Trowback dinner

I’m feeling retro, and thus, craving the cuisine of my childhood, namely: Tuna Noodle Casserole.

Scoff if you must, but tonight, the hubster and I will be feasting on this mayonnaise-based classic.

Ingredients:

Egg noodles (half of a bag)

Broccoli (about one head or a small bag of florets)

Tuna-drained (one can in water, the best your wallet can spare.)

Cream of crap soup (one can)

Mayonnaise (about 1/3 cup)

Water (about 1/2-1 cup)

Celery Salt (a lot)

Cayenne Pepper (some)

Breadcrumbs

Method:

Butter the bottom of your casserole dish.

Cook the pasta according to directions.

Add broccoli to pasta water to blanch.

Put the cooked noodles in the casserole dish.

Layer on the broccoli.

Add the tuna all broken up across the top.

Pour on the sauce: (combine the COC soup, mayo, water, and spices)

Top with breadcrumbs.

Bake at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes.

Serve with a smile.

Oh my god!

Oh my god.

I just read this and I could throw up.   Is it ok for a flowergirl to get a “manicure” with all the other bridesmaids like a “big girl”? Sure.

But a bikini wax? On and 8 year old?

I’m shocked that the spas agree to perform these services.

(confession, my mother had my hair permed in like 3rd grade….I’m still traumatized by it.)

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Trend: Pretty Babies

Facials, bikini waxes, mani/pedis and blowouts have long been de rigueur Rittenhouse and Main Line beauty regimens — but nowadays, the “women” getting these luxe spa treatments have yet to reach puberty

By Carrie Denny

Page 1 of 6

T. Kruesselmann/zefa/Corbis

Melanie Engle was trying to just pluck the stray hairs here and there. She was trying to deliver an age-appropriate eyebrow wax to her client. It was hard, though, because there was a foot tapping next to her, and a voice shouting in her ear: “No! Not like that — like a supermodel’s. I want them arched.”

After years in the beauty biz, Engle had seen her share of crazy ladies demanding perfect, Glamour-cover-worthy brows. But this Crazy Lady wasn’t talking about her own brows. The brows in question belonged to Crazy Lady’s daughter. Who was eight.

After sweating through the kid’s eyebrow wax, Engle, today an aesthetician at the Adolf Biecker Salon/Spa outposts in the Rittenhouse Hotel and Strafford — and, it should be noted, one of the most sought-after eyebrow specialists in the region — was directed to give her pint-size client a … bikini wax.

Engle was, predictably, extremely uncomfortable with the idea. But she sent the girl next door to the spa to have it done anyway. “It was clear that this girl was getting a bikini wax no matter what,” she says. “Better for her that we did it, instead of her mother dragging her off somewhere else to get it done.”

Engle is sharing this tale with me one afternoon over my own eyebrow session, after I’ve remarked on another young girl — no more than 10 or 11 years old — ­sitting nearby, thumbing through a magazine and obviously waiting for some sort of spa service. As Engle talks, my head floods with images of breaking this poor young munchkin out of the clutches of her surely nipped-and-tucked mother, to let her grow old and hairy under my prudish wing. “But … there’s nothing there, right?” I ask Engle. “I mean, at eight? Am I forgetting something?”

“Nope,” she says. “There’s not. Doesn’t matter. That’s when the mothers are starting them these days.”

Over the past few years, we’ve seen a tidal wave of this rising luxury-class culture — you’ve seen it in these pages, manifested in reports of $80,000 “push presents,” lavish condo buildings sprouting up like beanstalks, and weekends spent stockpiling couture with on-call personal ­shoppers. But just when we thought this consumerist takeover couldn’t get any worse, here comes the trend’s newest tributary: The kids of the pampered are being taken along for the ride, without a backward glance at the childhood left behind.

“I’ve actually been joking that I’m going to write a book called Where Has All the Pubic Hair Gone?” Janice Hillman, a doctor in the Penn Health System at Radnor who specializes in adolescent medicine, tells me. “It’s such a rarity to find it these days in 10- and 12-year-old girls, and older girls. I need to check for it at that age — it’s an indicator of puberty and development, how much there is, where it’s growing. And now, I need to ask girls, if it’s not there, ‘Do you wax? Do you shave?’ Because so many of them do.”

Read the rest of the article here.