Amnesia

One thing you forget as your children grow older is how excruciatingly long it takes to do anything with a little one. Once the youngest gets into all-day school and can undo their own seatbelt, you get amnesia about the way an errand that should take five minutes becomes an agonizing study in how much human patience can be tested without disappearing completely. They resist the car seat, get spaghetti legs in parking lots, dash away at the front of a long line so you lose your place trying to retrieve them, touch everything, and altogether refuse to make even the simplest tasks easier. It’s as if they have boundless energy, the ability to teleport, and wiles far beyond their years. And getting back into the parenting game at forty, ten years after thinking I was done, not only gave me plenty of time to get a foggy memory, it also gave me a decade to get more easily prone to exhaustion. The other day I made the mistake of ignoring my instincts and experience and took Scarlett with me to do a little running around. Boy, was I sorry. I could swear when I left the house she was an ordinary little girl but, by the first stop, she had morphed into a naughty, mischievous, trouble-making monkey. And I came home a stressed-out wreck. In Jane Belk Moncure’s One Tricky Monkey Up On Top, Melissa spends the entire book trying to corral one monkey. I know how she feels.

http://www.amazon.com/Tricky-Monkey-Magic-Castle-Readers/dp/1561893765

http://www.janebelkmoncure.com/fsrsbbhome.htm

Monkey Business

It’s astounding, humbling, and thought-provoking to observe monkeys in action. While watching a Jane Goodall documentary that particularly resonated with me, I was transfixed by the similarities between chimp and human behavior. There were teenaged girls cooing over babies, tiny boys posturing like big apes, and even a chilling incident where one chimp who had stayed inordinately attached to his mother dispatched a newly-arrived sibling in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again. So, if monkeys are so much like us, I guess we just lucked out in evolutionary roulette, huh? Charlton Heston’s damn, dirty ape experience notwithstanding, they got the cages and we got the keys. When I was five, my family went to the zoo where we spent time at the monkey habitat. It was very busy and the animals were subjected to waves of gawkers, but seemed utterly unfazed, until one monkey chose me out of the crowd. To my delight and the amusement of the quickly growing swarm of spectators, the chimp would mirror my every move. We danced in tandem for quite awhile, until the bystanders got restless. As I turned to leave, the chimp and I locked eyes and I felt an unbearable sadness that I could walk freely away and he never could. In Esphyr Slobodkina’s Caps For Sale, the naughty monkeys are tricked into giving up their prizes but not their freedom. Esphyr escaped Russia with her family as a girl--perhaps she knows something of being held captive.
http://www.amazon.com/Caps-Sale-Peddler-Monkeys-Business/dp/0064431436

http://www.slobodkina.com/about%20esphyr.htm