ashaland

Play Dooooh!

Does anyone actually make those perfect little multicolored animals on the Play Doh boxes? In my house, Play Doh retains its color for a day, maybe two if I hover around obsessively putting the Blue away before the Brown comes out. The favorite activity around here to moosh all the colors together till we have a massive amalgam one might describe as...puce?

Toy packaging. Hmmm. Sure, the toys are for the kids. But who's the one picking the toy off the shelf and saying, "Look, Mimi! Doesn't this look like fun? Look at all the pretty animals you can make with this!"? Who's got the Visa card? Those packages are for the parents, gullible souls like myself!

This may not be news to the marketing-savvy readers among you, and it's not really news to me either. It just struck me as I examined the picture of a particularly well-crafted lion on my daughter's new box of Play Doh this morning. Perhaps they should rename it Pay Doh.

Subversive housewife attire

I'm the only one who thinks it's ironic, but I've started collecting aprons. What better way to make a statement about my stay-at-home status? Who cares about my mediocre housekeeping skills. I now look fabulous in the kitchen.

I'm not usually a collector, but I was inspired by a pile of sixties-era cocktail aprons my mom brought home after a visit to an elderly cousin. This cousin used to throw lavish parties in her day, and she always wore an apron over her dress if only for its symbolic value. Believe me, a little wisp of black tuille tied around one's waist won't do much. She no longer has any use for the aprons, and she pressed them onto my mom during her last visit. My mom had no idea what to do with them, so I snapped them up for the dress-up box potential. But then, I found I kind of liked wearing them myself.

And so, I now wear aprons around the house. I like full aprons best.

ps. Apparently I'm not a trendsetter -- other people are into aprons as well.

Talking to Luke about Hurricane Katrina

The pictures of the devastation brought on by Hurricane Katrina are unfathomable. As I rule, I avoid TV news, so we haven't seen the worst of the images coming out of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, but I have been keeping up via my local newspaper and the Web.

I showed Luke a picture of hundreds of submerged houses -- only their rooftops were showing -- and it took him a moment to even figure out what he was looking at. Then, his eyes widened, and he whispered, "those are houses?" I pointed to our own kitchen window and showed him how high the water would have to be to cover our house to the roof line. He said nothing.

I've just made a donation to the Red Cross. If the link is busy (it took a while to load when I tried), try again in a few minutes.