Truthiness and Manipulation

First off, Stephen Colbert is my new hero. I'm not sure if I had an old hero, but if I did, she's been replaced.

You've probably already seen this, but if you haven't, please please watch it: Stephen Colbert addressing the White House Correspondents' Dinner. There's a little blurb about it, and then his speech is broken up into 3 different videos that you can, and should, watch. Just brilliant. I've always been tempted to get cable just to watch the Daily Show, but this has brought me one step closer to shelling out that money. If it could go straight into the pockets of Jon Stewart and Mr. Colbert, I'd definitely do it.

In an unrelated tale, I've discovered that my daughter is a master manipulator. (Manipulatress?) She hasn't been wanting to go to bed at the normal, established time during the past week or so. I've put it down to her fabulous Auntie Gayle sending her an audio copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone read by Stephen Fry. She hadn't read the book yet, and certainly hasn't seen the movie, and I had wanted to read it with her first, but gave in pretty quickly. It was definitely the right move. Great reading, as one would expect from Mr. Fry. We all loved it. Whenever Emma had a free moment she'd want to put the tape on. It was great, but so exciting and interesting, that it was not very conducive to sleeping.

So, I had put her to bed the other night and retired to the living room. 5 minutes later she was out of her room claiming insomnia. I told her to go back to her room, grab a book and look at it for a while and it should make her sleepy. 15 minutes after that, she was back. And here is what my sweet little 7 year old said: "I feel lonely and sad. I miss you. I feel like I never see you and we never spend time together because you get home from work so late."

Lord! Talk about hitting the working-mother-guilt bulls-eye! I've often felt that she spends more time with her teacher than she does with me. It's not like I work 80 hour weeks or anything, but if I get home at 5:30 and she goes to bed at 8:00, that doesn't leave a whole lot of time. Plus, once I get home, I'm very goal-oriented and feel like a bit of a drill-sergeant. There seems to be so much to do and so little time. Homework (which includes daily work, plus reading words to go over, a spelling test to prepare for and a math quiz to work on), dinner, bathing, and reading before bed. And if it's her gymnastics day or there's some school-event going on or something, well, just forget about any down-time at all. (She's at gymnastics right now, as a matter of fact. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to write this.)

Perhaps she's old enough to stay up a little later and that might help things. Or perhaps this is just a short phase, and she'll soon be back to falling asleep at her normal time. We'll see. I don't think she was actually all that lonely that evening, but that it was an ingenious ploy to stay up later and con me into letting her sleep in my bed with me. (Yes, it worked. Darrel got to sleep in the Princess Bed that night. He loves that, really he does.)

All I know is that she's a helluva lot smarter and more observant than I had been giving her credit for. And considering I think she's brilliant, that's a little scary.