and fuzzy, and despite how it looks when she sits uncooperatively, it kept her knees warm. I guess the dress-up gene gets turned on around age 2, though I really can’t remember a time that Sally and Susan weren’t changing clothes five times a day.

Today I felt sklunklish. The high-pitched whining (“I’m a princess. I don’t have to bring my dishes over to the sink.”) almost tipped the sklunkish-ness over into daughter-cidal mania. Which is not to say that I would prefer boy children.

If we had a boy, we’d have to build up a whole new terminology for potty time: Susan (sitting primly on the toilet), “I don’t put my dress in the potty, I just put my poop in the potty.” Although Sally’s latest bit of candor (“Mom, if you eat all of that you’ll get fat), made me consider the possible benefit of oblivious boys.

I’m assuming (charitably, I think) that Sally was mostly trying to get me to share my cookies with her. But she’s right about the eating=fat thing. Luckily I have a plan to work on that. Goes something like “eating+exercise=not too fat.” I’ve found an exercise/babysitting partner who inspires forces me to jog about five times a week and deep clean slop around some lysol wipes and empty the dishwasher every morning before she and her kids come over.

We’re running our first 5K race in two weeks. Nothing like a race in public to shame you into actually schlepping to the treadmill. I know I’m not Yiddish, but I did live in NYC for three years; I can use the word schlep. What a great word.

We went to a beach party at Sally’s school last week. Since there was neither a beach nor a party there, it was about what you’d expect. Dick had to use the little boys room and then reminisced about throwing wet (from the sink, I hope) toilet paper on the other kids. He was reminiscing about his childhood, not about having thrown wet toilet paper just then.

At church on Sunday I taught a class of five kids ages 3 to 8. Incidentally that was our entire primary; not exactly what I envisioned when we moved to Utah. First I totally changed their lives with a lesson encouraging them to choose the right by asking themselves”What would Jesus want me to do?” (see how that is similar, yet superior, to WWJD?). Then for an activity I had them draw pictures of them doing something that Jesus would want them to do. One 7-year-old boy drew a picture of himself helping a bleeding kid get a bandaid.

Each time he showed it to me the pool of blood was bigger, but, to be fair, the bandaid he was applying as an act of mercy got bigger too.

Sally’s school party was basically an excuse for all the kids to run around screaming (don’t they get enough of that at school?). There was music and a disco ball. Sally was really excited at first, but then she got shy for a while. I was mean and said she had to get out there and dance or we’d just leave. Susan, bless her heart, was oblivious to everything but the music and her own body. Why . . . really, why do they have to grow up even that much?

Dick forced me out on the cafeteria floor (“you have to dance or we’ll just go home”) for the moms-and-daughters only song Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. I almost started crying. Ok, I did cry a little, but I don’t think anyone noticed. Why am I such a girl? And why do I sometimes want to wring the necks of these three beautiful, frustrating, silly, loving, exasperating girls? I should probably focus on how angelic they are when asleep. If only I weren’t asleep myself for most of that blissful time.