Dry Skin, Fru Fru Lotion and the Smell of Fish

I’ve written before about how children’s minds work in mysterious and often funny ways. They can’t help putting two and two together and getting seventeen. Everything they see, hear and experience is put through their little filter that is only a few years old.

Logic is but a glimmering part of their distant future. The right now can only be viewed in the context of the last few months of their lives.

And for our little six year old R, it was perfectly logical that she inform me that what appeared to be, was not.

We were headed out for the day- on our way to see the High School Musical, umm, Musical, at the Tennessee Performing Arts center. As if Disney hadn’t sucked enough money out of our pockets through DirecTV subscription fees, trips to DisneyWorld and DisneyLand, countless plastic figurines, Cinderella and Snow White dresses, and so, so, much more, they of have to put on Broadway style performances of movies we have already seen a million times. And we gleefully plop down $300 or more for all six of us to go see a story we already know, and songs we know by heart, with no doubt whatsoever how it will end.

And so we went to see Troy and Gabriella fall in love. For the thousandth time.

The day was fairly cold- and a few of us were fighting off coughs and runny noses. I had noticed the skin on my hands had got rough and sore in the last couple of days and so as we drove I asked if anyone had any lotion. This is rather uncharacteristic of me. I simply do not use lotion. I don’t use hair products. I don’t use loofas or any other tools of the trade used by the common metrosexual. But this was different. The pain and itching were beyond my ability to ignore and so I had to apply some sort of moisturizing lotion to ease the pain.

Michelle handed me her lotion, warning me it smelled pretty girly. Well…that was an absolute understatement. I looked at the bottle and commented that it looked like it would probably smell sickeningly sweet and I didn’t feel like having to smell that on my hands for the next several hours. I commented on how the image on the bottle looked like it would reek and opened it up getting a wave of stink as if I’d shoved a dozen flowers up my nose. I asked if anyone else had any lotion.

Little R spoke up- “I do daddy. It’s in my purse.” She dug around and pulled out the lotion. She handed it to me as I drove, arm stuck backwards toward her seat with my hand open. She plopped it in my hand and then assured me that I would like the lotion despite the way the tube looked. I looked at the cute tube of hand lotion and noticed the penguin on the front.

She told me, serious as a heart attack, “Don’t worry daddy, it doesn’t smell like penguin.”