Things Have Gone TOO Far

Oh, really. I am getting horrendously tired of people attempting to make adults out of children.

I mean, when I was a little girl, age 12 was when you began leaving dolls behind. Age 13 was for your first heels (in my neighborhood anyway). If you were Catholic or Protestant, you got them for confirmation, and if you were Jewish you got them for going to someone's Bar Mitzvah. No, my children, there was, back then, no equivalent for girls. Nobody had ever heard of a Bat Mitzvah and wouldn't have believed it if they had. And, I may add, these "high heels" were something called Baby Louis heels, which were about an inch and a quarter high.

This somewhat mild rant is occasioned by the fact that in one of today's papers, I ran across a story about something new for girl babies. It seems that some enterprising fashion type has come up with - are you ready? - high heels for babies. And there is a picture of them. They are the same little Mary Jane type booties that many female type babies wear, except added to the heel is - well - a heel. According to the story, these heels are soft and not intended to be walked on (which makes sense, since the age group they're targeting doesn't actually walk yet), but, for God's sake!

What runs through my mind, if this trend persists, is that we are soon going to see a new form of the old Chinese practice of foot binding. Little girls will have their feet trained to look like Barbie doll feet, which cannot be made to wear flat shoes on account of they're permanently fixed in spike heel position.

Meanwhile, 10 year olds are being taken to Victoria's Secret for bras. And quite recently, one store (it might even have been Victoria's Secret) was forced to take thongs for the pre-school set off the shelves. What in the name of all that's holy is going on here? I am upset. What in the hell ever happened to bicycles and roller-skating and making doll clothes and the Easy Bake Oven and baking cookies on a rainy day and marbles and playing jacks and long Monopoly games and....why on earth are we trying to persuade these kids that it's more fun to be a grown-up? It's not, you know. I'd much rather have parties in the back yard where you dyed your milk blue with food coloring. And a birthday party where my grandmother listened to what I asked for and actually made me a pink birthday cake with white frosting, because all the other little girls in the neighborhood had white cakes with pink frosting and I wanted to be different.

You know, guys...childhood. Could we get back to giving kids some?

The ants seem to have disappeared, by the by. Joshua informs me that they were coming out of the dishwasher - evidently just another byproduct of our new neighbors behind us (renovations bring odd things out of the walls). I must say I prefer the ants to the horrendous plague of roaches that appeared when Lady Horrible and husband next door were renovating - I never saw a roach before that, and since the exterminators, have never seen one since. Unless you count our next door neighbors, of course.

I have done nothing of any importance all day, which suited me just fine...and lovely rain and thunderstorms tomorrow, so perhaps I will do something interesting. Or perhaps I shall sit on the porch and read books and watch storms. Happiness is knowing that you have no one to please but yourself.

Love, Wendy