Four years
posted in Alaska, Livestock and Pets, OmegaDotter, Parenting, Pop Culture |As of today, we have been in Alaska for four years.
OmegaDotter has grown from a little girl going off to kindergarten in a strange place, with tears after school for the first week, to being a 9.5 year old mini-diva who is deep into discussions of (ACK!) periods, breasts, and boys with her buddies. Luckily, these are things I have talked with her about long since, so she comes back to me and talks about her buddy discussions with me.
I’ve discovered that pop music is an excellent “in” to some more tricky topics about sex and drinking and “being pretty” versus “being yourself”. (“Brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack”, for instance, was a good conversation starter…) There are times when my eyes bug when I’m listening to the songs, and I swear things are Just Too Racy!, but then I think back to the songs my friends and I listened to, in the Dark Ages, and I realize a lot of it was the same stuff, with more drugs in the songs back then and more alcohol in the songs now.
Sex, drugs, rock and roll. The perils of being the mother to an almost-tween.
She is now almost up to my chin in height. When we moved here, she was still below my breasts.
Speaking of breasts…things are beginning to move in that direction for her, too. Oy.
Part of me wants her to just stay my little girl for a lot longer. Another part of me is finding these discussions interesting, and finding her becoming a bit (just a wee tad) more mature and interested in some more almost-adult topics that don’t revolve around sex and puberty. Alas, she still hasn’t become enchanted by reading, so I am considering a strict bribery-for-reading regime this school year. A dollar a chapter? Something like that, to push her past her “Ewww, reading is boring!” stage. At least, I hope it’s a stage.
She and I went to Arizona for five days in mid-July and had a wonderful time hanging out with my brother and 18-year-old niece. Niece and dotter adore each other, and almost all the pics I have of the dotter from that trip include pics of K. as well…but here is one where I cropped out K. so you can get a grasp of how leggy my girl has become:
In other news, our puppy is now 50+ pounds and six months old. Everywhere we go, we get comments like, “Oh! What a pretty dog!” What they don’t know is that our dog is like one of the brontosaurs of old, the kind that needed an extra almost-brain in the end of their tail. I call him our lummox, because he is so cute and friendly and goofy and just plain…well…dumb. I actually think he will turn out not so intellectually challenged as he grows older, but right now he’s got the “I’m a goofy dawg and need to chew things and get tangled up in my leash and whap things with my tail (as HARD as I CAN!) and Bounce Like A Tigger!” stage down pat. It is trying. Especially when the shoes get chewed up.
Anyway, that’s what’s going on right now. More later.
