Crick, Watson and Petunia Face: A Triumvirate of Genetic Geniosity

Good God, it's getting worse.

Please note the (stink ass) princess slippers worn in bed, the Bonne Bell Vanilla Lip Smacker tightly gripped in one sticky fist. The only reason she is not holding the Pink Bubblegum flavor is because my friend's dog Frida Love ate it today.

Zoey now knows about ballerinas and has taken to twirling in loopy circles in the living room like a Deadhead high on 'shrooms. I am not to be blamed for this, although I do take full responsibility for the lips. Lips, she says, lips? Which means, of course, that her tiny pink toddler mouth must be chapped and I am expected to hand her a lip balm to soothe her lips. However, I have quickly learned not to give her anything with even the slightest hint of tint because smeared around and around the mouth 30 times over and even the sweetest of petal pinks will turn hot fuchsia, the color a Brazilian hooker might blush if she had the good sense to be embarrassed.

This penchant for princesses and pink, for butterflies and oooooh! I don't know where she got it. I mean, sure, on the girlie girl scale of daisy doilies I probably score a solid 7.5 out of 10. I like make up and chick flicks, shoes, manicures, massages, from time to time I will watch an episode of Oprah; I need me some chocolate and never crave steak. But I swear I have done nothing to steer my daughter toward a life of primp.

And yet here we are. Two years old, en pointe et pas de deux. Now I am no scientist but I theorize (or is it hypothesize?) that somewhere in the DNA of most girls is a little curlicue on the 7th chromosome with a picture of a pony on it. And that teeny tiny microscopic pretty pony sets off the balance of the double helix causing the polymers to shift and the polynucleotide to spiral less like a hydrogen bond and more like the pirouette of the pyrimidines, the dance of the sugar plum, supercoiling quadraplex structure-fairies.

I take great pride in the fact that Zoey is not out in the backyard burning pill bugs with a magnifying glass, but this sudden thirst for pretty? For soft and pink and sweet and light? I'm afraid I don't have much to do with it, the Princessification of Zoey.

And I am fairly certain that any year now I will be taking home the Nobel Prize for Molecular Biology.

Scientific Footnote: As soon as I took the above photo of Zoey the flash woke her up. Rather than be grumpy that I was taking photos of her in her sleep she simply uncapped her Lip Smacker and applied a few (dozen) coats to her lips. Thank you, mommy, she said, and turned over and went back to sleep.