"Nook Kids" is Here Today. Will nook Color be Here Tomorrow? (via brandchannel)

"Nook Kids" is Here Today. Will nook Color be Here Tomorrow? (via brandchannel)

'Maybe I could ask him if he'd be my daddy,' said my daughter.

The other day I was chatting to the dad of one of X's nursery friends. He told me that his application for flexible working had failed with his employer, which meant that he wouldn't be able to share the childcare with his wife as much as he had hoped. This surprised me as he works for the council who profess to be highly supportive of family friendly working. The dad was frustrated because he'd put a lot of effort into his appeal case for the flexible hours but when it failed his children were totally delighted. The little boy ran around the sitting room whooping. It meant that they'd get to go to X's minder who gives them slush puppies and crisps. The dad said he sometimes wondered why he bothered. He looked quite upset about it.

X asked me why she didn't have a daddy today. She said she'd been thinking about it while having lunch at school. Maybe someone said something, I don't know. I don't know much when it comes to this. I've known this would be coming for some time and I've still not come up with anything to say.

X already knows that she has a tummy mummy who isn't me but that still doesn't explain why there isn't a daddy. She may well never know who her daddy is, since no one seems to know. It makes me want to find her tummy mummy and find out what she knows, and I'll understand if X feels the same way about this. It seems very sad to me to never have any idea at all about half your blood heritage. Of course none of this explains why she hasn't got a 'heart' daddy who lives with her 'heart' mummy - but I'm guessing a blow by blow on every single one of my failed relationships isn't really appropriate for a three year old , though the repetition might be fun in an old Macdonald had a farm type way (Eee! Ow! Eee! Ow! Aye!) and it might be a good bedtime story to get her off to sleep.

I just said that I agreed with her that it was very sad she didn't have a daddy. I mentioned a few male friends and relations who take an interest in her, but she didn't pick up on any of them. Instead she talked about her friend at nursery who's daddy sometimes takes her to school. She said that he was a nice daddy and her friend sometimes cried when he left her. It was the same man who had just told me how frustrated he was that his children didn't care whether he picked them up after school or not.

X said that maybe she could ask him if he might be her daddy too. I said maybe we should do that together. It seems a bit much to lay on a man first thing in the morning when he's probably late for work but I'm guessing at the right moment he might be glad to know that a three year old had noticed that he was a nice daddy.

Not many three year olds could carry off baldness with such aplomb as X's best friend

Every day for the last couple of years or so X and I have suffered hair envy. We've stared with longing at her best friend's hair: it's heavy swishing volume, it's dark lustrous curls, it's glorious bouncing mass. We've fingered clips in Sainsbury's and longed for the day when we might need them too. We thought her little friend was just so lucky. But then her little friend always seemed so lucky in so many ways: great looks, fantastic parents, obvious intelligence, natural confidence, a born leader.

X, on the other hand, has always been folicle- challenged. This was a huge blessing to me as I was only allowed to adopt her on the understanding that she was a white child. It was only, post adoption, clear when her hair finally twisted it's way out, that there was definitely more than a little bit of fuzz to it. Caribbean ladies have come up to me on the street and asked which island her father came from. X has an orange Jackson Five fuzz around her head, but she still has a very high forehead so she sometimes looks a bit like Queen Elizabeth 1. More often, though, she looks like a saffron colored sheep who's wool has got matted from a winter out on the hillside. I've developed a nervous habit of plucking at it it to tease it out to stop it looking as if she's a feral child with unkempt matted locks. I've had long conversations in the African hair product shops about what might turn it into lustrous curls and ended up with lots of pots of sticky, stinking brilliantine. My ex-social worker in the adoption process sent the best product. We have a little smile to each other sometimes about X's hair. I have a feeling that she, being a lady of Caribbean extraction, might have had a little suspicion that X's hair wasn't going to be totally English Caucasian, but maybe I'm wrong. I like X's hair now she's got some. When the light shines though it she looks as if she has a halo and I love it's mad look. I just wish it started further forward. If she was a middle aged man I'd be advising her to shave the lot off and not to pretend it wasn't badly receeding.

X is in love with long, straight hair. When she came to me she couldn't go to sleep without fingering her foster mother's hair and now she can't sleep without fingering mine. She's been envious of her friend's hair for two years and has insisted on clips just like her.

Now her little friend has lost all her hair from chemotherapy. Not so lucky after all then. Her poor little body is a bit skinny at the moment. Though the prognosis on her type of leukemia is good, the treatment sounds brutal. Her tiny little frame is blasted with toxins and all her incredible, thick, lustrous locks have fallen out. X has steadfastly ignored this, not mentioned it at all. Her friend, though, is the feistiest little girl with the most indomitable spirit. She said to their childminder the other day:

'So, what do you think of my new haircut, then?'

The minder said she was lost for words, which in itself is a little miracle.

MUMMY TANTRUM

I wanted one. I really did.

I'd had a horrid day, missing the little one, wondering how she was doing at school. She's only been there two weeks and now she gets passed through several carers hands every day in a patchwork of minders, school and minders. I have to cling to my diary just to keep up with the schedule myself and every day she wakes up and says: 'where today mummy?' I worry that I'm causing irrevocable damage by not being there at the end of the day to share her tales of ten green bottles and who weed on the floor. I worry, full stop.

Today? Today I was very organised all day but I finally had a little wettie when it looked like I was going to be kept way after end of play. I kicked off just enough to extricate myself from where I was without ( i hope) causing lasting bruising, and I rushed to pick up the new schoolgirl from the new minder. I was amazed how quickly the journey went, and was thrilled to be early. The day was looking up. I'd be able to microwave some beans for her! Cook for her!

i rushed into the minders, but did my little one come running to me? No. She was very fed up that I'd come before I was supposed to. She wanted to play more with her new best friend from school, who also hangs out there. She wanted to go to the shops with the new minder. She was on the loo and wanted the minder's daughter to wipe her bottom, not me.

Not me? My heart was shattered. It was a first. The first time my little one hurt me. I know it will happen a lot more,and it's a mummy's job not to count or care, but this was the first time and my inward breath was sharp and cold.

There are limits, however. I may have to grovel when it comes to getting work to support my little one but groveling to wipe her bottom is one step too far. I demurred. I was sent away again. Of course I pretended it was all great and fine. You can't dump people together and then object if they get on. I'm truly amazed and relieved that the new minder is that popular. i'll write a reference stating that from the very first day my child didn't want to come home, wanted the new minder to wipe her bottom.

I did feel, however, like rolling on the pavement and kicking my heels and screaming and having a spoilt little temper tantrum on my lonely walk hone to kick my heels looking a my tax form. I'm sorry but I did. I'd done my work, I had more to come later. The one good bit of the day had gone, the one bit that I do everything else (all the working and earning and sorting and running and the damned dull tax form ) for. All gone. But I'm not going to tell the little one that.

I know many women go through moments like this and I'm bigging up my part with mountainous molehills. But if you have had a moment like this recently, well then, lets just say I really, really empathise.

By the way, by the time I went to pick up my little girl I'd my little temper tantrum all on my own and was a nice mummy again, all very grown up, and I didn't sulk one little bit.

Can I have a gold star, please?

WE MUSE TO AMUSE OURSELVES

(a dissertation in the role of housework in the creative process, with special attention to the role of tap polishing)

FIG A: a tap like this is almost complicated enough to stimulate an entire chapter of a novel)

When I was a little girl my mother made my sister and I do household chores on saturday mornings, after orchestra. My sister had to hoover the dining room and study. I had to clean the bath and basin in the main bathroom.

I remember bursting in on my sister as she was doing her hoovering to discover her mid emphatic declaration, arms waving. She was actually shouting, the noise of the hoover covering up what she was doing from the rest of the house. 'What are you doing?' I asked in astonishment: my perception of my sister was of a quiet, practical person not given to interior thought, but there was no one else there, had she gone mad? She coloured with embarrassment as if I'd caught her in some intensely private act and then got angry to divert me from what I'd seen. Later I realised that she must have been telling herself some kind of story. So I started telling myself stories as I polished the taps. Move over Jonathan Franzen, sitting in your soundproofed box, talking your dialogue out aloud as is so often talked about the way you wrote,'The Corrections' and'Freedom' - little girls also talk their stories aloud to themselves, while doing the housework. Girls not only get stories made up we also get the room hoovered at the same time! Even now I can't see a dirty tap without wanting to amuse myself while polishing it by making up a little story. And I don't think my sister of I are at all unusual. I notice that X, who's only three, while in the bath and she thinks I'm miles away ( usually just outside the bathroom door, snooping while tidying up) also chatters to herself, making up stories with the pig and the tea set that sit on the edge of the bath. She's musing out aloud to herself.

This leads me to a proposition: that Virginia Woolf got it wrong when she said that women need a room of their own to write - what they really need is a comforting array of boring, pointless household chores and a little time to commit their subsequent musings onto paper. No doubt the argument against my theory is that housewives have not tended to win Nobel prizes for literature or even publishing contracts. Well, that may be true, but that may say more about the men in the publishing industry of the past than about what has actually been written. Women who've had a series of mundane household chores and a little free time have written their musings down in journals for centuries: The Diary of an Edwardian lady etc. Women's journals have been a major source of writing for eternity, cave women probably scribbled on the cave walls more than the men- using charcoal from the fire while making mammoth stew.

Many bloggers, mainly women ones, also muse 'out aloud' by blogging. The stereotype of 'the blogger' is a young man geek talking about tekkie stuff, but Richard Jalichandra, President of Technoriati, talking to iMedia said that, in his opinion there's another there's another topic that beats it:

' Personal musings. Different groups seem to move in and out of the spotlight, such as mommy bloggers, but in the past two studies that we've collected demographic data, they've remained pretty constant. However, it's my personal observation -- and this is more anecdotal than scientific -- that the influence of mommy and women bloggers with consumers has become really important. The proof is in how much attention they are given for outreach and advertising from CPG marketers.'

For those uninitiated is one of the tedious anacronyms of marketing - CPG is simply short for consumer packaged goods.

Mr Jalichandra may be right regarding mommy bloggers and advertising outreach. I can see that there are a significant number of mommies desperately trying to connect online everyday to 'make friends' and to network to become part of that CPG marketing outreach. They're, quite understandably as mums at home, trying hard to find a job that pays a bit of pin money. But far more than that there are countless women musing out aloud into the void in their 'free time', simply to amuse themselves.

If they find that their musings are interesting to others I'm sure that they feel thrilled and amazed. I imagine it's truly a wonderful thing to find someone else who stumbles onto your private musings and connects with them. But the impulse to put those musings out into the world in some kind of journal- on a white screen or a white piece of paper- is just the way women are made, scribbling away in their little diaries with locks on them. For me proof of that comes almost as much in other blogging areas, sex for instance, where women bare their souls in works of subtly crafted poetry mixed with personal imagery, often not at all graphically sexual, on sites that have passwords to enter, their own little online secret drawer where they muse on their most inmost feelings, and then send it out into the void with only the vaguest thought or hope that it might connect with any life form on another planet outside their own head.

Like me over my taps, X in her bath and my sister behind her hoover, these women are just saying it out aloud for the pleasure and interest of having a look at it, musing to amuse themselves.

The next frontier for blogging - iMediaConnection.com

The blog is as old as the internet itself, but has never waned in popularity. What's in store? We ask Technorati's Richard Jalichandra to give us the lowdown.

View >>

the heritage of language.

'Can we not go?' says my little girl, which to me, sounds a little bit Miss Jean Brodie, putting the 'not' in that place.

'Is it five and twenty past?' she says- rather than the more usual, twenty five past- which again sounds like a little touch of Scots to me.

My little girl may be adopted but I can hear my mother (who grew up in Glasgow) in her when she she talks. She must have copied her as I don't think I speak like that. Copying the way we speak and act is what children do, of course. I know an adopted child who is not an academic at all but who talks and acts in the manner of a university lecturer, as was his adoptive father.

But no wonder our language is so gloriously rich when a little girl in South of England has picked up Scots phrases from a woman she doesn't see all that much and who hasn't been to Scotland herself since she was a child.