Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank Read Online Free PDF Page A

be my flower girl. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
    Oh, thank God! I had lost enough sleep over this. Sophie and I went shopping for the perfect flower girl dress (the one with the daisies was too small by now) and counted down the days to the big event.
    Todd and Linda decided to incorporate some rituals from his Native American heritage into their wedding ceremony. Before the service began, they had a friend set some sage on fire and “smudge” the sanctuary of the church to purify it.
    This was lovely and quite meaningful to everyone except for the late-arriving Aunt Tiny and Uncle Dink.
    While a nephew home from college for the festivities optimistically noted that “Cool, this church smells like pot,” Uncle Dink noisily shuffled from corner to corner, sniffing for the source of the “fire.”
    I suppose it’s true that once a volunteer fireman, always a volunteer fireman, because even as Sophie walked into the church in her first-ever flower girl outfit, back straight, hair festooned with tiny white flowers, shy smile in place, Uncle Dink was swatting at the air in front of her. “The whole damn church is going to be on fire and nobody seems to give a damn. It’s the damndest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said, finally settling back into his rightful spot beside Aunt Tiny.
    All we could think was,
Damn.
    I discreetly pulled Uncle Dink aside and told him that nothing was on fire, that it was just a purification ritual that involved burning sage. He looked relieved, but the nephew looked crestfallen.
    “Oh, for God’s sake,” I hissed at him. “Did you think we were going to hand out big fat doobies like little bubble soap containers?”
    He hung his head.
    The wedding was beautiful, and the best part was seeing the flower girl proudly posing for pictures beside her beloved aunt after the ceremony.
    Sophie had not only been a flower girl at last, but she had done it for someone she genuinely loved, not just somerandom couple that broke up because the groom-to-be couldn’t stay away from the Lucky Lady Floating Casino and Hot Wings Bar.
    Oh, and the second-best part? There wasn’t a chocolate fountain in sight.

5
Weary Mom to Uppity Teens
At Least We Know Where the
Continent of Chile Is
    There’s a great brouhaha brewing over the problem of poor writing among America’s high school and college students.
    Ain’t hardly none of ‘em can do it right, studies say.
    Some blame the text messaging craze favored by the phone-as-umbilicus set. We’ve become a nation of instant messagers that has far surpassed the shorthand of my high school yearbook (motto: “not badly writ”), the uninspired 2 Sweet 2 B 4 gotten. That’s right: I used 2B sweet.
    As long as there’ve been parents and kids, the older has whined about how the younger can’t write, spell, speak to elders, make fire, and so forth as good as they could at that age.
    I think that instead of pointing fingers, we should help convince America’s young people of the lifelong benefits oflearning to write with thoughtful expression, correct grammar, and, of course, appropriate sin tax.
    We should get back to basics in the classroom, teaching that conjugation isn’t just something your redneck cousin wants to do when his girlfriend visits him in prison.
    He hadn’t oughta stole that man’s bling, nohow.
    According to members of the prestigious National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools, and Colleges (or “the Hulk” as they like to call themselves), even the English classes don’t require much writing these days. And yonder lies the problem.
    When I was in high school, we were not only required to read such literary masterpieces as
Beowulf
and
The Canterbury Tales,
which I believe were both written by J. K. Rowling, but we were also required to write ten-page reports about them. And while this assignment was as painful as an Arsenio comeback, there’s no doubt that it built character and made my writing gooder than it