Cassie and Emerson, a Reintroduction
Cassie is now 6 1/2 and in first grade. Her hair is still light blonde, and she wears it in two braids, just as I did when I was her age. She has Pete's small, dark, slightly Asiatic eyes, though, so she's working a kind of exotic, vaguely Finnish look somehow. And she's still very tall for her age. If you dressed her in something extreme or funky, she could easily be a model in one of those contexts that require a quirky, offbeat aesthetic. (She's frankly a little pasty and sullen for anything fresh-scrubbed and girl-next-door like a Sears catalog or anything. Comme des garcons or Jil Sander would be much more appropriate.)
She loves colors (especially blue and green), making art, looking at art, Pippi Longstocking, Martha Speaks and Word Girl, summer sausage, juice pops, making her little brother laugh, making her little brother whine and cry, going to school, and making potions. She was a big, big Hillary fan (despite having parents who were kind of on the fence), but has now thrown her full support behind Barack Obama. She also thinks that Malia and Sasha are lucky because their dad is famous.
Cassie has asserted a belief in God for a couple years now, although in the last week, she did let slip that she thinks she might be believing a tiny bit less lately. The poor thing has precious little to go on for models of religious faith, although I am at least willing to fill her in about the basics of "what you believe if you're a Christian." Pete just spits nails when the subject comes up.
Cassie is wasting no time in preparing herself for her teenage years, alternating talking incessantly with periods of huffy, surly quasi-silence. She has even precociously mastered the art of flouncing into the bathroom and slamming the door when she's put out about something. I think she's kind of a prodigy.
She lobbied for a while for a dog (starting approximately one day after overcoming her longterm deathly fear of them). One day in the car on the way to swimming lessons, though, I spelled out in great detail just what kind of work having a dog was, and made it crystal clear that Daddy and Mama would not be doing the work because Daddy and Mama did not want a dog. She pondered briefly, and announced she thought she would like to get a bird.
She would also like to know why they put designs on toilet paper, since it's just going to get poop on it.
Meanwhile, Emerson has been honing his already considerable cuteness to a needle-fine point of adorability. It's kind of staggering. This is a creature who could have been specifically genetically engineered for winsomeness. He's plenty good-looking (another brown-eyed blond, but less flaxen and more sandy, and also less exotic and more all-American boy), but it's really
his personality that does it. Affectionate, ingenuous, enthusiastic, warm, humorous. And of course, since he's 2 1/2, there are the myriad charming mispronunciations ("doodles" for "noodles," "Ama" for "Grandma," "mekkah mitser" for "cement mixer") and random perfectly enunciated exclamations a propos of nothing in particular ("Go Red Sox!"). Other parents watch him play on the playground. His day care teacher assured me the other day with great feeling that it was fine that I was almost ten minutes late picking him up--"we've been having fun!"
So my thought now is, at some point in the future Pete and I are just going to have to sit him down and tell him very seriously and firmly: NO SEX WITH INTERNS IN THE OVAL OFFICE.
She loves colors (especially blue and green), making art, looking at art, Pippi Longstocking, Martha Speaks and Word Girl, summer sausage, juice pops, making her little brother laugh, making her little brother whine and cry, going to school, and making potions. She was a big, big Hillary fan (despite having parents who were kind of on the fence), but has now thrown her full support behind Barack Obama. She also thinks that Malia and Sasha are lucky because their dad is famous.
Cassie has asserted a belief in God for a couple years now, although in the last week, she did let slip that she thinks she might be believing a tiny bit less lately. The poor thing has precious little to go on for models of religious faith, although I am at least willing to fill her in about the basics of "what you believe if you're a Christian." Pete just spits nails when the subject comes up.
Cassie is wasting no time in preparing herself for her teenage years, alternating talking incessantly with periods of huffy, surly quasi-silence. She has even precociously mastered the art of flouncing into the bathroom and slamming the door when she's put out about something. I think she's kind of a prodigy.
She lobbied for a while for a dog (starting approximately one day after overcoming her longterm deathly fear of them). One day in the car on the way to swimming lessons, though, I spelled out in great detail just what kind of work having a dog was, and made it crystal clear that Daddy and Mama would not be doing the work because Daddy and Mama did not want a dog. She pondered briefly, and announced she thought she would like to get a bird.
She would also like to know why they put designs on toilet paper, since it's just going to get poop on it.
Meanwhile, Emerson has been honing his already considerable cuteness to a needle-fine point of adorability. It's kind of staggering. This is a creature who could have been specifically genetically engineered for winsomeness. He's plenty good-looking (another brown-eyed blond, but less flaxen and more sandy, and also less exotic and more all-American boy), but it's really
his personality that does it. Affectionate, ingenuous, enthusiastic, warm, humorous. And of course, since he's 2 1/2, there are the myriad charming mispronunciations ("doodles" for "noodles," "Ama" for "Grandma," "mekkah mitser" for "cement mixer") and random perfectly enunciated exclamations a propos of nothing in particular ("Go Red Sox!"). Other parents watch him play on the playground. His day care teacher assured me the other day with great feeling that it was fine that I was almost ten minutes late picking him up--"we've been having fun!"
So my thought now is, at some point in the future Pete and I are just going to have to sit him down and tell him very seriously and firmly: NO SEX WITH INTERNS IN THE OVAL OFFICE.
posted by Rosie Bonner at 9:08 PM
3 Comments:
You are back! I'm so glad.
AM
I googled my daughter's name and found your blog. I just thought I would share with you that I have a daughter named Emerson Bean who is the same age as your son.
Oh my goodness! That's outrageous! April, we are some kind of maternal soul-sisters. In my son's case, it's a pseudonym (mostly so I'm un-google-able to people I work or worked with). But kind of remarkable all the same, huh?
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