Leituras infantis. Às vezes é difícil encontrar livros infantis que não insultem a inteligência das mamães e ao mesmo tempo sejam divertidos para os filhos. Minha salvação costuma ser o Ricardo Azevedo, um contador de histórias de primeiríssima categoria e autor de excelentes livros como Contos de Enganar a Morte e No Meio da Noite Escura Tem um Pé de Maravilha.

Outro livro que fez muito sucesso aqui em casa comigo e com as meninas foi O Primeiro Homem, contos creacionistas indígenas recolhidos pela Betty Midlin. A propósito, ontem descobri que a coleção tem vários outros títulos na contracapa do livro Palavra Cigana, que tem lindas ilustrações de Stephan Doitschinoff.

Outra dica de leitura muito divertida é Felpo Filva da Eva Furnari.

Nós mamães sereias somos assim: gostamos de ler contos de lobisomem, mitos ciganos e histórias sobre coelhos poetas deprimidos para as sereeinhas.

Just what Mermie needed on the fourth day of her vacation.

A Feast for the Eyes. One of the most beautifully designed animations I've ever seen. Images so spectacularly rich they make your eyes hurt.

My girls.

For Little Girls and Boys. Yesterday we had great fun at the award-winning play "Por que o mar chora tanto" by Meninas do Conto. It's playing at Teatro Folha in São Paulo. Meninas do Conto reclaim the old art of storytelling with simplicity and mastery.

We have also been reading The King of Capri together, beautifully illustrated by Jane Ray.

Got to love those American towns for their geographical boldness...

I'm suddenly interested in Weimar and Jena because there is a possibility the HH will entice us to live there some time next year while he pursues his phD on a sandwich scholarship. I find the prospect exciting because it will give me the opportunity of learning a new language or at least moving forward from my near-0 German skill level.

But I worry about the Mermaid Jr. It took her so long to begin to speak Portuguese and she still stumbles constantly: conjugations, verb tenses, prepositions it's amazing how my girl has a gift for mangling her own language. We're just about to get discharge from speech therapy even though she can't handle two phonemes yet: the R of rato and the sh of xixi.

German sounds daunting considering that she still refuses to speak English. I suspect she understands a good deal of it but she doesn't bother to speak it or repeat the English words I try to teach her. It's not easy when language gets tangled up with the emotional mess: English is the language spoken by her father whose name predictably begins with the letter R.

Maybe she will turn out to be a genius in German precisely due to the reasons explained above. Who knows...

La Chichonera. Two days before her 4th birthday this little monkey was jumping on my bed. The monkey fell down and banged her head. Thank God to rubber bones she didn't break her head, as confirmed by last night's CT scan. Mood healers for my little monkey: Dora the Explorer and McDonald's delivery. Let's just see how well those fries perform after 30 minutes in transit...

Learning Numbers. This weekend I discovered a great method to teach numbers to pre-schoolers. And if you took a hint from the image above, you got it right: take them to the horsetrack and let them gamble. It's all very pleasant, especially if you're in Brazil and it's the beginning of autumn, perfect weather for a nice cabernet and a light sweater under the magnificently blue skies.

We were all very proud at the Little Mermie, who cheered and betted like a pro, making sharp remarks when I took her to see the horsies on the paddock before they raced. She would say "number 2 is very angry. he doesn't want the man!", or "number 5 is too tired" or just pleaded in a very unsophisticated way "Mommie, I want to win, win!". At first I thought she was just saying numbers out of the top of her head, but when she corrected Angie's miopic statement that number 4 had won, I knew that not only her eyesight is much better than ours, she was actually reading the numbers.

Imagine the algebric exploits parents and their offspring can make on the horsetrack: multiplication, combinations, likelihood, all the stuff I never managed to get into my woodblock of a head because there were never enough math tests with questions enunciated as "You gambled $20 on a place bet paying 3.513 to one...".

But the story gets better. Believe it or not, she picked the winner two times in a row. Just like in DH Lawrence's Rocking Horse Winner but without the eerie rocking, just keen equine observation after much chocolate chip cookie munching. On the third race, she insisted on number 5, but since she was already feeling a little tired, her predictions were not as accurate as before. Number 5 lost by a head to number 1.

The Little Mermie, who is 3 and a half, also made a point to collect her bets immediately at the restaurant cashier, all by herself, to the astonishment of all around. She came home with her pockets clinking with a grand total of R$12, to be squandared in lollipops and candy.

Vegas next?

Carnaval. It's been a long time since I posted, but before the hiatus broadens so that I begin eyeing the Blogger interface with the same guilty countenance I have when I meet friends I have neglected for long, let me make a little post about Carnaval. Truth of the matter is that I don't really like this time of folly and overcrowded highways, especially when the thermomether has climbed to the upper 100s and when perched there, the marker grimaces and throws you raspberries saying that it simply won't come down. Two nights ago in Piracicaba we had to sleep under damp towels to cool down, never mind the ceiling fan turned on at full throtle.

But Carnaval is here or so I am reminded by the kiddie activities going on. Since no Carnaval is complete without a costume, the Young Mermie and I went shopping for an outfit last week. Since the reais are clinking ever more slowly in my bank account, we went to Fradinho's Presentes, a cheap neighborhood store which attires itself according to the seasonal mood. When it's Halloween, this gringolandia fest that only in the past 10 years has been celebrated in Brazil, Fradinho's is all about skulls and witches. Easter? Bunnies and chocolate eggs galore can be acquired at discounted rates Fradinho's, which also possesses a bootleg Barbie line that's the envy of the street peddlers of Taiwan. But I am sure that the readers are more interested in the trinkets that make up a traditional Carnaval stash of goodies.

I bought the Mermie a bisnaga d'água, um martelo sonoro, confete, serpentina in addition to a white and silver ballerina costume at an astounding size 8 (the Mermie is 3 years old, but tall and chunky and getting chunkier). I think I was probably much more excited than the Mermie about the Carnaval Day at Tartaruga School, because I sent her dressed in full regalia and with the martelo sonoro in hand one day before schedule. Hmmm. Very interesting indeed, considering how one of my earliest memories is going to a day trip to the zoo, packed with a special lunch box containing boiled eggs and all of my animal figurines, only to discover that the day trip was supposed to be the next day. I remember feeling quite dismayed at my mom's lack of attention to the kiddie agenda and protocols. Luckily, the Mermie has less regard to conventions than I did, because the teacher reported she was only too glad to parade in the sandbox with her dainty ballerina outfit while the other kids wore their drab navy blue uniforms.

The next day we improvised another costume for her, this time, a pink ballerina tutu with a Little Mermaid maillot, not as dashing as the first one, I'm afraid. So now she has two costumes to choose from when we go to the Clube Athletico Paulistano Matinée Ball next Fat Tuesday. The Hairy Hungarian and I will be also attending the Monday Ball at the Paulistano, not that I care much about these balls, which only remind me of the drunken Carnavais of my teenage years. But the Hairy Hungarian is a foreigner and has no recollections of the follies of yesteryear and he likes to party hard, even with a busted knee.

The good thing about Carnaval is that it lasts only five days. I couldn't take the continuous broadcasting of the desfile de escolas de samba, with that poor sound quality that makes every samba-enredo sound the same, although watching the naked girls is fun, I admit it.

What I really like about Carnaval, however, is neither the excitement nor the glitter and masquerades. In the days preceding and following Carnaval, what I really love is looking under bridges and overpasses for the carros alegóricos. The escolas de samba many times lack the space to store them, so they are left unattended under bridges, the costumary home of the homeless. You can spot them along the major thoroughfares or in forgotten alleyways, shining like a miracle under the scorching sun, never complete and admirable as you seem them on TV, but rather downtrodden or half-built, the matte ossature showing through the sparkles of illusion. At once an augury and a summation of the euphory on the streets.

Life is so Unfair. While the Globo Ocular Peludo gets to go to Bahia and drink maracujá caipirinhas I get to go to Bee City and to drink unwanted drops of strawberry juice from the Mermie's sippy-cup. She more or less freaked out when she saw all those beehives and beebuzzing exhibits. But the uterine experience of going inside the giant bee gave her a kick. Speaking of kicks, how about smuggling some Fernando Pires shoes to New York?

Mothern. The incredible adventures of girls who have already given birth.