Straight From the Horse's Vagina

Sophie and Molly went to the bookstore today, because the library was closed and Molly needed a book right this minute. Molly came back with a copy of Twilight, which I’m not even going to comment on, since I prefer my vampires of the Salem’s Lot variety rather than the sparkly hairless-chested Jonas Brothers type. Sophie, however, definitely scored in the book department. She came back with a visible horse, which is just totally, totally awesome. Remember the Visible Man models from when we were kids? A plastic statue of a human man, with breakaway organs and bones, designed to show kids the anatomy of a person? Well, this is the same thing, only it’s a book with a plastic toy transparent horse in the center of it, and every page you turn reveals more and more of the underlying tissue and matter under the horse’s skin (and since it’s a three-dimensional model, as you reveal more of the horse on one page as you go, the pieces that come away on one page start to build up on the other, so that you’re constantly getting a breaking down-building up dynamic going).

Sophie is absolutely in love with this book. Her grasp of equine anatomy is shady at best, but she is all too eager to point out the various organs to you. She made me read it with her five times alone this afternoon, jabbing her finger at the bits and pieces as we went.

“That his brain, Daddy,” she said, pointing at the horse’s stomach with certainty. I could see where she would have trouble with this, because for a large animal, a horse’s brain sure is awfully small (at least in this plastic model it was; I’ve never seen a real horse’s brain, nor do I feel a deep-seated need to), and her stomach is right there, huge and obvious and  just waiting to be pointed at by a sticky little finger. Oddly, the only organ she nailed correctly each time we went through the book was the horse’s uterus, which Molly had explained to her was where baby horses came from. Sophie has been on a “babies come from mommy’s tummy” kick the past couple of weeks, so maybe this explains why she’s Dr. Doolittle all of a sudden when it comes to a horse’s reproductive organs.

When I got home from work this evening, after Sophie had gone to bed, I went up to check on her like I always do. She'd pulled her baby's crib upstairs and into her room, and there was a doll propped up in it, looking disturbingly like one of those old Victorian photos of a baby, dead from small pox or cholera, that you could use to show your relatives what the child looked like before the funeral, some five or six months before the arrival of said relatives by train from the other coast. Sophie was asleep in her bed with her visible horse book cradled under her arm, where I assume she'd fallen asleep while pointing out its uterus again and again to her terminally ill, pox-ridden baby.

I'm guessing the baby's autopsy begins in the morning.

Taken Together, I Sleep With One Eye Open

Kids love hula hoops. I think we can all agree on that. I know mine does. She's got a pink one that lights up at various points around the circle while she spins it, although the spinning is rather limited at this point, what with her only being three years old and not very coordinated yet.

The other day, I'm napping on the couch and wake to find her with the hoop, standing next to me. She's naked from the waist down, having taken off her pants and panties, and she's spinning the hoop over her head and between her legs, repeatedly saying, "I kill you, I kill you, I kill you."

I haven't yet decided if this is oddly endearing, in a sort of pornographic Wednesday Addams sort of way, or just more than a little bit disturbing.

Now, keep that story in mind while I tell you this one: a couple of days ago, I'm out in the backyard with the daughter unit, who begins idly kicking at the edges of one of the holes that the demon spawn of a dog we have has been digging.

"Please don't kick that, honey," I say. "You'll get your new shoes dirty."

She looks at me and then puts her head down and says under her breath, "I gonna dig it so deep you never get out."

I think I'll be safe until she can reach the knives in the kitchen. Then all bets are off.