Saturday, May 28, 2005

Random Flyby Chatty Post

It's Saturday. And in the immortal words of my six-year-old--it's summer!! Summer break, that is. She woke this morning with a long list of things she wanted to do, and when she agonized over the possiblity of achieving them all (well, it wasn't exactly agony), I reminded her, "Don't forget, you have the whole weekend."

"NO, Mommy!" she cried gleefully. "We have the whole summer!"

It's funny, isn't it, but a change like school ending creates a change in the atmosphere. Things around the Knight household feel more carefree today. There's Hillary Duff playing off in the next room (obviously not MY choice) and the little people just seem more at ease somehow. They know it's summer. And it brings back a whole raft of memories and associations from my own childhood, a kind of preverbal feeling that I can't quite touch in my mind. That's one of the perfect joys of parenthood, the healing of our pasts and then the reliving of them in a more perfect way.

And while we're talking about my kids, I just have to share this. The other night Tyler (six) was in bed beside me while I was proofing my chapter in my novel, and she asked me, "How did you think up these people?" So I told her I got the idea for the hero in PARALLEL ATTRACTION about four years ago. I then said, "Well, and he's an alien."

She cried, "For REAL?"
"Yeah, for real."
"Mo-mmy," she snorted, "there's no such thing as aliens!"
"I know," I said. "But that's why it's a book."

So she snuggles down next to me, my little reader she does, and then out of the blue asks, "How come the word 'sexy' is in your book?" :) Uh, oh. I'm thinking my reader is a MUCH better reader than I thought she was. "Where did you hear the word 'sexy'?" I almost shouted. Her father the rock snob wanders in and tells me: "She heard Sexy Sadie by the Beatles."

Oh goodness.

Changing gears completely, Gena Showalter has her really cool ad for AWAKEN ME and the other Downtown Books that are part of the summer promo up on her blog. Check it out!
www.genashowalter.blogspot.com

And changing gears even MORE completely I had a big celebrity spotting yesterday. I was at the spa and salon getting my hair and nails done for NYC this coming week, and guess who I ran into? Well, you'd guess if you knew this place because this person is a known guest there. Whitney Houston! In her spa robe standing three feet from me, no less. Rather interesting! And there I was staggering under the blistering pain of a bikini wax. So color me doubly speechless.

I'm sure I'll be around this holiday weekend. More to come!
Deidre

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh that's adorable :) I remember how happy I was when summer vacation rolled around. Funny too how when I was little, Christmas seemed to take an agonizingly long time to arrive and not it gets here before I have time to think about it. Cool about seeing Whitney Housten :)

TJ Brown said...

Ahhh, the joys of six.

My daughter is fourteen. She walked into the room on her way to the rink yesterday and my husband's jaw dropped. "When did she start looking like that?" He asked me later.

I knew what he meant. She had been wearing a pair of vintage looking low rise jeans and her lycra skate top. Her waist was pencil slim. Her hips and bust no longer were. Our lovely, athetic girl went from shocking us with knowing the word sexy to being undeniably sexy.

Having your daughter being sexy is much, much worse.

Enjoy six:)
Teri

Ellen said...

LOL. My kids all read early, and I got to the point with my first one that I couldn't write with her in the room, because she'd come up behind me and read (out loud) everything I wrote. She was about three and a half:-O. It really put a crimp in my writing of love scenes for a while... I had to write them when her daddy was around to keep her out of my hair!

Jeanne Damoff said...

Sooo . . . you'll be wearing a bikini in NYC next week? ;)

When Luke was four I walked into the living room to find him intently studying a Nat'l Geographic article about pygmies in Africa. All the women in the photographs were topless. As I contemplated an explanation, he looked up at me and said, "They don't dress very warmly, do they?"

Happy Summer. Enjoy your little ones.

Jaci Burton said...

How precocious! She sounds adorable, D! And wayyyy too smart ;-)

Hmmm hair, nails AND bikini wax for NY? Just what are you going to be doing there next week? Are you auditioning for the Next Top Model show? *g*

Jaci

Diana Peterfreund said...

Oh, crap. A bikini wax? Are you serious?
::starts looking into salons::

Deidre Knight said...

Oh you ladies are too much!! The biking wax, ahem, was NOT for the trip to New York. Can you say Summer?? :) I'll admit it: I had a girly-girl day. LOL.

Carol Burnside aka Annie Rayburn said...

Is it only me that finds D's comment "Rather interesting!" to describe seeing Whitney--well, rather interesting?

Hmmm...

Brenda said...

Ugh. Don't get me started on summer break. The four are makin' me bonkers already on oh...Day One (today). Yeah, yeah, I know, short drive as it was.

Where's the Xanax?

Anonymous said...

My 9-year-old is into writing, and a couple of years ago she wrote a short story where the girls were discussing hot boys. I said something like, "what do you know about hot boys?" She said, "Mom. I don't like hot boys. They like hot boys. It's fiction." LOL

Re: summer, I was talking to my two about next year going part time at work so they could be home with me, and they both started wailing about missing day camp. I guess that's a good thing--I'm not warping them by being a working mom and making them go to camp all day. But that also means that dream of becoming a full-time writer might be much further off. (sigh)

Natalie

Amie Stuart said...

Brenda--thank god for daycare! hehehe but on the flip side my son was out riding his bike at 8:30 last night which was cool in a really sublime sorta way (it's not something he's been able to do cuz we used to live on such a busy street).

Anyway...I'm LOL@sexy. I keep telling the boys that mom's writing isn't appropriate for kids. You should have heard the cheer that went up when they found out I was working on a YA (something they could actually read).