Charles made Rose’s week by helping her install a Tinkerbell light switch cover in her room. This doesn’t sound like that big of an issue, but when we moved into the house we changed the ancient, polluted light switches into the wide, flat ones that don’t actually accommodate a Tinkerbell switch cover. So, you know, it is slightly more complicated than pulling the old one off and putting the new one on.
Rose was a great helper, letting her dad know when he turned the power to her room off, and then handing appropriate screwdrivers and other implements of torture. Quite the little tinker-er.
For those of you that are unfamiliar with the Tinkerbell reboot, she’s basically a fairy who invents and builds stuff. Not the worst Disney role model to have. And Rose LOVES the new movies, and is pretty much obsessed with them. She was Tinkerbell for Halloween. I tried to talk her into going as Iridessa, Tinkerbell’s (are fairies African-American?) friend, but Rose just wasn’t interested. She had her heart set on Tinkerbell. I got her Iridessa for Christmas anyway, which Rose seemed to think was better than nothing. Of course, she prefers Silvermist, the (Asian?) one that her aunts got her for Christmas, who is voiced by Lucy Liu in the movie. I don’t know if it is a racial issue or the fact that Silvermist’s wings light up and she makes these chiming sounds when you push her bellybutton.
But Rose got a real kick out of helping her dad with a project. Usually D and Charles do those kinds of activities (often as a result of Dillon’s homework requirements) and I think it made her feel like a big kid. We’ll have to do more of that stuff with her – I often forget she’s a really capable kid. She is a great helper for all my projects, but those have lately tended towards cooking and holiday stuff. I did make a point of letting her watch me put the toaster back together the other day after I pulled it apart to clean it, just so she knows I am (almost) as capable as Charles with this stuff.
There was a notable exception the other day: when it comes to picking out a soldering iron. Charles sends me to the store saying “they are all the same, you really can’t go wrong” and there are ten different sizes and prices, so I basically am choosing the most expensive one when a nice hardware store patron asks me, “what are you soldering?” And I tell him it is for a science project we’re doing with Dillon and he’s points me down a couple of sizes and price ranges and says “the one you’ve got is for something the size of jumper cables, these smaller ones are probably better for science projects…”