I have a question.

If you catch the bus, and don't have money for the fare, and explain to the driver that you really need to be on the bus anyway because your asthma is so bad you cannot walk the 4 blocks to the boat (okay, five blocks - they're long at that point) in this heat....

Is it fair for me to interrupt and ask why you stink of cigarettes at this point in the conversation?

I mean, I didn't, but is that a valid question? Because my gut feeling is that the smoke is far more likely to be hazardous to his health (although I do understand that the heat and humidity is a bad combo for asthmatics in and of itself, of course).

That's the same bus ride in which the baby, for the first time ever, said "Mei-tai!" because she saw somebody wearing her kid in... I don't know, some structured carrier I didn't recognize and that didn't have a visible label.

Old commentary.

We've got this kid's book I adore, More More More Said the Baby.

I was really irritated a while back to read a comment about it on Amazon complaining about one of the kids being black, but having a white grandma - "It might confuse kids, they're not used to seeing this!!!"

I thought the point was absurd then, and I think it's more absurd now.

Little children I know routinely assume I'm Ana's mom. Our coloring certainly isn't similar, so they must just be figuring that if they see her with me, I'm probably her mother. But there's more to this story.

Today, Angelique and her friend Ana met up with another little girl we've met before, Sophia. Sophia is very pale, very blond, and she comes to the museum with her very dark, very Jamaican babysitter - who, quite aside from the obvious just looks nothing like the kid in build or facial features or whatever, probably because they're not related.

So, now, first Ana tells Sophia that she has to "ask her Mommy" before she can share everybody's strawberries - and then, after Sophia comes back, she tells us the following:

"She said I could have some. Oh, and she's not my mom, you know. She's my babysitter. See, my mom has black hair, and she has brown hair."

The almost certainly much more obvious difference in their skin color apparently never even occured to her. (Though, I don't know, I could be assuming things. I know. But the most likely answer is that her mom is just as liable to burn in the sun on a cloudy day as this kid is.)