I have been fighting off the stomach ailment Eliza had this weekend and have consequently not been much of a party today; ergo, no fabulous witticisms from me this evening.

I will instead leave you with this portrait my offspring drew of me today on her Magnadoodle:

She was very particular about informing me that “this is a picture of Mommy sayin’ ‘Hello!’”

What I find amusing (beside the fact that that my legs are attached to my chin and that she painstakingly draws my glasses), is that she steadfastly refuses to acknowledge my current haircut. She has consistently drawn me with the haircut I had last spring, which is similar to hers, and refers to it nostalgically as “when you had long hair, Mommy!”

Yesterday Eliza and I went to Kohl’s in a futile search for long-sleeved T’s for her, and found instead a plethora of cute dresses and short-sleeved T-shirts. The latter were on sale so I got a couple, and then she lobbied hard for a dress that had 2 bows. I ix-nayed it because it was linen and what crazy person designs linen dresses for little kids? No! Thank you!

Actually, I should expand on that: We wandered into the girls’ clothing section and spied a wall bedecked with dresses. She was agog at the plethora for a minute, then asked, “Mommy, what size am I?” Thereupon she bee-lined for the linen one, inspected the tag, and yelled, “This one’s my size!”

This number-reading business is really a problem.

Since the dresses were also on sale and her summer selection is getting a little thin (not that she’s concerned with seasonality), I told her if she found a non-linen dress in her size, we could buy it and she could wear it for Easter. Our town does this thing called the Easter Drag, which I’ve mentioned before I think: After church, everyone strolls up and down the dress near our house in their finery, and there’s balloons, clowns, face-painting, and usually, a rookie firefighter dressed up in full bunny regalia handing out candy. (We’re always early because we godless heathens don’t do church.) Anyway, my thinking was that she could premier the dress at the Drag, and I told her several times that this dress was to remain UNTOUCHED in her closet until then.

Today, I picked her up at school and guess what she was wearing?

Yup!

I asked what was up with the dress.

“I just REALLY wanted to wear it!” she said, all blink-blink cute-cute who-me innocence.

I reminded her that she had violated the agreement.

“Daddy put it on me!” she said, like a stool pigeon.

***

Yay, School is good! Part 41,963,437

Eliza’s got a new school buddy, a girl who doesn’t speak a lick of English. Most of the other kids in class are fairly bilingual at this point, but this kid has nothing. 

This weekend, Eliza came out with “Escuela means SCHOOL!” and told me her friend M had taught her — an assertion the teacher agreed could well be possible, since the two of them are apparently thick as thieves and trading words back and forth. I’ve met the parents, who ARE bilingual, and they tell me that their daughter is all “Eliza this, Eliza that,” so all of us are pretty pleased with the way this bilingual business is working for us. I’m under no illusions that she’ll be fluent by the time she leaves, but as Eliza’s teacher points out, she’s got the sound of the language in her head and she’s able to make some of the sounds that are particular to Spanish, all of which will help when she actually sits down to learn it.

I tell you, these stories are such a relief, because for a while there in the middle of the year, I wasn’t at all sure we’d made the right call putting her in this school system in general and in this class in particular. But I think everyone is learning. The teacher gets my kid, I have stopped freaking out, and Eliza appears to be acquiring more or less the skills, social and otherwise, that I hoped she would from school.

The other day on a blog I read a mom was fretting about something her kid was going through and one of the commenters kind of slapped her down and said she was being a drama queen. It was sort of accurate, as far as it went, but totally beside the point. The kid was facing real challenges, and if the mom was going a bit over the top describing them — well, it’s her nearest and dearest, she should be allowed to freak, especially on her blog (is web LOG, i.e. JOURNAL, no?). And if, through freaking out, she came to a place where she had processed all her (frankly not unfounded) angst about the situation, so much the better that she should have an outlet for all that worry than that it should fester inside her or somehow affect her dealings with her kid.

I was thinking about that today because I recognized some of myself in it vis-a-vis the school situation. I still think I was right to be concerned about the way Eliza’s adjustment to school was initially misinterpreted (see: nearest and dearest) — but I also recognize that I often tend to paint a gloomier and doomier picture than is necessary, because I am of the expect-the-worst-and-then-anything-better-will-be-a-happy-surprise school of thinking. (See optimism and how it paid off, r.e. unexpected passing of father) 

Now I am going to be on tenterhooks whether the school system gets economically stimulated enough to offer “summer camp” again. Since it’s a lynchpin of the school’s fairly aggressive special education efforts, I am hopeful. I’m even more excited about the camp since I read the Malcolm Gladwell book, Outliers, in which he argues forcefully for year-round schooling to bridge the achievement gap in poor communities — his argument buttresses what I intuited with actual numbers. (A legitimate criticism of the book is that he doesn’t offer a strategy for how to achieve this year-round business, and I think the camp’s an excellent solution.)

Side note, this reminds me that at last weekend’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, several public officials were greeted by parade-watchers with, “Where’s my bailout?!” Obvious, but funny in a Better Off Dead, “I want my $2″ sort of way.

This morning Eliza tried to convince me that we should give the cats “to some poor kids that don’t have any, and then we can get a dog!”

I told her no way, and besides, how does she think the cats would feel about being given away, plus, we’ll talk about it again when she’s older.

I relayed this conversation to Jim and when he came into the bedroom where Eliza and I were snuggled up for story time with the cats, he asked her if she still wanted to get rid of the cats.

“I’m gonna stick with Barney and Moe for now,” she said.

“You could get rid of me and get a dog instead,” he said.

“No! You can’t sell people!” she said.

Eliza, who has some sort of puking illness, is lying in the TV room playing with some cute new plastic animals I gave her this morning.

“Why did you give these to me, Mommy?”

“Because you are sick and I thought they might cheer you up.”

“It’s not working.”

I went to a wicked fancypants college — lots of old money and limousine liberals. Snarkiness aside, I enjoyed it, but it must be admitted there were some elements of the strange about the place and some of its denizens.

I took an art class during my first semester there, and among my classmates was a guy who was not conventionally good-looking — not ugly, but just not in any way Brad Pitt-esque. Let’s call him Gerry Genkins, which is close enough to his real name for the purposes of my tale.

The man’s name came up frequently among my female (and gay) classmates throughout the first year, and it was invariably invoked in a tone of unmitigated lustfulness. Gerry this, Gerry that, the hotness of Gerry, blahblahblah.

I found this puzzling because one, they were referring to a classmate and I was SURE this guy was a couple of classes ahead of us, and second, of course, I was just not getting whither came all the lustfulness.

Was I just that far off the norm with my taste in men that I literally couldn’t see it? I mean, I’m not a Brad Pitt fanatic, but I’m usually able to see why others would find a particular movie star attractive. Why was I not recognizing this man’s overwhelming hotness? I stared and stared (and in retrospect I sincerely hope I was somewhat discreet, although I suspect, knowing me, that things were more along the line of slackjawed gaping) and I could. not. see. it.

How gorgeous his eyes were, his lovely dark hair, his physique; I cannot impress upon you enough how much I felt like an outlier during these conversations. Was I gay? Blind? And why were they talking about how deliciously tall he was when, on a good day, the man was roughly my height? Had the entire female (plus 10 percent of the male population) succumbed to mass hysteria?

No, they had not!

The mystery was cleared up for me one day when Gerry was seen in the company of a younger brother of whom I had hitherto been unaware, a young man of stunning Pitt-esque handsomeness — whose name was also Gerry.

They belonged to one of those families where everyone was given the same name. Dad’s name: Gerry Genkins. Oldest son’s name: Gerry Genkins. Youngest son’s name? STILL GERRY GENKINS. Even weirder: They all had different middle names, and yet! And YET! They all used their first name. You know, the one that was THE SAME. The one where, if their mom yelled “Gerry!” three people would say, “Yes?”