don’t call me out of name

So you can imagine that the recent Imus fiasco was quite a topic of conversation around my house for the last week or so.  Y’all can imagine what I think of him and what he said… but if you can’t, see LaTonya’s blog… she says it better than I probably could. Oprah hosted a town hall on her show today, and that provided a perfect opportunity to get Tyler & Halle involved in the dialogue… to put some substance behind the reasons we don’t listen to certain radio stations that play the raunchier hip hop songs, or why I change the channel when certain popular songs come on the ones we do regularly listen to. The kids and I have had conversations about certain aspect of hip hop culture, and right now I am the authority of all things under the sun in their eyes.  At the same time, I am very aware that they walk in different skin than I do, and there may well be a time where I’m not going to be considered an authority on anything in general, but particularly not anything related to race. I thought there would be a lot of benefit for the kids to see Black men and women of authority address the issue, so I let the kids stay up to watch the show with me.

a woman of authority

So about a year ago I went to Barnes & Noble with the intent of buying Simple Abundance and wound up buying several other books instead… books that I have yet to read.  I bought The Good Son, Shaping the Moral Development of our Boys & Young Men by Michael Gurian, and picked up The Wonder of Girls, Understanding the Hidden Nature of Our Daughters, also written by Gurian, simply because if I’m going to buy a book about the boy, as an Equal Opportunity Parent, I feel compelled to buy a book about the girls.  After I bought these books, I checked some reviews and was a little put off by one review that classified The Wonder of Girls as an attempt of a man trying to tell women what their nature was when he, by nature, could never have a true understanding of women.  Although both books were overall very well reviewed, that may be why I’ve never started reading them… but in fairness, in the year since I made these purchases, I have been consumed by the reading of other books which seemed more relevant to where I was in my own personal growth as well as my parental growth… Eat Pray Love, White Like Me, and Does Anybody Look Like Me come to mind. Those were all books that I read intensely and voraciously…taking them everywhere I went and unable to put them down at night.

I swear it’s true…

So we were watching a netflix rental from the 70’s earlier this afternoon, called Free to Be You and Me. I hadn’t paid much attention to the cast, but early in the movie I recognized a face.

“Oh, my God! That’s Michael Jackson!”

My son looks at the TV and back at me, without any hesitation in his voice AT ALL,

“No, it’s not… Michael Jackson is White.”

Ironically, he was singing a duet with a female character about how it didn’t matter whether he was tall or she was pretty, neither of them would change when they grew up.

OPEN THE DOOR!

So we were up late Saturday night, my little Easter/Christmas Elf and I, assembling Easter baskets and watching The Five People You Meet in Heaven.  It was a warm weekend, but I refuse to turn on the air conditioning this early, so I popped the baskets into the fridge, intending to get up about half an hour earlier than either of the girls usually wake up to set them out and to go outside and, using the chalk stamper/stencil I got at Target, to stamp bunny feet going to and from our front door.

The girls woke up at 6:30. 

So I herded them into the tub before they could look any further than their rooms, pulled the chilled chocolate and jelly beans out of the fridge and set them out, and ran outside in my jammies to stamp the bunny foot prints. 

bopping your baloney

Geez, I’m getting a helluva eduation on new slang terms this week.

Now, I’ve been anticipating the early stages of puberty, with Tyler’s age and recent interest in girls.

So I noticed that just about every night this week Tyler has been volunteering to go to bed early.  He usually doesn’t get up after going to bed… but two or three nights last week he got up for a snack or drink… and was awake for an hour or two after volunteering to go to bed.

Hmmmm.

Thursday night, the second time he got up for some water, I snapped at him and told him to take his little butt back to bed… I’m not sure what it was he was doing in there (though I had some strong suspicions), but it sure wasn’t sleeping.

So I bit the bullet and got online and started doing some research on puberty and… masturbation.