Szalon a la Child

Other than giving me massages and compliments on a regular basis, my kids also like doing my hair, and spend much time ooh-ing and ah-ing over my unmanageable mane. It's amazing how little convincing it takes to get a six-year-old girl to brush your hair for 15 minutes.

The other week, I let Dori do my hair while I drew the 11736th "fairy princess" of the day for one of the other girls. As I was coloring in the drawing, an amazing conversation was going on over my head between Dori and Zsofi:

Zs. "Dori, after can I have a turn?"
D. "Zsofi, I need to do something very nice for Jenny, so that all the boys will love her."
Jenny. "That's right. Please take as much time as you need."
D. "If Jenny would like to be pretty, then we have to take our time."
Zs. "Okay." Short pause. "It's so strange, this day. Yesterday was sunny, and now it's rainy!"
D. "It's very strange. I hope tomorrow it's sunny again."

This conversation about the weather was taking place without any of my prompts, and Dori kept interjecting brusque commands and comments like "head up," "look left," "great," and "yeah, this is nice, this is nice." I felt like I had been transported to a beauty salon in Little Italy, and any minute now the conversation would switch to Tito's bad back, or Rosalita's new baby.

Here's a picture of the two of them, sort of. Dori is the one with her mouth open (one begins to see why she's my favorite: we pose for pictures the exact same way), and Zsofi is the blond one in the Hello Kitty shirt.



I know I told myself a hundred times that I don't want to make working with kids my career or anything, but it's just so damn awesome. How can you not enjoy these little people, who are, in many ways, so much more fun than adults? I've met lots of people who tell me they don't like kids, and I get it. I really do. They're annoying, snotty, loud, selfish. That's just cold, hard fact. But I think it's all perspective. Kids, I think, are just full of that, I dunno, "joy" or whatever. When I'm with them, I also get to take part in that dumb joy, and suspend my notions of reality. Kids make me feel so happy. I don't know if I could ever give that up.

PS. If you're wondering what my hair ended up looking like after Queen Latifah was done with it, it was a side ponytail. It always is. For some reason, they think side ponytails are the most hilarious, outrageous hairdos you can have, and they're always bursting with giggles as they send me to the mirror to inspect the quality of their work.