Mopsy tried on this new shirt today -- one of the goodies in the latest box of hand-me-downs from her cousin. (Thanks for the loot, Katie.)
This is what I found in the pantry last night: an empty cookie container with about seven crumbs in the bottom. Hmm. Does the culprit think that he's actually fooling anyone with this? The old put-it-back-and-she'll-never-notice trick generally doesn't work with clear packaging. With a cardboard box, you might get away with polishing off the last of the cookies for a few days. Maybe a week, if you're lucky. But this? This is just careless. Lazy. 
I prefer the original. This concept, as it was originally conceived in 1993 by the Ms. Foundation, was all about girls. And what’s wrong with that?
Take our Daughters to Work Day was about combating low self-esteem in girls, which often plummets in adolescence. It was about helping girls visualize careers for themselves, away from the boys who most often were singled out for praise in math, science and technology -- a few of the fields that led to the most lucrative careers. In this case, separate was a means of working toward equal.
But of course there were objections. It wasn’t fair to the boys. The teachers wanted to structure some curriculum around the day, but that wouldn’t do if the event excluded half their students. The Ms. Foundation insisted it wouldn’t work as a co-ed program – when clearly boys and girls face very different constraints and opportunities -- but caved in to the pressure in 2003. Instead of creating a separate day for the boys – which I think would have been a much better solution – it became the diluted event it is today.
Here’s why we need an all-girls day. My 4-year-old daughter said to me recently: “Moms don’t go to work!” That horrified me on many different levels. I know another girl the same age who’s obsessed with weddings and loves pretending to be the bride. Many, many girls fantasize about princesses, and focus an inordinate amount of attention on their looks. My son, however, is debating whether he wants to be an architect, scientist or a writer. Boys, in general, have no problem envisioning themselves in a career.
Maybe this dichotomy exists in our particular home because my husband goes to an office every day and I meet the kids at the bus and make dinner. I also have a small business designing accessories and the kids have sat on the floor with me, helping package orders and sticking hundreds of price stickers on tags. But maybe they see that less as work, more as mom fooling around with the glue gun again. (And not in a million years would they believe that the job of raising them could be called work.)
One could argue that underprivileged boys need this event more than , say, upper middle class girls do. That may very well be true. But make it a different program. A different day.
I don’t worry about they boys. The unspoken messages they receive every day tell them that they should expect to have a stimulating career, that they can have any job they're willing to work for. Every president we’ve ever had has been a man. A vast majority of scientists and engineers and astronauts are men. An overwhelming majority of the top business execs are men. When half the CEO's are women, then we can talk.
Tell me: should an 8-year-old kid have a foot nearly as large as his mother's size 8 1/2s? To my dismay, QB and I are now sharing a single pair of rollerblades. 
It's been a tough week around here. The kids are out of school for, count 'em, 11 looong days. So not only are we moms scrambling to try to entertain these bored kids and keep siblings from killing each other, but to make matters worse, half the people in Fairfield County have fled for warmer climates. People will soon be returning from St. Barts, Anguilla, and the Bahamas with tans and annoyingly relaxed smiles. Thirty-five degree weather is depressing enough in April. It's even worse when your neighbor emails you pictures like this. 
Oh how I wish there was some way to get a little body into her hair. There’s a horrendous place near our home called My Three Sons. Kids almost universally love it. Parent hate it. It’s basically a con game disguised as an arcade. Here’s the premise: Parents buy lots of tokens which kids use to play fairly harmless arcade/video games, like Whack-a-Mole. The better they do in each game, the more tickets they win at the end of it. With those tickets, kids can buy prizes at the end of the day. Here’s where it gets annoying. You have to buy about $20 worth of tokens for the kids to earn enough tickets to buy a toy worth maybe 50 cents. Not only that, but the toys are those annoying made-in-China plastic jobs that inevitably break in the car on the way home, initiating a melt-down. You can probably see why parents avoid this place like the plague. But that’s not really the point of my story.
QB is one of those odd kids who’s able to delay gratification. The last few trips to My Three Sons, he’s opted not to collect a prize, but rather to save his tickets. He’s working toward a car and track set he has his eye on, which requires something outrageous like 750 tickets.
The other day he went to a birthday party there, fired up that he might hit the 750 ticket threshold and come home with his prized car and track set. He didn’t. But he didn’t seem too upset about it.
That night, he told me he had a present for me. He had the biggest smile on his face as he held out his hand. In his palm was a toy ring with a little green stone, the kind you might get out of a gumball machine.
“Where did you get this?” I asked.
“My Three Sons,” he answered proudly.
It nearly broke my heart. He'd traded in his precious tickets to give something to me. I know how badly he wants that car, and his sacrifice makes the innocent gesture even more tender. It meant more to me than if he and his dad had gone to Tiffany's and charged something on the Amex. It might just be the sweetest present I’ve ever received. I’ll treasure it forever.
Tomorrow I’ll tell you about a similar gift Mopsy gave me.
