A Wisconsin Yankee in Walt Disney's Court

The whole “distressed” t-shirt thing is puzzling enough– why buy a shirt that already looks old? So you can claim you’ve had it for years, and fool your friends who’ve never seen the giant display of them at Kohl’s? Even more alarming, perhaps, is that they sell them in sizes for 2-year-olds now. Do they expect that my kid will be at the playground taunting the poseur toddlers with her distressed Charlie Brown shirt, claiming “Hey, I was into Peanuts before you were even born!"? We bought it because we never see t-shirts in her size with anything much besides Dora the Explorer on them, and it was on the clearance rack at Target, but I’d rather it just looked new.
The 2-year-old just turned 3 recently, celebrated with a Dora cake that didn’t turn out too badly, but it was like painting with toothpaste to get the frosting to cover the faint outline from the cake pan.

We went to a Build-a-Bear place on her birthday, where she built a puppy she unhesitatingly named ‘Hearty.’ They place a satin heart inside the yet-unstitched animal in an anointing ceremony that’s like a strange cross between Voodoo and Catholicism. It turns out those ritualized things really stick with little kids, which must be how the Pope ropes ‘em in at a young age.
It’s funny how she coins words and names. It’s hard to say how she decided that adding -Y to anything made a descriptive name, like Hearty, or Planty and Orchidy who’ve eaten dinner with her. I remember being fascinated that at barely one she called money “bank” without ever hearing slang from 1970s cop TV shows. I imagine our chimp-like ancestors running around giving everything a name in the same way as soon as they invented language.

She also got this tortoise, another of her favorite animals (actually it’s sea turtles, but we only have one bathtub). They’re a pretty common pet down here, and this kind grows to a couple hundred pounds and people keep them in their yards. Wild gopher tortoises live around here too; we just saw a pretty big one next to the road yesterday. Presumably she’ll be able to ride this one someday, depending whose growth ouraces the other’s.