idols

This woman is a legend. This is the kind of mum I want to be.

On the other hand, a woman with true class (in the etiquette-book, not socioeconomic, sense of the word) would probably not have taught her flu-stricken daughter to lick her wrist and then throw back the little cup of cough medicine like a tequila shot. Four-year-old Nora's dose is now too big for the baby syringe, and during this last illness I got tired of her taking eensy sip after eensy sip while complaining about the taste. So I demonstrated the proper technique with salt and my own wrist and a shot glass of water, and told her that "this is how people quickly drink something that tastes bad." (But tequila tastes GOOD! protested my brain. Be quiet brain, we're trying to parent over here.) Nora is a sucker for procedures and processes, so she learned the routine and now knocks 'em back like a big girl. We skip the lime, that's just empty vitamins.

Whatever. She is allowed to be angry, and she does pretty well with just going in her room and getting over it, which takes all of five minutes with the preschool attention span. If I need her to get over it right now (public place, guests in the house, etc), we have had some luck with a modified headstand to "dump the angry out," and then we pretend that there is a big gooey pile of angry on the floor, and I usually pretend to step in it and get it all over my shoe, ick gross, and if the situation is really desperate I am not above taking a big comedy pratfall in the slippery angry goop, because nothing is funnier than adult incompetence. Except maybe poop in a bag.

I do actually have other things to write about but I suspect I'll memo them in a draft to come back to next week when I have time.* But for now, it's Friday and I'm about to grab curry for dinner and then go see a friend's kittens (kittens! YAY!!!!). That's how to close a week.

*HA! As if. Given that my boss is away next week and I'm pretty much manning the fort and I'm meant to get most of the mag done in a week when we usually get about 4, yada yada yada, oh woe is me, time, let alone spare time, is not something I expect to be seeing a lot of...