Grasshopper New Media Presents...

My two-year old daughter offended a grown woman today. I’m so proud.

We’d gone to the “nice” side of San Francisco — Pacific Heights, for those of you up on your Michael Keaton horror films — in a vain attempt to hunt down fun socks with cool designs. We have eighty-five pairs of solid white and blue, but Boo prefers to wear our sole remaining teddy bear infant sock on one foot and hunt down her skankiest striped sock from the laundry for the other.

Midway through our unsuccessful hunt through the baby boutiques (even the rich kids don’t get cool socks), we stopped for bagels. Inside, Boo struck up a conversation with a lady on the next stool who was wearing the BOOTS. These BOOTS weren’t your everyday faux-cowboy knock-offs, but serious salary-buster Italian leather BOOTS with Western tooling and buckles of silver mined from the bottom of the world’s last remaining wild rivers in farthest Uzbekistan — BOOTS that had started wars and healed the lame.

“She’s got boots,” my daughter observed.

“Why, yes she does!” I acknowledged proudly. Now, Boo’s gotten adept at recalling contextual discussions we’ve had. If we see a tomato, she’ll mention the tomato paste we talked about the day before, that sort of thing. Remembering that our last conversation about boots had been at the zoo’s horse barn, I asked mischievously, “Why do people wear boots?”

“Horse poop!” she shouted. Ms. “My BOOTS Cost More Than Your Mortgage” blanched, all her “what a cute baby” smiles disappearing.

“That’s right! And what else?” I prodded.

“Ummmm. Boots. Snake bites!”

“Exactly!” I agreed. Fortunately, BOOT lady’s bagel order arrived so she could leave us without a backwards glance. Through the store window, I noticed that she rejoined a woman who could only have been her nanny, outside with a sleeping infant in a stroller.

Sigh. It’s not that I don’t like rich people; I just don’t understand the ones I see most of the time, especially as parents.

A few minutes later, Boo and I were people-watching out the bagel shop window when we spied two mothers with grocery bags. Like BOOT lady, they were dressed to the nines. (Who the heck dresses up to go out to the grocery store?) Each woman was accompanied by a girl of about six or seven years, and one boy of indeterminate ownership orbited the group joyfully. Dressed in fancy logo hoodies, the girls were walking woodenly next to their respective mothers. They wore light but evident makeup and several accessories each — purse, earrings, scarf, dangly bracelets, that sort of thing.

Make no mistake — I’m completely aware that my own Boobaby will dress exactly this way some day, and I think she’ll have fun with dressing up. I just hope she doesn’t do it too often. The mode of dress — which I’m guessing the girls wear daily — absolutely prevents active play. I imagine that they mostly play dolls or house, but almost certainly not basketball. The boy, by contrast, was also dressed in expensive-looking clothes — corduroy pants and a button-down shirt — but they could at least be played in actively. And he was playing, running around the mothers and girls, hanging on newspaper stands, kicking parking meters — in short, being a kid.

At least their moms probably take the girls to yoga.

by Doodaddy

Photo graciously provided by *n*o*o*r*, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved