Mother-Daughter Bonding

Over cars!

Sorta.

I am not a car girl. I appreciate a comfortable car. I will notice a pretty one on the street. But makes, models and specs? No idea, and no inclination to become more informed. Cars just don’t feature much in my world. I don’t even own one.

Both my girls, though, have gone through a phase in which they were quite taken by Volkswagon Beetles. Don’t ask me why. When she was sixteen or seventeen, Haley was very determined to have a whole fleet of them one day, in a rainbow of colours. Me, the non-car girl, could not see the point of that. I don’t even do that with teeny accessories, never mind something that would require extra acreage around my home. But, mostly, I just laughed fondly. It was never going to happen, and it made her happy to imagine it. No harm there. (These days, she owns one car. Not new. Not a Beetle.)

And now Emma is interested in Beetles. She likes Fiats, too, but Beetles, she declared yesterday, look much nicer than they used to. Have I seen them?

“Um… aren’t they sort of flatter than they used to be? The roof isn’t as rounded? Or is that the Bug?” And even as I spoke, I wondered if the Bug is really the same thing as the Beetle, just a different name? (Because I am Informed and Aware about cars. I know this stuff.)

She taps away at her iPhone, then shows me a few pictures. Oh, yeah. Much sleeker than the bulbous little fellas I remember.

And a decent amount of storage space, too! Ah, that German design.

Suddenly, Emma snorts and taps her screen again. “Hey, look at THIS!”

My snort is probably louder than hers. “Holy Hannah!” With advertising like that, no wonder my girls are Beetle fans. Going after the women’s market, are we, Volkswagon?

I put on cheesy car-salesman voice. “Just slide yerself onto that, little lady.”

“And then,” Emma adds, a wicked glint in her eyes, “shift it into drive!” Our laughter is distinctly un-ladylike.

My attention moves past the phallic-ly obvious to the hand brake.

“Oh my! And look at that! Ha! It just gets better and better.”

Emma looks at me, blankly.

Blankly?

Well, now. Her loving mother has sussed out a gap in her knowledge of Important Girl Stuff. I think we need to make a trip to Venus Envy, or at least visit the website. She’ll be thrilled, I know. That Mother-Daughter bonding? It just never ends.

Some kids really ARE exceptional

Isn’t this amazing?

A thirteen-year-old has a provisional patent on a new kind of solar panel array, which he devised by analyzing how trees interact with the sun.

I’ve argued before that not all children are ‘exceptional’. But this kid? He’s exceptional.

I did my best, really

Even the most confident of parents, with the very nicest of kids, ends up, every so often, looking at their offspring and wondering, truly, truly wondering…

“Who the hell raised you?“

the good, the bad, and the embattled

If you’ve noticed I’m a bit distracted these days (and how could you possibly have missed my frequent whinging about how tiiiired I am??) it’s all because of this.

Update: Her big brother realized that what a beleaguered girl might welcome in the middle of a long day would be a break, so he popped down to the school at lunch today to take her out. (Isn’t he great?) Lunch went well, and, so he reports, did her morning. Relatively speaking, at any rate, but at this point, we’ll take what we can get.

It’s not perfect yet, but things seem to be looking up. Thank goodness. Because those prehistoric ostriches? They were seriously eerie.