Zoe vs. Is It Inappropriate? AKA: The Day the LOLZ Died

Have you heard that last year's biggest toy for Christmas has a new line this year? And that some parents are not happy? First, if you don't know what LOL Surprise dolls are, let me explain.

LOL Dolls are tiny dolls with disproportionately huge heads (OMG SOOO CUTE!). They come inside little plastic balls that your child unwraps, revealing smaller (SURPRISE!) accessories---tiny outfits, little purses, and sunglasses---on the way to the big reveal of what doll you get. It's a collect-them-all Dantesque nightmare, just with tiny shoes that instantly (OMG!) get lost. Plus, glitter! 

Zoe got a whole bunch last year for Christmas. Did I mention they have THEMES! For instance: OMG! Fashion!, Glitter Glam!, and Swag!, all with exclamation points exactly where you'd think and also where you wouldn't think! But wait! There's more!

Don't let the big eyes fool you. They will LOL while they slit your throat.

There are also even smaller (AW!) Little Sister versions and pets, also with accessor!es. Some you put in water and their hair changes color . . . at which point the FUN! is just SO MUCH!... for about ten minutes. And then you lose one shoe from each pair.

But don't worry, you'll never ever lose the glitter! That's with you for life!

And because---viva la variety!---this year we have LOL Boys! And, LOL!! they are anatomically correct. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, maybe hold back one LOL! if you haven't yet had THAT conversation with Dear One, because what's getting unwrapped this Christmas is AWKWARD! Talk about a surprise package!

I censored the scandalous, I mean, God's beautiful teachable moment.

Naturally some parents are a tad upset.

Let's go back in time, shall we, to the days when toys were less LOL! and more Puritanical and no one was allowed to laugh quite as loudly---or if we did, we spelled it the right way, by God! Remember Ken and his neutered smoothness stored discreetly in hot pants? Though he did have a butt! And truly what is more old-fashioned lowercase lol than a butt for the under-ten set?

Well, that was so twentieth century. The twenty-first is all about dolls with tiny grape-like yet detailed constructions tucked into their tiny plastic hot pants. I wonder what happens when you put them in water?

All I can say is, add LOL Boys to Uncomfortable Topics for Christmas Dinner.

For extra credit, see if you can steer the conversation toward adjacent divisive topic circumcision! 

Now really what better toy can there be for a little girl like Zoe, who claims she can see cartoon characters' penises through their cartoon pants, and then asks me if that's inappropriate.

What does one say to this?

I'm really asking.

Because she asks me daily and my "It's okay, dear" is wearing thin but not as thin, apparently, as Snotlout Jorgenson's trousers in How to Train Your Dragon.

So if she gets one of these LOL Boys for Christmas she's likely to a) notice, b) comment on it, and c) point it out to strangers on line at CVS.

If Zoe was Haley Joel Osment in Sixth Sense, when she saw a dead person, the fact they were dead would not concern her as much as what they were wearing and whether it was revealing too much rotting skin.

So you'd think I'd be prepared and on high alert myself for inappropriateness, but nope. I recently put up four Art Deco prints in our bathroom and hadn't even noticed this one:

L Eau

Can we all see the butt of the gentleman coming out of the lake?

Le buttocks

Can we all guess who saw it immediately and zeroed in on it?

Then there's this one:

Le feu

Don't see anything? Look at the vase.

Le hermaphrodite?

Two more to go. See any problems?

La Terre

No? Look again. Those trees have boobs.

Le arbre a seins

Zoe is now calling them boob trees.

Personally I think she's reaching with the last one, but she swears she can see butts in the clouds.

L Air

Well, maybe.

Le tushie

But I'd argue that that's the only image she ever sees in clouds. Whenever this child looks up, I suspect that all she sees are cloud-butts and boobs in trees. Maybe she should keep her eyes on the ground. Where there are puddles. Shaped like penises.

Zoe: 195; Universe: 0

If you enjoyed this post, you may enjoy this Christmas post: Zoe vs. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

For more of Zoe's hijinks, follow me on Facebook and on Twitter at @zoevsuniverse. 

I need a win here, people. 

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Zoe vs. the Dear Santa Letter

Christmas, the season of joy, of wonder, of small children, their eyes aglow with acquisitive zeal. In the immortal words of Sally Brown: "All I want is what I have coming to me. All I want is my fair share." 

Zoe concurs. With some edits. "All I want is what I have coming to me as well as what everyone else has coming to them. Fair share? Who's that?"

Zoe's only five so I suppose I can't expect her to understand selfless gift-giving and fellowship of man, etc.  Every time we attend a birthday party I have to explain that the gift I'm wrapping is for her friend, not for her. And she counters that a friend wouldn't mind if she opened it and played with it first because we're all supposed to share, aren't we, or was that a lie, Mother?

So not only has she had, cruelly, dangled in front of her the gifts others were getting, poor child, but she's had to suffer through TV commercials parading before her toys she doesn't own . . . yet. How does she bear it?

After months of her begging for "a new show, one I haven't seen before," now Nick Jr. has delivered. I wonder if that's so they can get more little eyes on the toys in their ads? I say to myself with false innocence as I watch Zoe salivate over Barbie and her horse.

Zoe only wants two things: It and all.

Therefore I thought she'd be primed when I said it was time to write Santa a letter (now that she's learning to write in kindergarten) and tell him what she wants for Christmas.

To my surprise, she drew a blank. Well, not literally.

One thing about having a kid, it allows you to set up fun experiments where you tell them to do something without giving any instructions and then sit back and wait for the comic or tragic results.

Turns out Zoe doesn't give an elf about proper formatting. Her letter started out as one giant salutation right in the middle of the page. Then she circled it, a hovering island of greeting and bon homie. After that she was stumped so she drew . . . something. Don't ask me what.

Then she asked me how to spell cat. As I answered, my heart took a nosedive. Ever since our cat Harley died she's been asking when we were getting a new cat, and I keep putting her off, a path I now continued to traverse but with a slight detour I call Blaming the Man in Red.

"Santa can't bring cats because the sleigh doesn't have a litter box," I told her. 

She thought for a bit then asked how to spell toy. I told her, again my heart plummeting at this open-ended request. Could she be more general?

But then she placed "toy" in front of "cat." 

Hmmm. I could work with that.

Then she asked how to spell dog, and wrote "toy" above that.

A theme had emerged.  

Her finishing touch was to write "car" after "cat." I wasn't sure if these were meant to be separate items so I said, "You have lots of cars already . . . or is this a cat who drives a car?"

Her response: "Like the new show."

I had no idea what she was talking about, so later I asked the Husband if he knew. He didn't either. But I was reminded of this old cartoon where a cat drove a car. Did the Husband know what I was talking about?

"Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse?" he suggested.

Cats like convertibles so their capes can catch the breeze.

"Oh, I remember that show, but no. It was a cat who wore a mask and a trench coat."

It's important to note here that it was in our wedding vows that the Husband must figure out what I'm talking about from incomplete, and possibly incorrect, information. It might be strange but it works for us. Well, for me.

Anyway, eventually he figured out I meant Secret Squirrel.

"You thought Secret Squirrel was a cat?" he said.

"I don't know. Maybe that was his secret."

If you ignore the bushy tail, and the protruding tooth, it's a cat.

In any case, the identity of Zoe's car-driving cat is still a mystery, one that Santa will have to unravel when he gets her letter. Even though she didn't sign it, I suspect he'll still know it's hers because . . .

Zoe: 119; Universe: 0

For more of Zoe's hijinks, follow me on Facebook and on Twitter at @zoevsuniverse. 

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Zoe vs. Santa

The night before Zoe's first visit to Santa, story time took a sinister turn. We were reading Dr. Seuss's Tooth Book. When we got to the page with Smiling Sam the Crocodile, Zoe looked up at me with her big blue eyes and said, "I'd like to take his smile away." True story. All she needed to up the creep factor was an English accent.

Following the unpleasant business in Texas, Leatherface
finds seasonal work at the WestShore Plaza mall in Tampa.

This Christmas felt like it was time for other firsts. Zoe was now three so it seemed she might finally "get it." However, getting it and going along with it are not the same, as I was to discover while putting up our first real tree in several years and going all out with the decorating.

Slutty candles.

It will probably not surprise you to learn I'm a far cry from Martha Stewart. My nod to home decor year round is a candle that sits in a glass dish that sits over a glass vase that I fill with multicolored rocks. On its own, shoved behind the junk mail on the sideboard, it looks like an item they couldn't push on QVC. But for Christmas I removed the rocks and added silver balls and voila, we were all festive and crap.

Unwilling to lose this momentum, I unpacked all the dusty boxes we hadn't touched in years, put out knickknacks of Santas, gingerbread men, and angels, put up blinking lights, and arranged a Nativity scene in front of the candle/vase thing.

Counting down the shopping days till Jesus' birth.

Outside Zoe's bedroom I hung an Advent calendar made out of felt where the usual suspects are also felt with Velcro on their backs. Each day you're supposed to take the next person or animal out of its pocket and place it on the appropriate spot in the Nativity scene. Zoe really liked the calendar but had other ideas about deployment. On day one she took all the people and animals out of their slots and placed them randomly around the manger. Poor baby Jesus ended up upside down at the bottom, all of his blood rushing to his head. In Zoe's tableau one of the Kings (Stephen? Larry?) perched in the manger. By his side, his proud parents: a camel and a sheep. Instead of an angel viewing the scene from above there was a cow that appeared to be plummeting to a grisly death. Perhaps Zoe was starting a new holiday tradition. We'd call it: Pick your blasphemy.

When it came to decorating the Christmas tree, I was prepared, not just from knowing Zoe but from hearing other parents' stories about broken ornaments and the horror of bottom-heavy ornament placement. I was pretty sure Zoe's OCD would not make her immune to the latter. First, there was the height disadvantage. Second, her aesthetic eye is particular to her. She was excited when I showed her the ornaments and wanted to hang them all but kept losing the hooks on her way to the tree. 

In one box was all our baby's first xmas ornaments that we'd never had opportunity to use. A mercury glass rocking horse was the first to succumb to her destructive love. It was my own fault for putting it too low. The first time my back was turned she pulled it off, sang some off-kilter song in which the only words I could decipher were "rocking horse, rocking horse, oh, hey, whoa." Crash. Which was the sound of her dropping it. It broke into shards. She still wanted to play with it, perhaps even more now that it could draw blood, but I pulled her away. Our first casualty. Probably the only reason it survived as long as it had was that it had been in a box since 2010. Godspeed, red teardrop ornament that caught Zoe's eye next.

Besides keeping the more fragile ornaments at the top of the tree I've also directed her attention to the ones she can touch, like the furry mouse or the Elmo ornament. She has her workarounds for both protective measures. 1. She drags  a chair over to reach the higher ornaments. 2. She smashes the ornaments she can touch against the ones she can't.  

Regarding the singing of xmas carols: Don't. Except for "O Christmas Tree," which we must keep singing. Over and over. Go ahead and try another song. You'll get shushed.

Now for our visit with Santa....

This plastic Santa mask is the
only thing creepier than a child
with an English accent.

I've already mentioned her chilling pronouncement the night before our visit. I knew it was unlikely that she'd sit on some stranger's lap let alone some big guy in a loud outfit wearing a fake beard (apologies, true believers and children at heart). But it's those damn photos. You know the ones. They feature smiling little children, all Zoe's age, thrilled with their one-on-one audience with the ultimate gift giver. So I held on to hope.

Foolishly.

Following my experience at Macy's Santaland, I feel that a docile three-year-old who happily sits on a stranger's lap is as mythical as Santa himself, combined with the Yeti and conditioning shampoo.

First, a bit about the line. I feared for everyone when we got there (early, by the way) and the line already snaked back, disappearing into the bowels of the department store. How long would Zoe's patience hold out? I thought, filled with panic. Thankfully, though, those elves run a tight ship. But it was a desperate hour. She became well known, as I expected she would, since her grandmother and I had to keep calling her name when she strayed too far forward. We also had to keep telling her to stop pulling on the rope barrier, and banging on the metal base of one of the stands with a broken hanger. There were a litany of whiny requests we fielded, from the relatively benign: juice, pretzels, cheese to the somewhat bizarre: keys to get into the staff-only door, a candle with the number 3 on it (okay, that's actually not too bizarre; she likes to play with her birthday candle; what's bizarre is that I always carry it with me).

I have a meter just like that
and it also starts with a "B"!

Eventually we made it to Santaland proper, where Macy's kicks the holidays into high gear with electric trains, animatronic deer, a live Mrs. Claus, and a giant sleigh, which Zoe wanted to climb on top of. I tried to get her to pose for pictures at various points but she yelled, "No photo!" every time. Most of the shots I have of her show the back of her head with her hand out, the well-known gesture of the celebrity-felon.

Then our turn came. I knew we were in trouble as soon as Piper, the official elf escort, led us to the room our Santa was in (sorry, again, true believers). Zoe peeked into the room at the hell that was ahead of her and got the look in her eye with which I'm so familiar and which was probably the one I'd had in my eyes when we'd first arrived and beheld the line.

So . . . as any good mother would, I dragged my child kicking and screaming to her merry fate. She tried to run. She went boneless. She lay down on the floor. I shot Santa a look like, I bet you see this all the time. He did not return my gaze. I imagine all the Macy's Santas must be instructed: no eye contact, no sudden movements, three "ho"s minimum. Keep it moving, children. Santa loves you but by law must restrain himself.

The upshot, I wrestled Zoe onto the dais/bench whatever it was---I didn't have time to look, for all I know I was on Santa's lap---smiled a crazed is-this-fun-or-what? smile, and: SNAP. Holiday memories. Hilarious ones I'll be sure to rub in her face for years to come.

Don't leave him cookies, kids. This Santa's favorite snack is your soul.

Afterwards, while we waited to purchase our hilarious picture, Zoe ran over to a pay phone, picked up the receiver, and guess who she called? "Hi, Santa!" she said. I'd thought she'd said it all with her tears and screaming but I guess in all the hubbub she forgot to say hello. Before she unceremoniously hung up on him, I snapped a picture. It's the only one where she's smiling.

Zoe: 24; Santa: 0