Tomorrow, my baby starts kindergarten. It is the next of her inevitable steps in her Great Work.
She is ready.
And, through my tears, I am proud.

This is just a little blurb I wrote for Gaia's teachers this year. The classes are all named after birds, so Gaia's in the Bluebird Class this year. The class mommies, of which I'm a proud member, are putting together a little book for the class to give the teachers and you're supposed to put a little message for the teachers there: So here you go:

Bluebirds we came, just last fall;
a friendship great was felt in all.
We met new friends inside this hall;
It's a year of life we'll long recall.

Adventures, learning, and growing too
through hugs and scrapes and missing shoes,
but in the end, we learned from you
to hold in our hearts your lessons true.

I just cant say enough nice things about Wee Know School.

Driving to work today, without radio and fuming about a lot of things, but mostly about having to go to work on such a beautiful spring day, Gaia says to me: "Daddy? Do you know who I love?"
"No," I say. "Tell me."
"I love you. And mumma."
My heart swells. "Oh, honey. Thank you."
"I'll love you and mumma, no matter what. Always."

You're a good girl, Gaia. There are things on this here blog that I might show to your first real boyfriend. This post will be one of them.

Oops. Tears of joy now.

So, I was toolin' around in my Flickr site looking for an image to use for some wacky dumb project and I stumbled across the stupidest video ever.

It's a video of the Little Black Dog (tm) flapping her legs in the sunshine. But what's going on the image is not what makes this video warm my heart on a long cold day in early march. What warms my heart is the soundtrack.

Two-year-old Gaia, clearly sitting in a pool of water, is asking me to identify a bucket. And it is so important that she asks me five times.

Gaia: Is this the bucket daddy?
Is this the bucket daddy?
Is this the bucket daddy?
Is this the bucket daddy?
Is this the bucket dad?

Gabe: Yeah. That's a bucket.

Gaia: Why?
Why's that a bucket?

This is what the flip video was invented for people. It's also why I keep all my raw flip footage, even though there is more of it than I'll ever be able to parse. You never know what is the golden footage that will warm your heart when you need it most. Data storage is cheap and plentiful in this day and age. Roll with it, people.

Gaia and I have been spending a lot of time in the Mushroom Kingdom lately. And let me tell you this: New Super Mario Brothers Wii is both a blessing and a curse. It's great fun that Gaia can play along with me, carefully ensconced her her protective bubble until we get to a flag, at which point she will scream that she wants me to let her out of the bubble. Once I do, she will hop on to the flag before me and exclaim: "I Beat You, Daddy!"

The curse? It's a goddamn hard game. Especially when you have a little bubble floating around during boss fights that gets you killed every so often. And, it's unforgiving. It's a Mario game. Mario is stupid and falls in lava and dies a lot. That's what Mario does. He's lame that way. If Mario had half a brain, he'd leave the Mushroom Kingdom forever and head back to Brooklyn where he could rake it in as member of UA Local No. 1. But no. He'd rather get his ass kicked again and again by some cheaply placed Bullet Bill. Whatever Mario.

Anyway, my mismash of love/hate feelings for Mario have not yet sullied Gaia's feelings toward him, as evidenced by this pair of drawings found in the back seat of my car this morning. Enjoy Gaia's drawings of Mario and Luigi.

The Fancy Nancy Dress Up Stick-Ons Game makes me crazy. Super Crazy.

1. Colorforms are impossible to stick on something if you have cold little hands.
2. Colorforms are small and probably going to get lost.
3. The game shows you where the peices are supposed to go on the gameboard, but in some cases, especially with the wands, there is no way to stick the item in that location on the standee.Lame!
4. Fancy Nancy is plenty fancy without getting all gussied up with "accessories." But that's not really the game's fault. That's my prejudice about Fancy Nancy and her inattentive, Kings-Crown eatin' parents.

However, G. loves the game. And here are some ways that the game is good:

1. No dice. And the spinner is built into the box. (Look, there's nothing wrong with dice, but with little kids, dice are one spastic arm shake away from gone forever.
2. The game can be played to completion in about 15 minutes .
3. There is no board to move peices around.
4. Gaia loves it.

She was mad that we wouldn't get up this morning. She usually sleeps in later than me. Today, she poked her head in and asked if it was Ok if she went potty. I should have known something was up then.
So, we poked around. She came downstairs and got her note from St. Nick and saw that she had a haul of Hello Kitty stuff in her stocking. And she kept looking around.
"Are you sure there aren't more presents from St. Nick?"
No, Jeni and I stood united. "No. Gaia. There aren't anymore presents. Don't be greedy." She sucked it up and pouted a bit and then went on a candy-cane bender.

Later.

We're picking up prescriptions and it turns out Santa is appearing at the store, so we head to the back so she can have a sit with Santa and say hello. "Will Santa have some presents for me?" Again. Jeni and I said no. "Don't be so greedy, Gaia." She sucked it up and went and sat on Santa's lap. Back at the front of the store she started to cry. "Oh no," she said. "I forgot to tell Santa I wanted a Barbie." I told her it was Ok, and that I'd tell Santa she wanted a Barbie when I called him at work on Monday.

Later still.

She's sobbing on the couch, and I've just barked at her for talking back and grumbling into her blanket. "In this family," I explain, "We talk to each other. If you have a problem or are upset, you tell your family, you don't tell it to your blanket under your breath."
She looks up at me from her tears. Her lip quakes and pools well in her eyes. And then the dam bursts. "I don't know when its Christmas!"

And it all clicks.
She's confused St. Nick's with Christmas. She has been frustrated all day because Jeni and I have not, from her perspective, been taking Christmas seriously. The tree's not even fully decorated yet! So we grabbed a calendar and some stickers and talked about the days of the week and the time between now and Christmas, and by the time we'd finished, she was laughing about how silly it all seemed.

She's four, but so very very smart. I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to have more thoughts than you have words for all the time. I must remember to ask her mother.

One of the many irritations of commercial construct known as "the holidays" is the ramping of the advertising aimed at children.
Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network are the worst offenders, and given their demographic, I blame myself for being surprised.

Everything that is advertised this time of the year is positively _awesome._(With one major exception. Anything made by "Leapfrog.") I'm very proud of my girl for her continued honesty with herself with whether she wants or needs the delights being advertised.

We have taken to cat calling at commercials as they air. We especially like calling out "LAME!" at the top of our lungs at the LeapFrog edutainment products. "Those are for kids who don't know how to play videogames, right Dad?"

Right Gaia.

Or for parents who are scared of videogames.

I've been exposing Gaia to "her roots" lately. We've had a quick tour of some of the great videogames of the past, and I've been largely surprised by her reaction to many of them. Games that I thought she'd not like she has, and games I was sure she'd love, she's grown sick of quickly.

Now, I recognize that I'm not doing good science here. My own feelings toward the games could be having a huge impact on her reaction to them. I think that's particularly true of Bubble Bobble, for example, where my love for the game gets in her way my being able to evaluate her reaction to it. But for the most part, she's got a good head for games -- she should, she's been playing Super Puzzle Fighter since she was 2 weeks old.

So, imagine how my heart swooned when she took controller into her little hands and fought her first couple rounds of Goblins in Final Fantasy.

We're playing the GameBoy Advance version on the GameCube, by the way. For what it's worth, I'm told this version is more polished and considerably easier than the original verisons. I never played the NES version.

She named her characters for the usual suspects, (Pearl is her freind from school, who she said had to be a red mage-- "She's NOT a Thief, dehdeh. No way.") and she made me so proud when she chose the role of Warrior for herself.

The Final Fantasy games are a little tough on her, she (rightly) hates the idea of randomly spanwing battles, but once she became aware of the best way to win most of them (Rapidly pressing A until you win) she quickly found them annoying more than startling: "I just want to go to the castle. You fight, Dehdeh."
Also, she doesn't read passively, so keeping tabs on her party's health and navigating the menus was hard for her.

She loved that she and I were able to rescue a princess and be back to the castle in under an hour of real playing time, and she thought it was cool that we could walk around and talk to people in a town.

She also likes the music, and sometimes makes me sit around in a town or castle so she can listen to the music. She does not like the menu music. "DehDeh, what did you do? Put the castle music back."

I should know better than to have this conversation, but I’m gonna jump in here. You may have seen an image floating around that attempts to take the Disney Princesses to task for being overly obsessed with beauty or other “shallow” values otherwise associated with the feminine.

Here's the thing: This graphic presents almost exclusively what outside forces view these women; it does not even attempt to express how these women feel about themselves. This graphic specifically relates to the women pictured only as sexual objects, and in fact, fails to account virtues that the princesses do possess, including kindness, bravery, passion, love of nature, and a strong sense of self.

If you find yourself cheering the sentiment behind this image, consider this: the reason you probably identify so strongly with this image is because deep down inside, you feel the same way toward them. And that’s an ugly part of yourself. So lets talk.

It’s only the shallowest interpretation of the Disney Princesses stories that ascribes them only the virtues of sexuality. Every one of the Disney Princesses exhibits amazing courage. Not only in the light of their grand and epic adventures, but also in the face of defying the cultures in which they live. Snow White, left alone in the woods, knowing that she spared being unjustly murdered, sets off to live on her own, alone in the woods. Briar Rose, Jazmine and Ariel both defy their father’s wishes and undergo drastic personal changes to make themselves into something they wish to be. Out of her great love for him, Belle gives up her own life in exchange for her father’s freedom. Cinderella retains a belief in the power of goodness and spirt in spite of almost overwhelming evidence that goodness and spirit do not exist in her world.

These brave things are not only embraced by the princesses, but they are things that each princess must actively fight for in order to remain true to themselves. And they don’t do it by sitting around making wishes. They fight, ague, take stands, make questionable choices, work hard, learn much, and understand more in the course of their respective journeys. Are there no greater virtues we could wish to instill in our daughters than an understanding of themselves and their place in the world and the courage to make sure they remain true to that sense?

The sense that somehow a talent for something deemed “feminine,” (such as cleaning, sewing, caring for nature’s creatures, or yes, even, possessing an overt feminine sexuality) somehow diminishes the bravery shown by the heroes of the Disney Princess stories is a sense that comes lazily from perspective of the dominant culture, and not from a critical look at the characters of the stories themselves.

Its only right, with the unusual exception of Briar Rose’s case*, to declare the Disney Princesses true heroes of their respective stories, but society doesn’t, because it’s too easy to ascribe a heroic nature to the masculine lead of any given story, thus relegating the princesses to the hapless victims. This is clearly not the case to anyone with any familiarity of the story, so why, as a culture, are we so quick to describe it otherwise?

Heroics and villainy are no more easily defined than masculine and feminine. Ask yourself which are you, the hero or the villain, the masculine or the feminine? Are these exclusionary constructs? Are the princesses your heroes or your villains? Can you be only one, or can you be both? Why or why not?