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Thursday, February 25, 2010

Double Talk



I seriously think there may be something to the whole stars, charts, and rising signs astrology thing. I’m not so invested that I would refuse to leave the house based on a dire horoscope, but if the tides are influenced by the movement of the planets and our bodies are mostly water, it just makes sense that when they move, we get a little cosmic tug. I also have two children born at the tail end of May, which means I’ve got more Gemini folk than I can comfortably handle sometimes. In the zodiac, Gemini represents the twins. In my house, Gemini represents the drastically polar personality shift that can happen to kids #2 and #4 at a moment’s notice. These are children who give new and more profound meaning to the metaphors associated with emotional swings--hot and cold, night and day, Jekyll and Hyde, etc. It is always amazing, and sometimes a little bizarre or frightening, to see a small person in the progression from sun to wild storm and back again in the amount of time it takes for toast to pop up. This duality kept going through my mind as I was reading Michael Bond’s Paddington’s Opposites to the littlest quick-change artist in my life. The contrasting conditions in the book are pretty straightforward--on/off, neat/messy, open/closed--but the illustrations are a bit outrageous, especially on the “negative” parts of the pairs, and those are (naturally!) the ones Scarlett likes best. Or not. It all depends on her mood.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=paddington%27s+opposites&x=0&y=0

http://www.paddingtonbear.com/thenandnowmichaelbond.html

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