Of Dolls and Non-Kid Music

I've spent the last month or so making a concentrated effort to find toys that Bea likes. Because you know how every kid has their THING. At this age, Max was aaaaalll about Thomas the Tank Engine (that smarmy self-righteous little git with the rolly eyes), so he'd put wooden tracks together all over the place, watch Thomas videos until the DVD splintered into shards, and read Thomas books. I even knit him a Thomas sweater, back in the days when I had time to design things like that.

But Bea is proving to be a bit more elusive. At first, she LOVED "Baby Einstein" and would stare at it, glassy-eyed and unblinking until the drool puddled down her chin. Since we've moved here, however, she's needed more stimulation. MUCH more stimulation. We tried a few other things, but now she's very much into "Blue's Clues" and asks for it whenever things seem slow around the house by pointing to the telly and saying in that lovely, demanding, and charmingly insistent way that all toddler girls have, "Bea show! BOOS COOS! BOOS COOS?!"

It could be worse. When I realised that we were making the choice to have children, waaay back in 2001, I set some boundaries within my head on things I was NOT going to do. Never. Not no way, not no how.

Yeah, I can hear all my fellow parents out there laughing their tired heads off. I admit that a lot of the crap I said I'd never do I've done, if not with Max then definitely with Bea, out of ease and pure exhaustion. But some things I held firm to, and it's a point of pride.

My kids have never watched a "Barney" episode because just the thought of that giant purple weirdo makes me spin in a frenzied rage.

I would NEVER play one of those "Children Sing-Along!" tapes in my car. To be fair, I did once try a tape MIL sent me called "Sing Along with the Cedarmont Kids!" with Max when we were driving home from a party once. After five minutes of a rather sickening version of "Old McDonald", Max sighed and said politely, "Mummy?? Can we listen to The White Album now?"

Thanks to me, by the time Max was three, he knew who the Egg Man and the Walrus were. And when he was five, it was the lyrics to Chicago's "Jailhouse Tango", much to the startlement of my husband who heard Max it to himself in the back seat one evening. Hubby took me aside later that night and said in all seriousness, "I think there's something wrong with Max. I heard him in the Volvo saying to himself, 'So I took the shotgun off the wall and fired two warning shots...into his head.' And what the hell is pop six squish uh-uh Cicero Lipschitz??"

Yeah, that Mother of the Year award is coming in the mail AAAAAANY day now.

Anyway, my basic vow was that I wouldn't listen to any music I couldn't stand myself. And I would do what my mom always did with me: I'd sing anything that came to mind. My mom was forever singing oddball songs at me from the 20s, and at the time I thought it was like super dorky, but I later cottoned onto it as a great way to teach language and sideways thinking. Which is why I'm always making up songs now for my kids (you should hear the Bathtime Song I made up for Bea...it's kinda cute, and when she hears it, she immediately starts disrobing).

So as I drive my car around, my CD box contains no kid's music. I tried a few months ago with a Veggie Tales CD we got free from Burger King, but even Bea was bored with it, so out the window it went. Right now Max and I are enjoying Rush's "Chronicles" and Sting's "Dream of the Blue Turtles" (I long for the day that Max spouts out, "What key is it in?? Wait, wait!! What key is it in??"). When I was pregnant with Bea and driving Max home from Gymnastics practice, we belted out the "Grease" soundtrack.

It's all in what you allow yourself to take and what you don't.

But as I was saying, Bea is a little harder to pin point in terms of what she likes and what she doesn't. She seemed to enjoy putting things together (she is an engineer's daughter, after all), so for Christmas I got her a little toy tool kit. She took to it like a fish to water, gleefully screwing things together and pulling them apart and everything. Until we realised that the little black screws blended perfectly into our large oriental carpet in the great room, and that the most effective way of finding them was to walk across the carpet in bare feet, step on them one after the other, shriek painfully and expel a loud invective, then pick them up and fling them across the room.

I got her some ridged beads that pop apart and together and that you can also clip together on the sides, figuring she'd build little structures. All the did was put them together in one long line that stretched from our sofa out to Peoria, so I've had to put those away till later. I even bought her a set of those cardboard bricks because she has this thing about stacking, but again, she wants YOU to stack them so SHE can plow through Godzilla-like and scatter them all over the floor. At least they're easy to see. And last week, at the suggestion of Himself, I got her a Take Apart Helicopter and Car, the big chunky plastic kind with a wee screwdriver and big screws that a kid can totally dismantle, then reassemble.

Remember the screws from the tool kit? These are far more plentiful and just as painful. Strike two.

But then I had an idea.

For our last Christmas in Germany, Right-Hand Neighbours gave Bea this doll that makes noise when you press its stomach. It cries, laughs, says Mama and Dada, things like that. Bea didn't think much of it at first. Actually it's more accurate to say that no matter how many times I tried to get her to pay attention to it, she'd scowl at me and toddle off in search of a dump truck or a book she could shred. So that doll wound up head-first in the bottom of her toy tote for a long time.

Not long ago, I found it (and another one the grandparents had sent her for her birthday) and presented them to her just to see what would happen. Parents are familiar with Toy Rotation, and if you do it right and with a LOOOOT of enthusiasm, you can work it to your advantage because kids have lousy long-term memories and the attention spans of fruit flies, so the toy you've been storing for the last two months can look like something completely new. Which is what I did with Bea.

And she LOVED on that dolly like no tomorrow. She immediately burst out, "BABEEEE!" and cuddled the crap out of it.

Finally. I had found Bea's "thing". She toted her two "Babies" around, pretending to feed them, singing, snuggling with them, and I thought, "Damn, the one thing that freaks me out more than any other children's toy is the thing she chooses." But inside I was a little happy. Maybe Beazilla just had an untapped nurturing streak. Maybe that's all it would take.

So when Sis asked what Bea would like for Christmas, I enthusiastically replied, "A little doll stroller for her to push her Baby around."

Sis did better than that. She sent a stroller AND a new doll that makes a sucking sound when you feed it a bottle. Then it burps and makes a snoring sound. It was awesome, and Bea loved it. Maxman liked it too.

That lasted about two weeks. I knew the doll loving was over when one day Bea came into the kitchen in search of snack food, and when I handed her a granola bar, she dropped her Baby right on its face and reached for the granola bar. THUMP...right on the slate floor. The doll even let out a startled squeak.

Did anyone else just wince? Because I sure as hell did.

But she wasn't done. As she stepped forward for her snack, she planted her foot right on Baby's back, and it cried out.

Oh, it was awful. Really awful. I couldn't stand it, so I picked Baby up and tried to demonstrate to Bea that you just don't treat an infant like that. I wrapped Baby up in a blankie, rocked her, and gave her a bink. "See??" I tried to soothe. "Baby goes night-night. Baby sleeeeeep now. Bea hold Baby?"

Bea just stared blankly at me, then zoomed off to eat her granola bar and scatter crumbs all over my sofa. I don't think anything sunk in.

I didn't play with dolls when I was a kid. The only ones I could stand were Barbie dolls, and they're so unrealistic that you don't really put any emotional investment into them. Actually, my friend Diane and I used to have fun swinging them around by their hair and chucking them across my back yard, giving each other points for distance and form. Extra points if Barbie's head popped off during the toss.

Back in England, my friend K had a daughter named Ruby who was quite fond of dolls. For Ruby's 4th birthday, I knitted one of her Barbies this fantastic little Chanel suit, complete with tiny gold buttons, on needles that were about the size of toothpicks. It was fiddly and frustrating, but it was also a great deal of fun, and I presented the suit, along with a hand-knitted evening gown, in a nice box to Ruby at her party.

When I rung K up later that afternoon to ask how Ruby enjoyed her gift, K replied, "Well, it's hard to say. Barbie spent the afternoon naked and head down in the sandbox. I *think* Ruby liked it, but it might be too soon to tell. Ask me when I've finished my GnT."

Interestingly enough, Ruby had another doll, her favourite, about the size of Bea's Baby. K, being an artist herself, always encouraged Ruby to draw and colour, and I suppose Ruby took it a little too much to heart because she drew heavy black lines around her doll's face, scribbled on some bright blue marker on the doll's eye lids, and coloured her lips a dark red. She then trimmed parts of the doll's hair and painted her fingernails and toenails, jammed earrings through the earlobes, and looped beads around the doll's neck.

This all wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the name she gave her tarted-up doll.

She called her doll ASBO.

I suppose the relationships girls have with their dolls can be an indicator of the relationship they'll have with their mums when they're teenagers. It might be that dolls are a sort of scrying tool. All I know is that Bea now has three dolls which she loves than abuses in turn, and that when I'm cleaning the house during the day they STARE at me.

Maybe for her birthday, I can get Bea interested in doing a bit of knitting.