Funny Pita, Dadeee.

It’s 5:30 in the morning here in beautiful Pensacola, Florida. You gotta get up at like 4:30 if you’re gonna steal any personal time. All you parents know this. We act as if having kids is the end of youth, but in reality it’s not children that own all our time, but income earning. Corporate Martial Law, Jello Biafra called it. Both parents have to work 40 to 60 hours a week just to keep the roof over our heads, and without profound success, as an artist we are likely sentenced to old age in sickness, loneliness and poverty. Not to sound dismal. The future is an illusion anyway and each moment is a gift, right?

Rinah, our daughter will be two on August 3rd. She was “due” on July 18th so maybe she’s really two then, but spent the first two weeks of “life” enjoying her last taste of the womb (for this life anyway). She’s super-talkative and we’re hoping to remember as much of her dialect, if that’s the right word, as possible.

It’s a very naked household over here and once it’s warm we rarely get dressed unless having guests, if then. So Rinah is very aware of penis and pussy, along with eyes, nose, armpit (no that’s your elbow, sweetie), feet, ankle (look, Dadeee - nuckle), toes, boobies, be’ee but (she doesn’t quite have L’s together yet), mouse (yes. the thing you talk with), ne’ and and bu’, which are the pronunciations of neck and butt. The K or hard C sounds are still eluding her so for example Car is pronounced Shar, with the Sh sound being created somewhere between the sides and back of her mouth. A few weeks ago we were in the bath together and she was repeating, “O’Shae, Dadeee, O’Shae” - she repeats the word ‘till you understand, rarely giving up - and when she couldn’t get it across finally submitted, “Awh-write, Dadeee.”

She was of course interested in the penis, which she called Pida, and in an attempt at demystification I at one point asked isn’t it funny? So then it became “funny pida”, which would be accompanied by her attempts to pull or smack it, laughing hysterically. We were concerned for a minute, in puritanical glory, that this might be unhealthy, and tried to dissuade this behavior, but fortunately were educated by this old hippy named Morley Shlosser, who runs a Naturist resort called Sunsport Mad haPPy played at, that it’s perfectly natural and healthy for kids to be interested in genitals as in any other part of the body and as long as it’s not touch that makes someone uncomfortable it’s fine. Thankfully the funny pida phase seems to have retired to memory. She did point to the family jewels the other day and say, “I see bumps.”, laughing and pushing them to swing back and forth. Mine have three piercings with rings in them (the three ring circus), one with a skull inherited from an ancient girlfriend, and she asked, “Hoo’s dat, Dadeee?”.

“That’s, ah… Mister Metal Man.”

“Mono.”

Mono is the Spanish word for gorilla, which she learned when a spanish-speaking family who are friends with Rivka’s sister were staying here for a week. It applies, at least in our world, to gorillas and monkeys.

The word “want” doesn’t exist in Rinah’s vocabulary - replaced by the word “need”. “Nee’dat (pause) kiddee, mommy.” “Nee’dat, boobie, Mommy.” “Boobie-bed” and, “boobie-lap” are often heard requests which are beginning to exasperate her worn mother.

We found an old 1991 Fisher Price doll house on the street the other day, complete with a bunch of furniture, and picked a couple of made-in-china 4 inch dolls that fit it, which she decided are ballerina Barbies, and refers to as “balle-Barbie”. It’s a pretty cool house, but this morning I wondered if it could be haunted. Haunted by a dead doll?

We’re taking down a wall in the house here and are going to replace it with a beam and support column, and decided to use a bare log to hold up the ceiling/roof. So the baby-daddy-to-be is the gardener at a start-up eco-tourism spot out here where they just did some tree clearing and we got to go pick out a log. He also keeps bees, which has a great allure and mystique, so it was awesome to get to go out there and harvest a bunch of honey the other day. You can do a bunch of the bee work without a bee-suit and we each got a few stings, but they’re not bad at all and apparently there’s some healthy side-effects like reducing arthritis. We did wear the suits to harvest the honey ‘cause apparently they don’t appreciate that too much. One of the things you have to do to maintain the hives down here is keep small hive beatles from over-running the place, killing off and driving the bees from their home. Apparently moths will also go in and munch out on the shit. Crazy. There are like ten thousand bees in a hive and the interweaving waves of buzzing are incredible, if not initially daunting. The first thing you really feel when you get stung is the flutter of the bee trying to pull it’s tiny barbed stinger out of you, turning circles on your arm (neck, face or leg). Then she (all the worker bees are female) flies off, leaving a tiny trail of guts between her butt and the still pumping little spike.

Michael said he usually leaves the stinger in until all it’s medicine has made it into your bloodstream. That was some fresh honey. There’s these dudes in Africa that climb up trees naked and take honey combs back to their women. No wonder they have big dicks.

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UPDATE: A deeply disturbed relative just contacted me to alert me that allowing your child to play with your genitals is illegal in the state of Florida. There are some disturbing allegations of sexual abuse in my family history so this note is assure readers that our daughter is in now way encouraged or allowed to spend time playing with our genitals, as that would be awkward and uncomfortable, making it “bad touch”. Our genitals are not treated as a source of shame and seriousness, but of casual humor and respect. We most definitely disallow any prolonged contact, as well as denying any request from her to pay extensive attention to her genitals. These issues are appropriate for public discussion as our society’s treatment of sexuality as a miasma is a in a large part, if not wholly responsible for the violence and shame entangled with it.

1/06/2011