Woolsey Family Chronicles

The kids are all at a very cute age. I didn't say it was an easy age, but cute for sure. People always talk about multiples having their own language. Some moms of multiples say this wasn't true for their kids at all while others claim that their kids needed a speech therapist because they just talked to each other in their own language. It is very cute because I am definitely noticing more and more that the little kids are talking to each other. They ask each other questions, answer each other's questions and then I have seen them mutually laugh at something that they are communicating about. Sometimes I can understand what they are saying, but a lot of the time it is just their own language.

I have also noticed, even though they are only two, the little kids play together all the time. I would say Preston has the highest propensity to be a loner and just play with his trains by himself. The girls do puzzles together with the help of their big sis, play on the play structures together and wrestle. The little girls love to wrestle. They grab and tackle each other from behind, throw each other to the ground, lay on each other, and this usually goes on until someone gets hurt.

Now that the blessed sun has been out more lately, we go outside to play on the playground in the backyard after dinner. I prop my buttocks on the blue lounge chair and monitor the kids as the go up and down the slide a thousand times, catapult themselves through the structures windows, and chase each other.

Tonight I was setting up Ava's Barbie house with her and it reminded me of a memory I had. Chris and I were traveling through France with our friends Nicola and Paul around 2002. We ended up at this quaint little house in Saumur in the heart of the Loire Valley. We were making ourselves dinner as the sun was setting on the vineyards around us and Nicola and I were going back and forth about how we would raise our kids. We were both years away from having kids ourselves, but boy did we know a lot about how these future kids were going to be brought up. No toys guns for boys, and no Barbies for girls. We would not have sexualized models of women with their perfect bodies and perfectly long illustrious hair held up as models for our girls to feel that they had to live up to. No way were we going to be into that.

Fast forward eight years and I have amassed through gifts and charitable contributions to the Woolsey household, if I were to count, 30 gorgeous Barbies, 60 different Barbie outfits, furniture to fill a few Barbie mansions and of course, the three story Barbie house. As Ava and I finish up working on furniture and Barbie placement in the Barbie house it strikes me that this looks a lot like a Barbie Hollywood whore house. It has all the makings of a scandalous scene, with scantily clad Barbies draped over the couches (possibly drunk) and crowding the beds (no comment) and then there are Barbies skinny dipping in the outdoor hot tub. There are hot plastic ladies everywhere. So my standards for allowing my girls to own Barbies have given way to our cultural and societal norms; this is sometimes the difference between idealistic parenting and realistic parenting I suppose. But I don't have any fake guns in my house yet!

Meanwhile I am engaged in a very tough conversation. In our Barbie Hollywood whore house decoration party, Ava and I have run across the tooth fairy pillow that my mom made me when I was a little girl. I explained to Ava that when she loses her first tooth she will place it in the pocket of the pillow and we will place this pillow under her pillow and then a tooth fairy will come by and take her tooth and replace it with something special. Ava challenged me big time on the tooth fairy. She asked several times in a few different ways how the tooth fairy knows that the pillow with the tooth in it is under her pillow. She asked me what she is going to give for the tooth. I said when I was little it was money. Ava has no use for money yet, so she suggested that a toy would be better. I told her that if she got money she could buy her own toy. She totally disregarded this brilliant idea and replaced it with her own sensible idea that really the tooth fairy should just get her a new toothbrush. Great idea, I said. Then about five minutes later Ava said, Mom, is there really a tooth fairy? I had to think quick but I pulled one out of Angela's playbook and said, "of course there is a tooth fairy if you believe in her." Phew. Tonight I am going to believe in my own kind of tooth fairy, the kind that leaves spa gift certificates under my pillow.

Until next time, the mothership is signing off.