Where Dora Meets Kai-Lan

Betty Boop is home from school right now.

She puked on the lunch table.

I swear I thought she was better when I sent her to school this morning. Even though her grumpy cries to stay home should have tipped me off.

She wasn't well over the weekend and had a high fever on Sunday so I kept her home from school yesterday. But then she just lounged around, whining, causing chaos, eating, and saying she felt better. And it is my humble opinion that if a kid is going to be sick they better be laid out and sleepy. None of this wild and grumpy stuff. No thank you.

So off she went this morning, and back she came this afternoon.

She lost her other front tooth last week. This one had been loose, but only just. Then the other night she wanted to join in the boys' wrestling right before bedtime. When Dan welcomed her with his arm and drew her into the fold a little too hard, her tooth hit Luke's knee and shot out of her mouth and across the room. She screamed like death and blood poured out of her mouth.

And then through her howling and sobbing she kept saying,

"Daddy! Thank you so much for getting my tooth out!" and would then proceed with her crying.

In the morning she told me that she would tell her teacher that she had good news and bad news. I asked her what that was and she told me,

"The good news is my tooth came out.


The bad news is Daddy wrestled me too hard and it was bloody."

She gave me pause recently when she picked out an outfit for school with Dan and tenderly laid it on the stairs, ready to put on in the morning. When I tucked her in, she told me how excited she was to wear her outfit the next day and that she would be so beautiful. But the outfit went against most common notions of matching.

Now I usually let her pick out her clothes. And I usually don't have a problem with purple and green or yellow and pink or really anything for that matter. If you've seen me with my children you have to know that I am not one who cares too much about my children making fashion statements for me. It's just not something that matters to me much.

But there was something about this particular outfit that rubbed my feathers the wrong way. If she were assigned to present a color story for the color red, she would have received an A+. It was red, fuchsia, melon, pink, purple. In the same family but all a little too close on the wheel for my liking.

And maybe the fact that it combined a shrug with a shirt over a shirt, along with a scarf, wasn't helping.

But once I saw her, I loved it.



Mostly just because I love her.


Last night, during Family home Evening when we were discussing Joseph Smith translating the Book of Mormon, and we were comparing it to trying to understand a language she didn't know, she chimed in with, "I don't know Spanish! I don't even live in China!"