Little Sister with her dolls

Little Sister with her dolls

Let me start with the real stuff first. When it comes to eating healthy, the holiday season sucks.  It’s almost impossible.  Today we had a holiday breakfast, a Christmas lunch, Christmas “easter eggs” (egg shaped chocolates with cake inside), Christmas cookies, gooey butter cake, and the list goes on.   And if I’m being totally honest, I had a little bit of all of it.  I couldn’t resist.  Isn’t that terrible?  At least at the new new job, it just a holiday thing, and not like my other job with the year round Food Cube.  I did eat a salad at the luncheon, but does that even count? I’m not going to stress over it too much, because most people, even those who don’t have bad relationship with food, struggle with making healthy choices during this time of year.  I’m going to try to work out tomorrow, but my knee is really bothering me;  I feel like I’m 80 years old.  If nothing else, these last few weeks of physical problems, has taught me not to take my body for granted…Anyway, I’ve mentioned before that I’m a mentor in the Big Brother Big Sister  Program for underprivileged children. 

The other day, my little sister from the program had me laughing my butt off!  She said, “We’re out of school until January 3d, can I spend the night until we have to go back? I said…ummmm Sweetie, let’s just do Friday night and go from there.  LOL!  Today, I picked her up and took her shopping for her birthday.  She decided that she wanted a baby doll.  Now, I normally leave controversial issues like race and politics out of my blog just to keep the peace, but this was so heavy on my mind that I had to talk about it.   When we got to the store, there was not ONE African-American doll on the shelf, in the whole store!  Can you believe? Come on now people, it’s almost 2010.  I’m sure you have looked at my pictures and you know that I’m Black, and it just so happens that my Little sister is too.  And it’s not that I didn’t want her to have a white doll, I just wanted her to have a choice to choose a baby that looks like her.   My Big Little Sister and I had this same issue last year at a different store.  So we wrote a letter to the manager addressing our concerns.  Today, I called her to vent, and she told me to go back to the store from last year.  I was so happy I did.  They had a wide variety of dolls.   They had black and white and in between.  I was happy that they took our concerns seriously, and did something about it.  My Little sister picked one of the beautiful brown babies, I don’t know what race the baby is, but I like that she was able to choose whichever she liked best.  I will send a letter to the manager again, but this time, thanking them for giving my little sister the opportunity to choose.  I’m sure I’ll get some comments on this post like …why should it matter….people are people…etc etc.  But I’m open to an honest discussion. 

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