The other day, I pointed out an actor on a commercial to GTB. He just happened to be at the Matador at 21 show we went to in Vegas a few months ago. When I saw him in Vegas, I recognized him immediately and then marvelled at how much shorter he appears in person.

The commercial then prompted a discussion between GTB and me about how many celebrities, particularly men, are surprisingly short. You expect them all to be at least 6′, but then you see them in person and they aren’t a lot taller than my husband, who is 5’8″ (but claims he is 5’9″).

So when I visited this tumbler page, which a fellow Jezebel commenter posted, I guffawed at almost every post. I’m 5’3″ and 3/4, which means that any day I’m wearing shoes, I’m taller than half these guys.

Regular readers of this blog, and anyone who’s known me for more than about five minutes, know that I am a bit of a wimp when it comes to anything remotely horror-related. In many ways, I’m fearless: I’ll jump out of a plane, drive in Manhattan, speak in front of large groups of strangers. But show me a trailer for a scary movie or remind me of a scene from “Poltergeist” and I’m pretty much guaranteed no sleep for the next few nights.

I’ve been this way since I was young and I always worried that I might pass it on to my own kid. Those worries, it seems, were well founded.

Signe refuses to watch certain Disney movies because they are, she claims, “Too scary!” (Snow White.) Others, she’ll watch but she asks me to turn off before the shit hits the fan. (Little Mermaid.) Most of the time, she can bear an entire movie, but she gets clingy and extra whiney during the intense moments. (Mulan.)

So the other day, we introduced her to “Shrek.” It’s light-hearted and mostly funny with minimal scary villains or crazy action scenes. A slam dunk, right? She loved the first movie (except for the part where Fiona takes off with Lord Farquaad, which prompted her to say, “No! That’s their Fiona!” over and over again), so we let her watch the second one.

(If you haven’t seen “Shrek 2” and don’t want spoilers, quit reading now because I can’t tell the rest of my story without revealing some telling moments from the end of the film.)

About the time the heroes hit up the Muffin Man to bake a giant gingerbread man, a.k.a “Big Gingy” (and, yes, I know he’s called Mongo in the movie), Signe started getting a little concerned. By the time they are storming the castle, she was on my lap and gripping my hair. And then they injured Big Gingy to the point that his arms are ripped off and he falls into the moat backwards. Well. We did all we could to convince her that he was just going for a swim, but she reads nuance better than I give her credit for, because she wasn’t buying it.

But it wasn’t until the next morning that I started to really question whether I’m doing her a disservice by letting her watch this stuff. Upon hearing her wake and walking into her room, I cringed when she said to me, “The man broke Big Gingy’s arms off.”

Fuck. Had she been thinking about it all night? Was she dreaming about it? Is she as big a wuss about movies as I am? Is this why she’s been such a bear lately? I’m making her watch scary movies and she’s not sleeping well?

The problem is that she refuses to watch anything benign anymore. I can’t beg her enough to watch Sesame Street or Yo Gabba Gabba. Once in a while, I can entice her with Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. But mostly, she wants the good stuff, the stuff that scares her. And I’m hard pressed to figure out how NOT to be the worst mother in the world. Probably, I should refuse her requests for any TV for a while, but, as my good friend Alisa put it, “Sometimes, you just gotta take a shower.” And TV makes that possible.

I recently got a little promotion at work. Mostly, it’s a title change, because with the economy being what it is, a pay raise was out of the question. But I’m still excited about it, so I ordered new business cards with aplomb.

Now, it’s rare that anyone asks for my business card. And because I have moved offices three times in the past five years, I’ve never gone through an entire box before it’s time to reorder more so I can change the address and phone number. With this last move and promotion, I decided to just put my email address, cell phone number, and new title. If we move again, my biz cards will still work and I might actually hand out all 1,000 of them.

A few minutes ago, I was showing the new card to a work friend when I saw this:

The Girl
Marketing & Communicatios Manager

In case you missed it, I misspelled communications. I so clearly deserved that promotion.

We have a little friend, Jack, who loves when his parents come to our house for dinner because he almost always gets to pick a movie from the kid shelf and watch it in our bedroom. A few weeks ago, he came over and chose “The Little Mermaid.” Because Signe is just about old enough to spend time alone with a boy in a bedroom, we let the two of them watch the movie together.

Bad idea. My darling daughter is now hooked on Disney.

After that fateful night a few weeks ago, we have watched “The Little Mermaid” every day. I was losing my mind a little and decided to try some other movies she might like. “Finding Nemo” wasn’t the slam dunk I thought it would be. “Monsters, Inc.” did nothing for her. We even tried “Snow White,” which she liked, but she would exclaim “This is scary!” about every two minutes while watching it.

So GTB and I did what every sanity-seeking parent would do: we went to Best Buy and bought four new movies. “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Princess and the Frog,” “Mulan,” and “Mickey’s Magical Christmas” now sit happily on our shelf and our good intentions have turned our two-year-old into a TV tyrant.

Keeping in mind that someone Sig’s age isn’t supposed to watch more than two hours of TV, we let Signe watch “The Little Mermaid,” “Mickey’s Magical Christmas,” and “Mulan,” yesterday, and she cried when we turned the TV off. The first thing she said to me this morning was “Watch Little Mermaid?” Each “No!” (there were several of them) was met with tears. She’s spending the day in daycare, which is sans TV, thank goodness, and I’m seriously considering a weekday ban on all television.

I have such mixed emotions about the whole thing. For one, Signe is super smart and I’m not terribly worried that TV is gonna make her suddenly stupid. But I do want her to play, use her imagination, and learn to be creative. There are worse things she could be watching than “Mulan,” which I happen to think is a pretty decent movie for Disney. I mean, (SPOILER ALERT) Mulan dresses like a boy, goes to war, and kicks total ass. I’m OK with Sig looking up to that role model. On the other hand, Mulan is one of the Disney “Princesses” and I have trepidation about the whole princess thing for little girls. Then again, if you ask Signe if she is a princess, she says, “No, I’m a monkey.”

So, what do you think? Am I ruining my kid by letting her watch Disney movies, or TV at all? Will she grow up thinking she needs a prince (or fellow princess; I’m open minded) to save her. Will this much exposure to screen time give her ADHD? Now that I’ve opened that Pandora’s box, how do I close it?

Not that I’ve ever really doubted it, but I’m pretty sure I have anxiety. Like, generalized anxiety. It’s anxiety when the crazy thoughts happen and they keep you up at night and distract you significantly at work but you can pretend you’re not debilitated by them and most people believe you, right?

Well, right now, I think it’s more like acute anxiety.

As I sit here at work, thinking about how my daughter is at the in-laws’ in Tualatin and my husband is on the road to Redmond, I look up and see a helicopter head across the river toward downtown Portland. Images of alien invasions, nuclear warheads headed this direction, and Godzilla-like creatures erupting from the Willamette start filling my head. As I ponder my escape plan, I am conscious of something my mother once told me about how if something catastrophic happens, Hometown is one of the safest places to be (out of nuclear range, apparently).

Then I remember that my family is scattered throughout Oregon at the moment, and I’d have to head 15 miles south during traffic to retrieve my daughter before heading back north–again through traffic–to Hometown. In the meantime, I have to hope that GTB has cell phone reception wherever he is between here and Redmond and that he can meet us somewhere on the Washington side, all while the shit is hitting the fan here in Portland.

The only thing that brings me some solace during this terrifying train of thought is that I no longer have to worry about stopping at the house on my way out of town to get Niles.

Probably, this is just some insecure part of my subconscious telling me that I don’t like having my family scattered around so much. If Signe is with the grandparents, usually GTB and I are together. Or if GTB is away, Signe and I are usually together. It’s not often they are both far away from me.

I was looking forward to girls’ night in with my book club ladies tonight. Now I’m just trying to get through the next few hours at work until I can drink enough wine to fixate on something else.

Last weekend, while discussing how precocious Signe is and what, if anything, we should do to help encourage that, my mother-in-law asked if we had looked into any Montessori preschools. We haven’t, for a few reasons.

They tend to be expensive.
They tend to be hard to get in to.
I’m not convinced they do any more for kids than what our current day care provides.

Thus began a conversation about what I know about Montessori, Reggio Emilia, and other teaching approaches. Which isn’t much.

But it made me curious, so today I went to Wikipedia to learn more. Montessori is pretty much what I thought it was. Reggio Emilia is pretty much what I thought it was, though I did learn this:

Reggio Emilia’s approach does challenge some conceptions of teacher competence and developmentally appropriate practice. For example, teachers in Reggio Emilia assert the importance of being confused as a contributor to learning; thus a major teaching strategy is purposely to allow mistakes to happen, or to begin a project with no clear sense of where it might end. Another characteristic that is counter to the beliefs of many Western educators is the importance of the child’s ability to negotiate in the peer group.

[Emphasis mine.]

I still don’t have a very good idea of what approach Signe’s current day care is using. But I’m convinced that Reggio Emilia is the approach used by Mrs. Sparklenose, the teacher at Abby’s Flying Fairy School on Sesame Street.

Signe got a set of table and two chairs for Christmas from Santa. Her favorite game lately is crawling on the chairs knees first and then standing on them. If I’m not paying attention, she says “Hi!” until I am. But most of the time, I am paying attention and before she fully extends her knees, I catch her and say “On your bottom!” She smiles like she thinks I’m kidding and in the interest of following through, I have to walk over and physically make her sit on her butt.

It’s a battle of wills, and though mine is strong, I fear she’s gaining the upper hand. I’ve resorted to yelling.

A few minutes ago, she tried this again and I said “ON YOUR BOTTOM, NOW!” She looked right at me, smiled, and said “No.”

I removed her from the chair she was standing on, grabbed both chairs, silently took them to the garage, and upon returning said to her, “I’m in control here, Signe. I’m the mama. When you’re 40, I will still be the one in control!”

To which my dear and devoted husband muttered under his breath, to no one in particular, “Believe it, Signe.”

When, as a kid, I pictured myself as a grown up, I envisioned a mature, pretty lady wearing a nice sweaters and slacks with killer boots, working at a cool job, being deeply in love with an attractive blonde man, and carrying a baby on her hip. And this grown up I pictured was always 34.

Some people have the “scary age.” I don’t know that I have one of those, but I have always thought that when I hit 34, I’d be a grown up. I’d be that vision I carried in my head of the put-together, professional, happy mom and wife.

Greg’s not blonde and I rarely look “put together” (at least not on days when it rains and my hair turns into a frizzy mess before I’ve walked through the office door), but the rest of it is pretty close.

So today, on my 34th birthday, I am filled with gratitude, love, and a bit of smug satisfaction that the image of adulthood I’ve had my entire life has almost completely come true.

Glass of wine #1: Signe has gone to bed, time to clean up the toys, turn on the game, and be a grown up.

Glass of wine #2: This game is so stressful, I have to have another glass.

Glass of wine #3: We won! Must celebrate.

Imagine what the Rose Bowl will be like.

They say there’s more than one way to skin a cat. I say, in marriage, there’s more than one way to win an argument. My current favored tactic is to say something so insane that there is no logical, rational response. Voila! The argument is over!

To wit:

GTB found out last night that the Dharma Bums will be playing a reunion show at the Crystal Ballroom in February. This morning, after finding out Stu will be flying in from Philly to attend the show with him, GTB informed me that he purchased two tickets, assuming I will go to the show as well.

“So you want me to go see two bands I don’t particularly love at a venue I absolutely hate?” I asked.

“Yes, I want you to come with me to see the band that was the biggest influence of my adolescence.”

“You don’t see me dragging you to MC Hammer shows.”

Crickets.

Works every time.