Read Online Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank by Celia Rivenbark - Free Book Online
Authors: Celia Rivenbark
Ads: Link
tired of watching them look historic, you cantake the Girls for a pretend ride on the official American Girl horse. He costs sixty dollars, but he looks just like a horse from the Family Dollar Store to me.
There is only one lonely American Girl boy-doll, and he’s no Ken, let me tell you. Even on the catalog pages, Bitty Boy Twin looks as if he wants to scream.
I wonder why. Perhaps it’s because he’s sick of being dressed by chubby little hands that don’t take proper care of his Fall Frolic outfit or his Festive Plaid knickers. Or maybe it’s because he just read his “biography” and realizes that the high point of his life is going to be having “not-so-clean fun making cookies” with his twin sister. Hey! Who needs PlayStation?
Truthfully, I suspect Bitty Boy looks so horrified because he just read his own shipping charges or maybe he learned that all his siblings are on back order. Again.
What could possibly be more American?
How about the Easy-Bake Oven, which Sophie has begged for this year, no surprise to any mother of a little girl. But when I actually went out to buy one, I felt that awful mix of panic and disappointment I’d felt earlier in the day when I discovered they’d taken beets off the Pizza Hut salad bar.
Is nothing sacred?
The new Easy-Bake Oven looks nothing like the one I remember as a tot. It’s a microwavey “snack center” contraption. At least it still operates on a 100-watt bulb that every parent forgets to buy. It’s a parental rite of passage tospend most of Christmas Day trying to figure out which bulb in the house can be unscrewed and substituted so you can watch a single “brownie” cook in just under eight hours.
The hot toys this year talk a lot more than the ones in the past, and I’m not sure this is a good thing. Diva Starz dolls, we’re told, “speak fashion-related phrases!”
What the hell is a fashion-related phrase? Oh, I get it. Stuff that supermodels say. Stuff like, “I’d like a single leaf of arugula on a Wheat Thin, please, and then I’ll go throw it up” or “I’d like to act, but I have no talent!”
There’s also the Lil Chefs Talking “Smart” Kitchen, a seventy-dollar plastic kitchen programmed with fifty sounds and phrases “typically heard in the kitchen.” I’m hoping that includes the mantras from my kitchen: “Let’s just throw out this slop and go to Wendy’s” or “Don’t answer that; it’s a telemarketer!”
Maybe your kid aspires to be a fry cook. The McDonald’s Food Cart comes with a little headset just like the drive-through guy wears, presumably so you can pretend to mutter unintelligible gibberish to whoever you’re playing with and they can scream, “What? What did you say?” just like the real drive-through.
There’s even a talking Lemonade Lisa who dispenses lemonade-type product to a pretend customer while uttering “10 fun phrases!” Personally I’d prefer a mini-Starbucks stand where pretend customers would complain nonstop about spending nearly five bucks for a large latte.
I may settle for a Fisher-Price Sweet Magic Kitchen, which has pretend food that turns colors to let you know it’s done. Ohhhhh. So that’s how you can tell.
Of course, the best toys at this stage always seem to involve Barbie & Co. My daughter’s little friend gave her a pregnant Midge doll for her birthday this year. It was a regular stroll down memory lane, I tell you. When I was a kid, I had Barbie and my sister had Midge, a perky, freckle-faced redhead with a Dutchboy hairdo. She was the girl next door, the pretty-in-pink-plaid pal, the also-ran to her hottie friend, the Barbster.
I always felt a bit smug that I had Barbie while sis had Midge. You just knew things were going to be harder for Midge. And now she’s knocked up.
The funniest thing is the brouhaha from the freaks that are offended by this sort of thing. Turns out some Wal-Mart stores, exposing retail spines of Jell-O, have taken to hiding the
There is only one lonely American Girl boy-doll, and he’s no Ken, let me tell you. Even on the catalog pages, Bitty Boy Twin looks as if he wants to scream.
I wonder why. Perhaps it’s because he’s sick of being dressed by chubby little hands that don’t take proper care of his Fall Frolic outfit or his Festive Plaid knickers. Or maybe it’s because he just read his “biography” and realizes that the high point of his life is going to be having “not-so-clean fun making cookies” with his twin sister. Hey! Who needs PlayStation?
Truthfully, I suspect Bitty Boy looks so horrified because he just read his own shipping charges or maybe he learned that all his siblings are on back order. Again.
What could possibly be more American?
How about the Easy-Bake Oven, which Sophie has begged for this year, no surprise to any mother of a little girl. But when I actually went out to buy one, I felt that awful mix of panic and disappointment I’d felt earlier in the day when I discovered they’d taken beets off the Pizza Hut salad bar.
Is nothing sacred?
The new Easy-Bake Oven looks nothing like the one I remember as a tot. It’s a microwavey “snack center” contraption. At least it still operates on a 100-watt bulb that every parent forgets to buy. It’s a parental rite of passage tospend most of Christmas Day trying to figure out which bulb in the house can be unscrewed and substituted so you can watch a single “brownie” cook in just under eight hours.
The hot toys this year talk a lot more than the ones in the past, and I’m not sure this is a good thing. Diva Starz dolls, we’re told, “speak fashion-related phrases!”
What the hell is a fashion-related phrase? Oh, I get it. Stuff that supermodels say. Stuff like, “I’d like a single leaf of arugula on a Wheat Thin, please, and then I’ll go throw it up” or “I’d like to act, but I have no talent!”
There’s also the Lil Chefs Talking “Smart” Kitchen, a seventy-dollar plastic kitchen programmed with fifty sounds and phrases “typically heard in the kitchen.” I’m hoping that includes the mantras from my kitchen: “Let’s just throw out this slop and go to Wendy’s” or “Don’t answer that; it’s a telemarketer!”
Maybe your kid aspires to be a fry cook. The McDonald’s Food Cart comes with a little headset just like the drive-through guy wears, presumably so you can pretend to mutter unintelligible gibberish to whoever you’re playing with and they can scream, “What? What did you say?” just like the real drive-through.
There’s even a talking Lemonade Lisa who dispenses lemonade-type product to a pretend customer while uttering “10 fun phrases!” Personally I’d prefer a mini-Starbucks stand where pretend customers would complain nonstop about spending nearly five bucks for a large latte.
I may settle for a Fisher-Price Sweet Magic Kitchen, which has pretend food that turns colors to let you know it’s done. Ohhhhh. So that’s how you can tell.
Of course, the best toys at this stage always seem to involve Barbie & Co. My daughter’s little friend gave her a pregnant Midge doll for her birthday this year. It was a regular stroll down memory lane, I tell you. When I was a kid, I had Barbie and my sister had Midge, a perky, freckle-faced redhead with a Dutchboy hairdo. She was the girl next door, the pretty-in-pink-plaid pal, the also-ran to her hottie friend, the Barbster.
I always felt a bit smug that I had Barbie while sis had Midge. You just knew things were going to be harder for Midge. And now she’s knocked up.
The funniest thing is the brouhaha from the freaks that are offended by this sort of thing. Turns out some Wal-Mart stores, exposing retail spines of Jell-O, have taken to hiding the
Similar Books
