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

anyway?
    Here’s a flash: They’re not mammals. Not even close. But they come under the heading of “sea creatures,” so that was good enough for me. While other, smarter mommies had assisted in constructing dioramas of rain forests, working volcanoes, and battery-operated solar systems, we chose a mammals-from-the-sea theme housed in a shell-lined shoebox. Which would’ve been killer if we had left out the turtle. This, coupled with my “help” on two math homework problems that turned out to be wrong, resulted in my firing.
    Of course, I know that turtles aren’t mammals. They are ambivalents, which can live on air or underwater and write with their right or left flippers. They also almost never vote.
    Although the science project ended poorly, it wasn’t a waste of time, because we also got to learn about the dwarfsea horse. These tiny creatures have a colt’s head, a monkey’s tail, and a chameleon’s independently roving eyes. (“You talking to me?
You talking to me?
Oh, I give up.”)
    While all that is fascinating, the coolest thing we learned is that the dwarf sea horse doesn’t have a stomach. That’s right! It has what is called “a continuous gut.” This anomaly is only found in the Florida Keys and, occasionally, the nation’s finer Golden Corral restaurants.
    The dwarf sea horse searches constantly for food, all day and into the night. Although I don’t have the head of a colt, I must have some dwarf sea horse in me.
    Another cool thing we learned about these weird little creatures is that the male gives birth. That’s right! The female, who is desperately out there trying to find a late-night drive-through, deposits the eggs in the male’s pouch, and he takes care of them, presumably giving up caffeine and highlights just to be on the safe side.
    Studies have shown that although the males carry the babies, they actually invest about half as much metabolic energy as females do in producing offspring. Everybody say duh-huh.
    So, in conclusion, turtles are not mammals, Donald Trump is a mammal but not warm-blooded, and I am, at least in the eyes of one elementary school student, toast.

6
Hilary Duff & Us
When Motherhood Hits Those Inevitable Valleys,
We’ll Always Have “the Hils”
    Hons, I am finally a hero in my daughter’s eyes. Not because I snatched her from the jaws of a rabid dingo or plucked her from a deadly riptide. No, no. I’m a real hero because I have secured tickets to the Hilary Duff concert.
    To those of you who don’t know Hilary Duff from Howard Duff, this is a Very Big Deal. It’s like if you were a parent back in ‘64 and came home one day waving tickets to
The Ed Sullivan Show
and asking, “Hey! Who’d like to see four mop-topped cuties from Liverpool perform tonight?”
    Hilary is a squeaky-clean teen queen with a passable voice who plays to sold-out audiences of “tweens.” My daughter and her best friend adore Hilary. They sleep in Lizzie McGuire nightgowns (Hilary’s TV show character—try tohang here, will you?), they wear Lizzie tennis shoes, they carry Lizzie purses.
    As role models go, Hilary’s okay. There was that reported flap between her and the tiresomely tough Avril Lavigne (Hil said Avril didn’t appreciate her fans enough—sigh) and a spat with Lindsay Lohan at the
Freaky Friday
premiere (Hil stole her boyfriend, hunkette Aaron Carter), but generally, she’s no diva. I know it’s true ‘cause I read it in
Bop
magazine.
    At forty-seven, I knew I’d probably be the oldest mom in the Bi-Lo Center in Greenville, South Carolina, and even as the tears of joy spilled like tiny diamonds down my precious daughter’s cheeks, she managed to choke out, “Uh, can you maybe sit behind us or maybe somewhere in the back?”
    Ouch.
    Just for that, my friend and I intend to do as our foresmothers did before us and embarrass the dookie out of our little girls. I’m going to jump up and down and make those hand signals that the kids all make, the ones