(and then I pilfered some photo frames from my parents’ basement.)

Hazel’s current loves, because why not? This book – every.single.night. This album – she runs to her bedroom to start it over every time it ends. Peanut butter toast. Harvesting ornaments from the Christmas tree for her own use (I found a bunch crammed among a silo full of crayons when I cleaned up her toys last night.) Sparkly pipe cleaners. The Floppinberg family. Snowglobes – she calls them “heavies”, but it comes out “harveys”, so if she’s asking you desperately for a “harvey”, she wants a snowglobe…and she wants it to play music. She has two, and she by far prefers the Morgantown snowglobe that plays Country Roads :) And the current love of her life… the focus of her songs and daydreaming… her hopeful request when she knows she’s about to be allowed to watch a cartoon… her alpha, her omega, her one and only… the one who keeps showing up in thrifted books, the Target dollar bins, Christmas stickers at the grocery store, in the form of awesome chunky chipboard pieces in the scrapbooking aisle at Michael’s…

“Snoopy dog?? Snoopy dog?? Pease Mama, Snoopy dog?? Chayey Bwown???”

…Hazel is still singing ”aaaaaa BERFDAY to BEN!! a BERFDAY to BEN!!!” whenever she pauses to ponder the bliss that is birthday cake. Which is almost every single day. We talk about birthday cake A LOT right now. We sing. We count cand-oos. We wish for chocolate. This helps tremendously to satisfy the craving. At least for the one who is… two. Pretend birthday cake doesn’t really do much for Mama.

This little gal… seriously awesome. And a little bit afraid of her birthday cand-oos.

Anyway -

Oftentimes when I’d fall (/jump) into the creek, my aunt would put me in Doug’s dry clothes and I’d wear them home. This thrilled me to no end because then I got to wear – and keep – BOY UNDERWEAR. Constrained to the land of hearts, stars, mermaids, and pink, I lived for the motorcycles and GI Joes making their appearance in the laundry cycle. My parents let me wear them (thanks parents!) and I distinctly remember sporting the motorcycles one day in first grade – the same day my friend Joey showed up in a brand new puffy painted MTV denim jacket.

Anyway -

That kind of stuff – the day I walked into the kitchen with a golfball stuck down the front of my (Doug’s) GI Joe briefs and said “look Daddy, they have a pocket!!” – that’s kind of the epitome of my mentality as a child. I wanted to be a boy. They had more fun, easier clothes, better toys. I went through phases as a pre-K aged kid where I made everyone call me Kevin, and then Josh. I wanted (and got) Tonka construction toys instead of Barbies. I wanted (and got) my first pocket knife at age six. I wanted to wear boy underwear, flannel shirts, and converse. No pink. No dresses. And don’t ever touch my hair.

When Meggan and I became friends later in elementary school she was always trying desperately to fix my hair. “Please just let me fix your bangs! They look funny! They are falling out of their clips!” She was a girly girl and couldn’t fathom my tomboy ways. She hooked me up with her cousin Greg in fourth grade (ha!) She sighed (in a loving kind of way) when I showed up for the first day of fifth grade in brand new mini hiking boots that matched my dads, she in her bright white cheerleading shoes with the colored tabs that you can switch out to match your outfit (which was red and white… on our first day of fifth grade). She did not understand things like my rock collection, but loved me anyway. I did not understand things like curling irons, but I loved her anyway. She was the first one to notice and freak out any time I adopted any new little bitty femme habit.

So she, more than most of my friends, giggled hysterically and completely understood the disconnect when we showed up at her parents’ pizza shop on Saturday night with Hazel sporting the new shoes she’d picked out and suckered her grandpa into buying for her (my dad cares very much that his granddaughter is well-dressed and that her hair is combed… it’s kind of adorable, but very weird to me). Sometimes I don’t know where this kid came from.

Hazel is lucky to have an Aunt Meggan to school her in the ways of makeup-wearing, getting poker-straight hair to do anything but, and everything other girly thing under the sun.

Except nailpolish. I do love nailpolish. But usually only… brown. Brown glitter. :)

I brought you to the river to watch the fish swim by
and lay around that grassy bank and breathe in that blue sky
I brought you to these waters to see what you could see
the difference in the two worlds can’t help but frighten me…

- The Avett Brothers

Autumn has arrived… at least at my parents’ house, where trees started shedding their leaves and seed pods simply for Hazel’s amusement and collection, it seems. Time to listen to cool-weather music, button up, cut off all of my hemp bracelets until time to make more next summer.

“Should I be taking pictures of this?”

“YES. We have to have SOMETHING for the slideshow.”

October 2009

Some of Hazel’s current favorites/demands:

Eric Carle’s Draw Me A Star (We are in the middle of a star fixation. Warning, there is a definite penis implication in an illustration of Adam & Eve. Lately, whenever we get to the photo of Eric Carle at the end of his books, Hazel exclaims “Pa!” each time – my dad and E.C. are beard twins, don’t you know?)

Mem Fox’s Whoever You Are (aka, “Ebbewa Awe”. This book taught her the word “blood”.)

Liz Garton Scanlon’s All the World (aka, “Ebbewa Wowd”. This book taught her the word “couple”, because I said “look Mikey, I think there’s a gay couple at the farmer’s market, too”… upon close inspection after reading a bad amazon review about the “lesbian couple on the swing”. *sigh*)

Jane Belk Moncure’s My “h” Book (I could have goodwilled the entire alphabet for $6.50, but… we’re moving soon.)

Dr. Seuss’s Yertle the Turtle (such a socially & politically PERFECT book… I do declare.)

Marie-Louise Gay’s When Stella Was Very Very Small

Sherry North’s Because I Am Your Daddy (Grandma hit the ball out of the park with those last two picks.)

Bob Barner’s Stars! Stars! Stars! (thank you Mrs. Hall for consigning this and your classroom’s entire Eric Carle collection.)

Catherine Walters’ Time to Sleep, Alfie Bear! (thanks again, Mrs. Hall, and other Grandma for financing this particular stack of books! This is a perfect summer book.)

Eric Carle’s From Head To Toe (she has owned this board book since she was teensy, and is all of a sudden obsessed with it – “I ‘tan do it! I ‘tan do it!”)