Dash? Or Slash?

This morning, before breakfast, Munchkin demanded I place her snowsuit on the kitchen floor for her. I did. With twenty minutes of effort, she managed to get most of the way into it. Sitting here on the floor, wrestling with her mittens, she called out to me: "Outside! Tape! Boots! Out ... SIIIIIIDE!" Calculating groggily, I figured she hadn't left the house since Friday.

Then, we ran out of milk and bread and bananas and Christmas oranges.

To solve problem number two, we did a family after-nap grocery shopping expedition. To solve problem number one, I proposed that I would walk Munchkin home from the store, in her stroller, stopping for a snack and some fun at Starbucks on the way. It's that part of the story I want to write about, and where I get stuck.

Is it a mother-daughter adventure? Or a mother / daughter adventure? Dash? Or Slash?

I'm intrigued by the semantics of the syntax: it seems to me the hyphen connotes something different than the slash. For me, "mother-daugther" is a conjunction, a two-become-one, a more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts proposition. "Mother / daughter" is a tension, an uneasy balance, a teeter-totter of managed expectation. Many of the activities we undertake together could go one way or the other: errands in the car, usually mother / daughter; brunch at the local diner, often mother / daughter; trips to grammas, always mother-daughter.

We buy our week's worth of food, and we wave Pynchon away and set off into the wind. "In, in, in!" yells Munchkin as the iconic sign comes into view over the sidewalk horizon. I park her stroller in a corner and drape our coats and hats and mitts on it, as she lines up her Little People--"Hippo! Tiger! Boy!"--on a hard wooden chair. We order, and settle in, and I drink my "yatteeee" and she sips her cup of ice water and munches on goldfish crackers and grapes. She dances in her chair, and I dance too. She flirts with nearby people and I try to teach her to be friendly but polite. She points out objects and names colours and counts crackers and I praise her and reinforce her. She shares crackers with her little people and asks me to help her put her shoe back on.

Today she was pretty crabby: stormy ups and downs and cuddles and tantrums and frustration and boredom and overexcitement and tiredness and clinginess and fierce independence. I was, by midafternoon, losing patience and running out of ideas. Our trip out for coffee and crackers cheered us both up immeasurably: we became again the charming and kind versions of ourselves.

"All done!" she hollers, brushing her fingertips together vehemently. "All done!" And so we pack up for home, putting the high chair back into place, collecting the fallen goldfish and removing them to the garbage. We walk the final four blocks home, and I sing "Jingle Bells" to her and she fills in all the words that occur to her, cheering a loud "Yay!" when I finish.

Today, for this outing, I'm leaning toward mother-daughter.