Not everybody worships Santa

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Yeah, I know. I've been slacking.

We had a nice Christmas, even though it still just kinda rubs me wrong to do the whole Santa thing. With the exception of the divorce (meaning, I still feed the mutual breakup "mommy and daddy wanted it" line), I'm all about total honestly. Bean knows that hamburgers are made from cows (and how the cows die), I don't use cutesy pseudonyms for body part names, she thinks vultures are cool and wants to stop and look at the roadkill we pass. So to do the Santa thing just seems wrong to me. Yeah, yeah ... I know. I take it from all sides when I talk about this, so I get the 'magic of make believe' deal. And I'm not against her having a kickass imagination. This is the girl who told me the other day "Look, mommy - I'm cooking slime eels". So I encourage and foster her imagination all the time. But if she's able to pretend she's cooking slime eels (and, to take it a step or three further, to pretend they taste good), she's obviously got pretend and make believe covered.

I also had the unenviable task of finding Barbie-esque dolls that aren't overly sexualized. I settled on Wizards of Waverly Place dolls, which are dressed like girls dressed when I went to high school. That is - not like a skanky ho.

I'm anti-Barbie for my kids. Their dad isn't, but I won't buy them Barbie dolls. Bean asked me why and I said that I thought they sent the wrong message to girls. To which she responded (she always has a response) "Well, if I ever meet Barbie, I'll just tell her she needs to change her message to the right one, and then you can buy me a Barbie to play with."

Problem solved.

Like my anti-Santa tendencies, I catch flak on the anti-Barbie stance. I really don't fault anyone else if they're okay with Barbie for their young daughters. I'm not. That's all. I'm not judging anyone or saying they're a bad parent for doing so, it's just not what I want for my girls. To me, Barbie just sends the wrong message. I don't see her as an empowering female role model. Now if they had a normally-proportioned astrophysicist Barbie in jeans and a t-shirt, I'd be all over it.

But I digress.

Christmas: good. The girls were with me the whole week, and Christmas morning was fun. The liked their gifts, my folks came over for dinner, and it was a pretty good day, even if Miss O skipped her nap and there were points in time where I considered seeing if any of the neighbors would like to receive two kids for Christmas.

I've been struggling a bit with Bean. We had a few rough days last week and a few battles of will. On Sunday, after a way-too-early morning, I told the girls they needed to nap. Then gave the ultimatum: you're not coming out of your room without a nap. One would think that would get them to chill out and sleep (because they both needed it). But they ended up staying in their room all afternoon. I spent an hour or so trying to get them to sleep, then put up the child gate on the door and told them they could come out for dinner and bath time, but otherwise, they were staying in there.

And I actually stuck to it. They took it pretty well, as they have a ton of books in there and love to jump on the bed and act like fruit baskets. There were a couple requests to come out, but I just reminded them that they chose not to sleep, so they could come out to use the bathroom, to eat and to take a bath, but that was it.

And then Bean showed up pants-less in the living room to inform me she only came out to pee. Apparently, she's able to climb over that gate. But she chose to use her powers for good instead of evil, and only did it to use the potty.

If I survive single motherhood with these two, I'm fairly certain I'd be able to talk jumpers off bridges, and hostage-takers into violence free surrenders. Maybe I'll run for president on the platform: I survived single motherhood with The Bean - there's nothing that can scare me and no one that can outfox me.
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