Thank you all for the sweet comments on my Brown Bear post. Miss Cellania posted some links to pics of lovely, non-blonde contestants of the Miss Universe contest for the past few years, suggesting I show them to the dotter: Awesomely gorgeous (but disturbingly gaunt) Miss China, Ying Hui Gao Stunning Miss Japan, Kurara Chibana Miss Universe 2000, Lara Dutta of India A totally shocked Miss Botswana (Mpule Kwelagobe) winning the Miss Universe pageant of 1999 Miss Trinidad and Tobago, Wendy Fitzwilliam, winner of the 1998 Miss Universe pageant So the dotter and I perused pageant contestants for a while. I thought they were gorgeous. The dotter, however, was more interested in the dresses than the looks, and declared that the ones that are best are the ones wearing dresses that look like mermaids. OmegaGranny suggested that I point out that OmegaBro is married to Japanese-American Aunt L., thus people with brown skin can get married. When the subject comes up again, I will definitely mention this. Johnny chimed in with a comment on the beauty industry, which makes its sales by first telling girls they have to look a certain way to be "beautiful", then advertising its wares as a sure path to that particular style of "beauty". This reminds me of one type of "beauty" issue with Asian women--the eyelid surgery, to get a double-eyelid to look more Caucasian. Sigh. As a result of all of this (plus a gentle nudge from OmegaGranny via email), yesterday after school I cornered Miss Beth, the daycare administrator, when OmegaDotter was getting her stuff from her cubby. I gave her the Hairy Eyeball and said, "Can we talk?" I explained our dilemma, and asked if the school could be doing something on "diversity" and suchlike. Much to my surprise, Miss Beth immediately launched into a discussion of how she's revamping the curriculum (woohoo!), hoping to get the daycare accredited as an official pre-school (and more?), and said that her theory is that kids get more into such visual differences if they aren't being kept busy (hmm). She said that she encounters this on a yearly basis. She further mentioned that she had taken over Miss Kalyn's class (the one OmegaDotter is in) for a week while Miss K. was on vacation, and that she was appalled at how "hungry for knowledge" the kids were. Now. Our daycare uses sweet young thangs from Small Mountain University's early childhood development program as their teachers. (Except for Miss Betty, who is about 50 and an awesome--AWESOME--teacher.) Some of these young things are better than the others. To be frank, I haven't been really impressed with Miss K. Neither, it turns out, is Miss Beth. Miss Beth announced to me that Miss K. was On Her Way Out, that in two weeks, a new teacher would be in the 4's classroom, and that we all would be "pleasantly surprised". Ahah. Soooo. I'm left wondering if the Totally Awesome Miss Betty is being moved up to an older classroom (she teaches the 3's), or if it's Miss Rachel (a sweet young thang who OmegaDotter is totally smitten with, who has the 2's class right now). We shall see. We shall also see if there's some more diverse stuff being presented in the classroom. In the meantime, rather than an all-out assault on "brown is beautiful" and "blondes are boring" (which is what OmegaDad's approach felt like), I am going to work on small doses sprinkled here and there.