It’s funny how Tar-jay has become the hang-out of the toddler set. You are bound to see other mom’s and the occasional nanny making endless circuits of the aisles when our list of activities has reached its unfortunate end. We found ourselves in and among that group just the other day. Meandering from the women’s department into and through shoes, we found ourselves in the toy department. As we passed by rows of puzzles and Bratz and Matchbox Cars, Morgan declares, “Um, Mommy. I need Barbie as Rapunzel.”
“Oh, you don’t say,” I keep pushing our cart down the aisle glancing. “You have a mermaid Barbie at home that you don’t even play with.”
Exasperated sigh that I didn’t expect to hear for at least another 12 years. “She’s broken, so I need Barbie as Rapunzel!”
Ugh, I regret the day that Barbie ever crossed our threshold. I thought I would be able to stave her off for another few years, but no. In fact, I actually invited her in when I brought Barbie as Princess of the Nile home from a consignment shop.
Interesting side note: Barbie a Princess of the Nile was sold to us for $3 at this consignment store. Her box was missing the top and bottom, but she was secured to the packaging, had all of her accessories and everything. Mo was desperate to play with her, so I “freed” her from her restraints using my house key, pretty much obliterating the box. By the time we got home, her crown was snapped in two, her decorative neck ware hanging askance. At home, I put Mo and Co down for a nap – this was around Halloween 2007 — and as I had never heard of such a doll, I googled Barbie as Princess of the Nile online. New, in the box, mint condition, the doll retails at $129.97. I just bought one for $3. Wow.
But, I digress. The Princess moved in and has brought with her Barbie Mermaid, Barbie Ballerina, Barbie Prima Ballerina (totally different from the former), and several other variations of Barbie as mythical, fantastical, and princess-ified. Oh, what have I done?
Back in my formative years, I fancied myself a poet and truly found a voice in sestinas, acrostics, haiku and free verse. I spent a better part of a college semester writing poetry about Barbie and her flaws and faults. I haven’t looked at these in about 10 years put the recent deluge of Barbies underfoot has made me revisit some pieces. I submit for your perusal. . .
Reality Check Barbie
I didn’t know Barbie’s hair was made of plastic
’til I tried to curl it with a curling iron.
Layers of long, luxurious locks
wrapped around the barrel,
sizzled and popped, blistered and hiccuped.
Sounded like bacon frying.
Smelled like driving with my brother —
burnt rubber and hot asphalt.
Looked as though Barbie was going to get a new ‘do,
a much shorter ‘do.
Real short.
So Barbie wasn’t like me after all,
with her dunes of plastic
contained by no bra.
Sold separately
She doesn’t even have nipples!
And what kind of woman shaves her pubic hair,
leaving a cameo as slick as a bald head?
She’s disproportionate.
Any real woman with those dimensions
would topple over,
chest first,
all internal organs pinched, cinched, and punctured.
She has bovine eyes that never close,
biceps perpetually contracted,
fingers that don’t waggle “hello”, make a fist or flip you off,
feet that are arched to fit only the highest of heels,
and a mouth that never frowns.
Is she really happy?
If I had Barbie Dream House
Barbie Jacuzzi,
Barbie 5th Avenue Wardrobe,
Barbie Limited Edition Mercedes Benz Convertible
I might smile, too.
But I like to pout and frown
and blink,
and have breasts that don’t give me back pain.
I like to cut my hair and have it grow back,
even raise my arms to dance.
And way back when, when I was Barbie’s
personal assistant
dressing, undressing, styling, combing
I didn’t kow she wasn’t like me. . .
Isn’t like me. . .
Not. Me.
Well, not exactly, but it sure came close. I took Mo and Co to the play area at the local mall the other day in order to satisfy several needs at once: My need to return and re-purchase items, their need to run around and all of our need to get out of the heat. The play area has had a face-lift in the last few months, but the erstwhile security guards are still more concerned with preventing moms from bringing in their ristretto tall non-fat extra-hot no-whip half-sweet sugar-free gingerbread latte from Starbucks than keeping out children with facial hair and acne.
Gone is the picnic theme from when we we first started going to this play area. Gone, too are giant hot dog, cupcake, and slice of watermelon. The whole area has become Looney Toon/Port Norfolk amalgamation. Bugs Bunny and pals feature prominently over the playscape, which also includes a container ship, freight trains, cargo boxes, and a huge tug boat. And the whole joint has motion detecting sound elements so that once a child’s foot runs past the boat, you get honest to goodness tug boat sounds. In the beginning, there were a few moms who scratched their heads between covert sips of lattes, wondering, “Good gracious, will that infernal fog horn never end?!” — yeah, sorry ladies.
Anyway, we’re at the play area. The girls are playing amidst the throng of other children whose mother’s think like me and I am pinching grapes from my ziploc bag in my purse into my mouth out of the eyeline of the security guard. We’ve been here for a good while and I’m really enjoying that both Mo and Co are old enough to play together and to play independently. I’m not saying I can just sit back and re-read “Twilight” while the run around, but I don’t have to be shadowing them as they meander here, there, and everywhere.
I see this one little girl, a toddler really, atop one of those climbers shaped like a hybrid freight train. The rear of the train flattens out into a slide ramp and as she makes her way towards it, I know exactly what is about to happen. Off balance, unstable toddler feet, lots of other kids weaving in and out — little girl takes a faceplant on the slide. Adding insult to injury — she doesn’t slide down, just kind of bounces on her face onto the floor. And lays there, crying. I start looking around wondering whose kid this is because clearly she’s hurt and scared. Just as I start to get up, this woman, who has some kind of genetic abnormality where her Apple iPhone has been fused onto her ear and shoulder, strolls on over, hoists the girl up under her armpit and walks away to sit back down. Okayyyyyyyyy. I mean, could you put the phone down for a second and make sure your kid’s facial features are in the same place you last left them?
Fast forward about 15 minutes. Mo is playing with some little girl on this climber shaped to look like Daffy Duck rowing a crate towards the port. The girl is standing on Daffy’s chest, Mo is laying on her stomach atop the crate and the conversation is involving pirates, mermaids, and who knows how to use the toilet all by themselves. Co, desperate to be where the action is, starts to insert herself onto the boat. The little girl, oblivious to the relationship between Mo and Co, begins to tell Co, “No, you can’t be on here. No, you can’t play here. No. No.” Now, I don’t like it when Mo does that to Co and vice-versa, and I doubly don’t like it when some little knock-kneed, buck-toothed, five year old waif does it to either of them. Still, I can’t get all mama bear up in here, so I call out to Mo, “Hey, Mo! You tell that girl that Co can play with you guys!” to which she says, “OK” and then resumes her position on the crate. Gee, thanks. And so for the next minute or two, there is this conversation dance of sorts between the girl saying no, Co saying yes, me calling Mo for reinforcements, and Mo just saying, “OK“.
Finally, Co decides enough is enough and really starts to maneuver her way into the boat. Ol‘ girl ain’t havin‘ that and in her infinite five year old wisdom, begins to pick Co up under her armpits to hoist her off of the boat. OH HAYLE NO. I couldn’t have been more than six to eight feet away from this, but I covered that ground in about 2 steps.
“Excuse me!” I said in my best-Homey-don’t-play-that-voice, crossing over to the boat. “Do not pick her up. Put her down. Now, ” and I gave her the stink eye so bad, her little hands just released Co and hung in the air, unsure of what they were and what they should be doing.
Now, a mom can’t roll up on somone else’s child like that without the offending child’s mother sensing a disturbance in the force. Sure enough, a voice calls out, “Emma (or you can insert your own overly popular name here)!” and head cocked to the side, maintaining proper shoulder to iPhone to ear connectivity, here comes cell phone mom from the faceplant incident. It was clear that this girl was her daughter — not only did they look alike, but the toddler did call her “mom”. Still, all I could do was look at this woman and wonder, who do you have on the phone that is so important, you can’t even pocket that thing to tend to your children? I mean, just tell the person, “Hey, let me call you right back.” What about a “Hang on a sec!” — you don’t even have to hang up. The woman didn’t even look in my direction, barely looked at her kid, but I’d like to think her mumbled, “Sorry about that,” was directed at me and not to the conversationalist on the other end of the phone.
I felt myself getting all Bruce Banner right in the play area, ready to unload an acerbic diatribe on her ass, but the feeling was short-lived. Mo decided she needed to use the potty — now. And when you gotta go, you gotta go. So, we went.
After a whirlwind week spent with Grandma and Pa in Maryland, Mo and Co returned home to Norfolk more loquacious and more cultured than ever. It’s had to compete with a week that included a visit to a petting zoo, a water park, a mega carousel, all the grand-parental attention one’s little hear could desire, and a trip to the Kennedy Center to meet the cast of The Color Purple –thanks, Uncle Brandon, for introducing the girls to Fantasia. Please give her my regards and my apologies as I truly want her to know that I do in fact feed my children, several times a day, in fact. I was absolutely mortified to learn that they both pilfered her dressing room’s craft cart for Doritos and Capri Suns. A reimbursement check is in the mail.
Never one to let moss grow under their feet, DH and I kept the good times rolling, whisking them to OceanBreeze Water Park on Sunday. I have to admit, I was a little skeptical about the place. There was just something a little off in all of the propaganda advertisements that I’d seen. I grew up going to Six Flags and WaterCountry, so everything that wasn’t those two establishments was kind of rinky-dink. Still, it’s nice to be surprised, and surprised I certainly was. There was a huge pool that churned out massive waves every fifteen minutes preceded by Queen’s “We Will Rock You“. There was a log flume, a kiddie oasis, kiddie slides, and loads of reclining chairs perfect for stowing you chair and for people watching (that’s another blog entry entirely!). The weather was great and once we had completely exhausted the girls, we took their pruny fingered selves to the picnic area for the lunch I had made. It finally felt like summer to me, sitting out there in the mid-afternoon shade, my bathing suit riding precariously up into places not suitable for mentioning here, the girls running back and forth from the table to take a bite of this and a taste of that. I felt like belting out a little Mungo Jerry right then and there.
No rest for the weary; we jumped into the week feet first and have been participating in VBS at church. Mo is in Amicus house and I’ve been volunteering as games leader, running the Roman Aqueduct. Well, it’s more a series of carefully fashioned gutters that allow kids to run change filled balls into a basket at the bottom of the course. The money goes to the church’s Living Waters ministry, which builds potable water systems in countries that are without such water. The game is really cool and the kids love racing one another to see who’s money gets to the bottom first.
And of course, we’ve continued our quest for mermaids. I think I’m going to have an addendum to this book I’m working on because the elusive mermaid list keeps on growing. There are at least half a dozen that are affixed to the sides of buildings, way up high. Unless Mo and Co are bitten by radioactive spiders, we just aren’t going to get to those. I doubt we will ever top our record of seven in one day, but we managed to take pictures with three and photographed two others that were just a tad out of reach.
My camera does the trick for most shots, but when it comes to zooming it falls kind of short. I’m hoping someone will see these pitiable shots and bless me with a new camera come September 8th (hint, hint, nudge, nudge).
Well, the girls are enjoying some quality time with the grands in Maryland this week, but before I packed them up and shipped them out, we had a banner day on our search for mermaids. We found seven of those sculptures!! Seven! I know, right?
I knew that there were at least four within a six block radius from our old apartment downtown. Now, I’m extremely competitive and I really wanted to see how many mermaids we could find and photograph before we were in the express lane for MeltDown City. Plus, we were planning to eat lunch — for the second time — at Costco with my mom, while we stocked up on Duggar Family sized bags of chicken nuggets, snacks and assorted sundries.
So, we’ve got about an hour to seek out these mermaids during what was arguably the hottest day of the week at the hottest time of day. My stomach is touching my back I’m so hungry and yet, I’m hot-footing it through downtown Norfolk pushing two stroller bound toddler that are cramming Goldfish into their mouths. Sadly, no one got a picture of that. But, here’s what we did see. . .
Norfolk Campus of Tidewater Community College
because there was an empty platform just to the left of Maid In Voyage)
Whew! It’s fitting that the last one we saw was the Flower Garden because it’s located in front of the apartment building we lived in when we first moved to Norfolk. And, the girls had just about had it when we reached this one, hence the somber faces. I really thought they were going to crash out in the car, but they stayed with me as we cruised on over to Costco. Once inside, they proceeded to inhale, imbibe, and ingest every free sample those little white-hair netted ladies pushed in their direction. And then, on the way out, they had the nerve to ask me for some snacks! Mo and Co, not the white haired ladies.
Anyway, while this is a record number for us, there are at least half a dozen more I know we can go paparazzi on. Plus, there are that are affixed to buildings that we can at least point out as we drive by. So, until our next foray, this should tide us over (see what I did there? mermaids, ocean, tide).
Yeah, I’ll sign off now.
Well, maybe more like a little new hair color and cut, with a little Bare Minerals Make-Up swirled on.