I confess. When I read to my child at night I sometimes try to skip ahead. She always catches me, but I persist, omitting adverbs (much too prevalent in children’s fiction) and omitting “he said, she saids.” I’m such an asshole. Here I am watching the Bachelor with my daughter and cutting her reading time short. And, I just finished Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (brilliant book) which stresses the importance of practice, putting in the hours, and extra work. I know the importance of legacy so what gives? I guess I skip more depending on the book. One of last night’s stories was a book about Aurora and Prince Philip, a kind of part II to Sleeping beauty. I HATE fairy tale sequels. They give me violent thoughts. They’re vapid, lazy and should be banned by Obama.
“Why do you like Aurora?” I asked.
“Um, um.” She covered her face, feeling the pressure. “I like her necklace and I want to be like her.”
“What?” I said. “Crazy. You know what’s weird–people want to be like you, too.”
My daughter beamed. In a writing class, Tobias Wolf told me to never use the expression, “she beamed,” but that’s what she did. “Isn’t that neat?”
“But they can’t be like me ’cause only I’m me.”
“And you don’t want to be like Aurora because then you wouldn’t be you.” Ho snap–mommy just dropped some knowledge right there.
“Fo shizzle,” she said.
“Sweetie, you need to stop saying that,” I said, even though I love when she says it, but I have to draw the line somewhere. I get points docked for skipping ahead so I need to balance my mommy spread sheet.

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