A Special Valentine

If there's one thing the kids and I can agree on, it's our love of gender stereotypes. Gosh, we do love them. Birdy enjoys nothing more than imagining herself one day weak and underpaid, teetering around on spike heels that she can just make out below her double-D fake boobs and pink whalebone spank-me Spanx. It's okay that pink's not her favorite color because it *is* her favorite color! I mean not actually, because her favorite color is turquoise, but conventionally, because she's a girl! And if the spike heels get in the way of the karate black belt she is working towards? That's a small price to play for the femininely helpless elegance of a broken ankle. 

To say nothing of Ben and his love of the color blue! Which is at least his 17th favorite color, if not his 16th! He loves blue and all things blue because he's a real boy's boy-y boy-boy. He can hardly wait for puberty when his beard will grow in and simultaneously push out of his facial pores all of the pesky feelings like compassion and empathy that might bog him down in his manhood ascendance to the supreme manly state of feelinglessness and domination and also the utterly natural footballish man-love of watching men tackle each other. Luckily there are no feelings to stir up! Phew.

It is all so good and right. And so, the kids and I were not surprised to see this pair of paint chips at the hardware store.

 

Sweet Baby Boy and Sweet Baby Girl. Of course. You would not want your customers to get mixed up, and so it's easiest just to make sure they know which is which, kind of like putting signs on the bathroom doors so you don't end up sitting on a urinal to pee. You wouldn't want to *by mistake* paint a room the wrong color and have everyone turn out transgendered and color-gay and whatnot, and so we were very grateful for the help. But imagine our delight when it turned out that one paint company had gone even one step further! 

And that's just for the boys! Birdy's going to paint her room Magenta Vagina or Vulva Rose. She can't decide.

Excellent recipes for two kinds of beets and butternut galette are here.

xo

Oh, hello, February! You are looking very snowy this year. Which I love--the snow, that is. Not the ice as much. The ice, for instance, on our roof. The ice dams. We were joking about the whole curse-built-right-in aspect of "ice dams," only I think it's not enough. So we are calling them "ice fucks."

Anyways. If it were funnier, I'd post pictures of our various leaking ceilings and the buckets and the knotted pantyhose full of ice melt out on the roof. Only it's not funny (except maybe for Birdy saying "Why is there a panty-hoe on the roof?") so I'll post this instead:

That's a picture from this etsy site here, where I bought Ben and Birdy spoons for Valentine's Day. Shhh . . . But aren't they lovely? The ones I got in the mail are even lovelier! Beautifully mismatched and sentimental and gorgeous. The woman who made them emailed to ask if they were for boys or girls, since she has some more masculine spoons (?) for boys, and I started to answer her in a complicated way, and then it was just too complicated, so I wrote simply, "Girls. Thanks." Not that Ben wouldn't love to get a silver spoon with a big, er, truck or football or bow tie or cock on it. But he'll have to settle for a pretty one.

What else? Let's see. Will you check out my recipes on family.com? Brownies here, and Ben learning how to make a salad here. I can't tell you what a revelation this has been. Now every night he says, "Hey, Mama, should I make a salad?" And I say, "Oh, would you?" And he does. We are thrilled.

One last thing. I can't remember if I mentioned this piece, on charitable giving, that I wrote for Whole Living, but I'm linking to it because writing it changed my life.

Hope you guys are all staying warm and dry and happy. xoxo