…that sometimes when you’re sick you get the blues? Which means you’re really sad, so sad you don’t feel like doing anything, not even playing.

(Ed note: Lu is not sick, just thinking out loud. And her mother promises to write about Beach Trip ‘08 later today.)

Please, tell me the story of your life. I mean it. I really want to know. I just spent 30 riveting minutes hearing the life story of one
of my co-workers, someone I am fond of, but don’t know terribly well. I know him better now. Hearing his story has made me connected to him. The possibility of such a story in strangers makes me more connected to all of them.

You may say, “Bah, who cares about ‘connectedness?’ I don’t want to hear everyone’s life story.” But you want to hear some of them, right? It’s why you watch reality TV, why you read any piece of literature, why you’re reading this now. Next time someone gives you the chance to hear his story in person, take it. Or send him my way.

…that Duck spent the night at school last night but it’s OKAY because he was there with Franklin, the classroom turtle? And Franklin stays awake at night because he is noc-turtle and he and Duck played in the classroom and had an adventure.

My dears (Mr. Levy and all the late-night teenaged wait staff),

I know when my husband first called you Saturday at 8:49 p.m. to inquire about “a lost yellow duck blanket that really means a lot to our four-year-old daughter,” you looked around while you collected deck chairs and swept up the place. Naturally, you didn’t find it. But thanks for looking.

And then, when I called back at 8:56 p.m. to ask about “something that looks more like a dishrag with a duck head attached. Like, you’d be wiping down a table one day and look down and think, dang why does this rag have a duck’s head” you looked a little harder. You seemed genuinely sorry when you didn’t find it, especially when you could hear my daughter sobbing in the background. Thanks again for looking, and for seeming sorry.

When I showed up at your lakeside burger joint at 9:49 with my flashlight, you rallied. Thank you for turning on the lights and hunting around the parking lot, thank you for digging with me through your trash and dirty laundry. Thank you (especially Georgia) for finding Lucy’s sad little dishrag of a Duck.

I will spread the tale of your heroism (and delicious food and cold beer) far and wide.

Sincerely,
Kate D.

The girl can really swim. In El Paso, she was jumping off the diving board and surfacing all on her own, using me or Uncle Adam as a buoy, then swimming to the ladder and getting out by herself. Over and over and over again.

The other night Lucy informed Baga and Jason’s Aunt Chris that she was planning to open a lemonade stand so she could save money for her trip to Disney World, where she is going when she is five (even though I told her we wouldn’t go until she is six, and was hoping she’d forgotten. I should know better: remember gum?) She told them not to tell her mom or dad about the plan because it was a secret.

What she doesn’t yet realize is that she will sell a hell of a lot more lemonade if she enlists the help of her parents, who work in advertising: we will do a lemonade brand campaign, complete with lemonade print and online ads, as well as a lemonade Facebook page. We will not have budget for lemonade TV, but we should at least be able to do a couple of lemonade viral videos.

Awareness of lemonade will go up, as well as intent to purchase lemonade, with an eventual increase in lemonade sales.

I just went into her room to wake her and the first thing she asked me, yawning was, “Mom, can I have a princess jacket?”

A) It’s too hot to be thinking of jackets. B) Good Lord. “Well, babe, it’s too hot for jacket. Why are you thinking about it?”

Lu: “Because Alex has one and I she is my best friend and I need to have one too.”

Not only are we deep into the Princess Period, she is also obsessed with doing whatever Alex is doing, which deeply troubles me, although Alex is a perfectly lovely little person. Who wears twirly pink princess dresses. Every single day.

“Pie and I don’t wear the same thing or do the same thing. I wear what I like and she wears what she likes.”

“Well, Alex and I both like princesses and that’s why I need to get a princess jacket. Can I?”

“Maybe.”

Then, an incisive rhetorical move, “Mom, can you look in our closets and see if you have a princess jacket from when you were little that I could wear?”

“That would make it a vintage princess jacket. I don’t think we have one here, but I can ask Granny to look in the closet in my old room.”

“Yeah, vintage,” she said. “Let’s go call Granny right now. Or you can send her an email.”

Just now, as I was finishing this post, she asked me, “Mom, now are you ordering me a princess jacket on the Internet?”