v: i LOVE to heal heads.
me: are you going to be a doctor when you grow up?
v: no, a scientist! a scientist who helps doctors make heads feel better.
me: i think that's a great idea.
v: and i'm going to tell everyone that werewolves don't exist!
we drove past some graffiti art that depicted a werewolf, and now she's constantly asking me, "how do we know WE'RE not werewolves?" to which i counter, "has your skin ever grown fur? have your nails ever turned to claws? have your teeth ever turned to fangs?" she often tugs on kevin's beard and tells him to shave, but the other night she was intently studying his every follicle. he didn't know about the werewolf obsession yet, and when i told him, he said, "so that's why she kept looking at my fingernails!" she would love it if he were a werewolf. while she talks a big game of "they don't exist," she also keeps talking herself out of it: "there are DEFINITELY no werewolves in los angeles, and DEFINITELY no werewolves in china, but they might live in a different place."
i feel kind of bad that "china" has become the token place of "other" for her. i suppose it started because the plane in knuffle bunny free takes knuffle bunny to china (OMG!), which i explained at the time as "the other side of the earth." ever since our first trip to the griffith observatory
she wants to know what people in china are doing at any given time. last night she interrupted my bedtime lullaby -- which, i'll note for posterity, alternates between elizabeth mitchell's "froggy went a courtin'" and the series of "animal songs" from if you were my bunny -- and asked what people in china were doing while we were sleeping. she really loved the day/night display, and also the one about galaxies.
she repeatedly asked me to read the text about how this meteorite was found in the desert
and she equally loved "blasting off" down the hallway into large groups of tourists.
she is very into the sciency series of dr. seuss books, and she totes home on beyond bugs from school about once a week, so we got there's no place like space from the observatory gift shop, and man, that purchase was gold. right away she memorized the planets but prefers to gleefully recite the book's acronym: "mallory valerie emily mickels just saved up nine-hundred ninety-nine nickels!" violet thinks mallory is going to buy an orange dress or a dog. mallory has good taste.
our dogs were practically biting off violet's fingers as she fed them her dinner scraps last night, and she couldn't stop giggling. same reaction when we fed the horses at the gentle barn a few weeks ago.
it was her first time with the big wiggly lips snatching carrots from her palm, and she was almost as delighted as i was. it's hard to resist the longing for her to love the same things i love. i told her all about how i took horseback riding lessons as a kid, how i would get to the barn an hour early so that i could brush the horses and pick rocks out of their hooves. "do you want to ride horses when you get bigger?" i asked, cringing at the implicit "of course you do" in my voice. i need to work on my poker tone.
at least i managed a straight face when i gave her a selection of weekend classes to choose from and she chose dance. nana and auntie have been rejoicing, but i can't shake the image of olive hoover sucking in her stomach backstage at the little miss sunshine pageant. OMG STACEY! i can't help it. so we're over a month into "princess ballet" and what can i say? it's pretty damn cute how much she likes it. if it wasn't right on the cusp of nap time, i'd like it a lot better, but she turns on a dime after class -- it's a lot of excitement at a time when she's used to a calm down routine -- and has had more than one meltdown on the way home. she screams at me to turn the car around so we can go back to the dance studio and right one of my wrongs, i.e. not letting her roll around on the ground, or opening the ziploc of cheddar bunnies myself. so far she has refused every request to smile for the camera in her tutu and tights, so here she is at the dance student appreciation party, hula-hooping to "let it go."
literally every other person there knew the words but us. she's a princess ballerina who prefers ice-age beasts over frozen.
and here she is on st. patrick's day:
"i painted a mess." i couldn't be prouder.
