My daughter sounds just like me. This is not a good thing.

Her two favorite expressions are, “You’re driving me nuts!” and “That’s very annoying.” It is something she tells Primo frequently, which isn’t such a big deal because, hey, she’s right, he can be very annoying, and its infinitely better than her stabbing him in the cheek with a pencil, which is how she used to respond. But when she says it to other two year-olds on the playground -- as in “Stop singing that song! Its driving me crazy!” – well, its embarrassing

Its also embarrassing when I hear her playing with her Wizard of Oz action figures.

“Glenda, you are being SO NAUGHTY!!!” she has Dorothy shriek, “You need to have a TIME OUT and you can FORGET about having DESSERT!!!”

But neither of those is as bad as when she gets to cursing. Last week, she called a little blond-haired boy a son-of-a-bitch. I could have died. I guess she wanted to be on the ladder he was on and she started off by demanding, “Move out of the way!!!! I need to go here!!!” but soon it devolved into her screaming crazy shit in his face like, “You’re not in charge of me!!! You’re a bad fussy!!!! FUSSY FUSSY!! Get out or I will spit at you!!! Son of a BITCH!!!!!”

Of course, sometimes it’s very affirming when she sounds just like me, especially when she takes on the role of Primo’s cheerleader. Like yesterday, when he was sitting quietly drawing one of his mega-opuses and she walked over and put her hand on his back.

“Oh Primo,” she said, breathless, “It’s so AMAAAAAAZING!!!” And them clapping her hands in delight, “I am so proud of you!!!!”

So, I'm not such a bad mom after all.

Tear shit up

Something unfortunate has occurred.

My daughter has stopped napping.

It’s the sort of thing that you know is coming, especially when you have an older child, but you just can’t quite believe that it’s time for it already. I mean, Seconda’s not even two and a half yet and I thought we had a good year at least of peaceful early afternoons before us. My son was at least 3 before he gave up his nap, and with him, it was a gradual process; he’d skip his nap for a couple of days, but I’d persist with our naptime ritual and he’d eventually cave in to sleep since there was nothing better to do, in the dark, in his crib.

Well Seconda has found plenty of better things to do in the dark. Not in her crib of course. That wildcat leaps out of her crib before I’ve even closed the bedroom door behind me. Most of the better things she’s found to do are highly destructive.

What I mean is, she likes to tear shit up. Literally. And the easiest thing to tear is, of course, books, Which in our house is tantamount to hurling the family’s crystal against the wall. I mean, I am willing to accept that my children do a lot of bad shit but tear up books?

“What did this book ever do to you?” I ask her, “All it wanted was to make you HAPPY and you’ve destroyed it!”

There was one time that Primo tore up his very beloved, very fancy, very expensive pop-up Wizard of Oz book. I don’t know if it was a masochistic thing or what, but it occurred during the tail end of the losing-the-nap period when he was stuck in his room for two hours with nothing to do. When I opened the door to release him from nap captivity, I saw all these beautiful bits of glimmering Emerald City and yellow bricks and pieces of poppy field scattered everywhere and I’m not going to lie to you, it hurt. I gave him such a stern talking-to then that he kind of has post-traumatic stress disorder about the whole episode. In fact, a year later, we were just sitting in the kitchen one morning talking and he told me that he had a horrible dream the night before.

“I dreamt that I tore up the Wizard of Oz pop-up book,” he said.

“That wasn’t a dream,” I informed him, “That happened.”

“No, no, that’s not right,” came his reply.

My stern reprimand scarred him enough that he hasn’t so much as dog-eared a page since.

Seconda, on the other hand. could care less about my little lectures or my time-outs or my yelling or my forcing her to read only board books until she proves that she deserves paperback again. During my stern talking-tos, she regards me with this bored kind of expression that is so awfully adolescent, I fear for the future.

“Whatever, lady, keep flapping your lips,” her eyes seem to say, “As soon as you turn your back, I’m ripping Puff’s face right of his magic body while Jackie Paper watches, then I’ll shred that sucker too.”

Off to see the wizard

I have been off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of oz. At Madison Square Garden. Wow.

When we got there, Primo was surprised to find that it was neither square nor a garden, and all of a sudden I had a glimpse of what he’d been expecting this whole time. When your kid uses words like “magnificent” and talks about the afterlife, you can sometime forget that he’s only four, and still just a babe in the woods.

Our family doesn’t take in a lot of Broadway shows. If my mother hadn’t have paid for this one, I would have had to sell an organ to cover the tickets. But I would have gotten those tickets somehow because my son has got to be the biggest Wizard of Oz fanatic of all time. The mania started when he was 2 and my cousin gave him some old WOZ figures she found in a box in her closet. A few months later, David’s parents in Tennessee clued him in to the fact that there was a feature film which told the story of these beloved figures, with singing and dancing and Technicolor! He didn’t get up off the couch for the entire duration of the movie, which, at two years-old, was somewhat preter-natural.

I don’t know exactly what it was about the struggle of Dorothy and her misfit friends that had my young son so entranced but after he saw the movie it was all Oz, all the time, for about a year and a half. We watched every bonus feature on the deluxe anniversary DVD that his grandparents gave him for Christmas – the silent film versions of Baum’s story, cartoon versions, tales from the making of the movie, extra footage, bios of the leading actors -- you name it.

Primo’s favorite character, hands down, was the Wicked Witch of the West. When he’d get into altercations on the playground, he would threaten to throw balls of fire at his fellow toddlers. Parents were understandably aghast.

“He’s not really going to DO it,” I’d explain, “He just really loves the Wizard of Oz.”

He wore this little witch hat everywhere, to the supermarket, the park, birthday parties, and in it he was fond of cackling, “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!” at the slightest provocation. And the show tune he preferred to all others from that killer soundtrack was the witch’s song.

The witch doesn’t have a song, you will say. That’s what we said, too.

She does have a theme song, though, the one they play whenever she flies by on her broomstick, and this is what he was referring to. Da dun da dun da dun DUN. Da dun da dun da dun DUN. DUN DUN DUN. You know the one I mean.

After countless viewings, here’s what David and I have decided about this timeless tale.

Glenda’s a grade-A bitch. Good witch, my foot. Sure she comes down in a flawless pink bubble and she speaks with that super-refined accent but underneath all that, she’s nothing short of sadistic.

She’s the one that puts the slippers on Dorothy to begin with, then when the witch promises to murder Dorothy is cold blood, she’s all, “I’m afraid you’ve made a rather bad enemy of the witch.”

“No, Glenda,” I’d have said, “YOU’VE made me a rather bad enemy of the witch, thanks. Now would you bugger off and stay the hell away from me? I need you like I need a hole in the head.”

Early on, Glenda makes a show of being terribly beneficent and powerful by bringing on the snow when Dorothy’s asleep in the poppy field, but honestly, how much did that put her out? I bet it snows all the time in Oz. And when Dorothy’s locked in the witch’s dungeon, with the red sand of the hourglass slipping away, begging for anyone at all to help, where is Glenda then?

If it wasn’t for the hapless lion, scarecrow and tin-man, who despite lacking organs which are critical for life, manage to rescue her, Dot would be belly-up in the witch’s moat.

And here’s the kicker. Dorothy suffers like a dog for two plus hours, at the end of which she finds herself still in Oz, without a hope in the world of ever making it back to that prairie home. Guess who breezes in on her bubble with some good news?

“You’ve had the power to go home all along,” Glenda kindly informs her.

Dorothy’s a sweet kid so she doesn’t say what she certainly must be thinking:

“Really? Then why the FUCK didn’t you tell me that to begin with, beyatch? Is this some kind of sick game to you? Victim of a natural disaster ends up displaced and you sic a bloodthirsty witch on her ass, send her to a charlatan wizard and then tell her all she had to do the WHOLE TIME was click her heels? Screw you and the bubble you rode in on.”

Of course, Glenda gives Dorothy some buuuuuullshit about how she had to discover it for herself, it was all about the journey of self-discovery blah blah blah. I think any sane individual would have at least given the heel-clicking a go, just for shits and giggles, why not, before undertaking an epic odyssey with only a yellow brick road for guidance.

So that’s why David and I hate Glenda. The witch, well, she was a woman in mourning for God’s sake, and the only possession her sister bequeathed to her was basically grave-robbed. I don’t blame her one bit.

The show was great by the way. Flying monkeys, falling snow, melting witches – the whole nine yards. I highly recommend it if you’ve got a kidney you can sell.