Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank by Celia Rivenbark Read Free Book Online Page A

concentrate on her poetry studies, which are frankly limited these days to
Girls go to college to get more knowledge I boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider.
    Parents show up for the Terrific Kids assembly withcamcorders and
bouquets of flowers.
So now, the kids who don’t get flowers from their parents pout, and the ones who did get flowers have won the unspoken “My parents love me better than yours love you” contest.
    I swear it almost makes me long for Red Rover.

8
The One and Done Club
Sure, I Could’ve Thrown a Litter
Like You, but How Much Ballet Can a Mom Take?
    My mom-friends and I have decided that it’s going to be a looooong summer now that the kids have been out of school for eighteen days, eleven hours, and twenty-six minutes. Not that we’re counting.
    There’s one mommy in the group, okay, me, who crudely scratches lines, diagonally crossing every four, to show how many days of “summer vacation” have passed. I feel like Tom Hanks’s character in
Cast Away,
only I haven’t started talking to a soccer ball wearing a face drawn with my own blood. Yet.
    There’s a noticeable difference between my mom-friends who sagely scheduled summer camps for their kids and, uh, the rest of us.
    “After book-publishing camp,” one said smugly, “Sallie Jowill do one week each of Tuscan cookery and Tae Bo, and then we’ll round out July with horse camp, cursive hand-writing camp, and pre-Olympic diving.”
    Those of us who rejected the notion of a rigidly scheduled summer of activities (that’s right, the
crazy
ones) are cursing that we said, a mere eighteen days, eleven hours, and twenty-six minutes ago, “Children don’t need all this organized activity! They need free play time!”
    Well, no. That’s why they call them children. They need a nice, paid instructor to show them pipe cleaner crafts and oversee relay races all day. What they apparently
don’t
need, much to my shock, is a ham sandwich in front of
Days of Our Lives
with Mommy.
    When my daughter complained of boredom the other day, I said, as lovingly as possible, “Shhhh! Lexie’s gettin’ ready to tell Abe that Brandon’s the father of her love child. Don’t you know nothing about a story arc?”
    She sighed heavily and retreated to her room to read a book. Freak.
    I guess the thing I hadn’t counted on was that, even on a day like yesterday, which included a three-hour playdate with a friend, a T-ball game, and a birthday party at an amusement park, my daughter would actually say, “I’m booorred” in the twenty-three-odd minutes we had between rushing from place to place.
    My daughter and her friends are under the delusion that they’re tiny passengers on an invisible cruise ship, and wemoms are the cruise directors. (“First up, Styrofoam peanut tower construction, followed by Slip’N Slides and slushies on the Lido deck at fourteen hundred hours!”)
    My friend, also the mother of an only child, promised to wave to me from the back of the white van after she gets her arm out of the straitjacket that she’ll surely be wearing by summer’s end.
    I’m sure she’s exaggerating. I don’t think you can really get an arm out of one of those things.
    One of the only camps I did sign up for was ballet camp. I’ve always wanted to be one of those dedicated and cheerful “ballet moms” who researches summer dance camps for months and even sells cookie dough and Christmas wrapping paper for ballet school fund-raisers.
    Ballet is beautiful, but I’m a new soul, incapable of appreciating scene after scene of young girls standing on their toes and mincing about and then standing on their toes and mincing about some more. And the plots? Sneaky fairies and magic feathers and stuff. Oh, just let me eat my own flesh till I quietly disappear. Still, the princess likes it a lot, so off we went to see her school perform something called
Coppelia.
    Now for those of you who don’t know pointe from pintos,
Coppelia
is a famous comedic