After the show, we went to dinner with Gigi and Jojo and the girls enjoyed playing in the Chick-Fil-A playground while we parents got a chance to chat.
Language funnies:
- I asked Evie what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said, "I can be whatever I want, a doctor, or a mama...." in a manner of listing off occupations. I'm glad she still feels that way, despite the crummy election results. (More on that later)
- Playing Rapunzel, Evie was talking about the character of Maximus who is a palace horse. I was pretending that I knew nothing of Maximus and asked her who he was. "He's a garden horse", she replied (meaning guard horse).
- At the Tigers game this weekend, we sat behind a man who struck up a conversation with me about how fast food places are now trying to be healthy. Evie must have been listening in. The man said, "I went to Wendy's the other day and got a chicken wrap, and it was pretty good." Evie said, "What did you really want?"
I was telling Evie the other day that my grandma's grandma used to sew all her clothes. Grandma always says that Mama True (my dad's mom's dad's mom) even sewed her panties. Evie was pretending that one of her dolls was being the mama and was sewing. I asked her what she was sewing and she said, "Oh... some panties."
Evie had a really cool idea that I *think* she came up with all on her own. We were talking about things we should do when Addie and Will come for Christmas and she said we should get decorate mugs and then drink hot chocolate out of them. I thought that was a really cool idea and creative for her to come up with on her own.
This week has been very difficult for me. For a lot of people. We are worried about what our new president-elect is going to do to this world, and while I would be worried regardless of whether or not I had a child, I'm worried in a difference sense. I'm worried that we're sending the message that it's okay to behave like Trump has, to be a bully, to treat people disrespectfully, to refuse to apologize for wrong things done or said. I went to bed last Tuesday night at my parents' house (we had stayed there to watch the election and as the events of the night unfolded, we decided Evie might as well sleep until I felt like we knew what the outcome would be, so we put her to bed upstairs and it was so late by the time I gave up, I decided to just spend the night there as well rather than taking Evie home) completely dumbfounded and angry and sad and every other emotion you could think of. The thing I think I will never forget is when Evie and I came down the next morning and I was making her breakfast, she was standing in the kitchen and my dad leaned down to her a gave her a huge hug. From where I stood, it looked to me like a hug that he needed because he was also discouraged, but a hug of consolation that Evie didn't even know she needed. Consolation for the world that is going to look incredibly different in four years' time, and not for the better. I thought, watching my dad hug Evie, that here's someone who wanted nothing more than to leave the world better for his kids and grandkids than it was when he was a child, and here we've got right back to, or worse than, where we were. I could list all the ways in which I worry about what kind of social setbacks America is about to experience that will negatively impact my daughter (misogyny, bigotry, denial over climate change, etc.), but the list would be too long and it would get me too sad. I'm hoping she won't personally experience any negative effects of this presidency, but I don't know how I could keep her safe from the attitudes that will infiltrate the public mindset with Trump as an example...
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