Thursday, May 17, 2012

Dora...Or Diego

I'm not sure what is wrong with me, but today I've pestered two perfectly nice people about their baby names (just call me nosy parker), made one friend cry (or at least not really helped her stop) and I must confess to all of you that I'm on my second night this week wherein Eli is otherwise engaged and I have to make my own dinner (egg sandwich) and I can't figure out how we dispense pepper in this house.  And I don't need salt for the egg sandwich.  I need pepper.  (Perhaps if Eli reads this while we're at home together I can have a kitchen tour.)

I forgot to tell you all a very funny story and I'm sure telling it will both cheer me up and amuse you for the twenty seconds it takes to read it.

The Saturday before I went to Dubai, the whole family went to my office so that my big strong husband could help me get all the things I needed for the trip.  (I should've just gone myself and taken a cab, but the story of us struggling in the Tube with my seven binders, our two children and the stroller is a story for another day, and is in large part the result of my refusal to let my 23-lb two year old go without a car seat in a cab.)

So, we walked into the office and two of my colleagues were there.  And when I introduced the kids to my boss, H, Lulu looked at him hard for a minute and then said something about rescuing animals.

I was confused.  But I was also willing to chalk it up to one of those random things that kids say.

Until -- in the middle of my conversation with Eli and H -- I realized that Lulu thought H was either Dora or Diego.  He has the same color skin, same color hair, and he has longish hair (like many English men do).  He does not have nor could I ever picture him having a backpack, or pink pants (trousers!), or anything on other than a suit (though my old colleague assures me that H does own a pair of jeans which he wears only with a white button down shirt and a navy blazer).

Instead of immediately telling H, I bit my lip and tried to shame myself for having a child who is only used to white people.

I'm pleased to tell you that this strategy worked and unless H knows about my blog (which he doesn't, as he "doesn't know how the internet works" and can "only do BBC"), he does not know that my daughter thinks he is a hispanic preschooler.

(I edited this because the paranoid part of me was freaked out putting my boss's name on my blog.  So there you go.)

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