kids

Cows and Gizmos

Posted on July 16, 2009 by Debora

A while back, before school got out for the summer, I promised Luke and Elizabeth that we’d go back to The Imagination Workshop sometime during summer vacation. “Sometime before you go to camp,” I promised them. We’d gone once before, almost exactly a year ago, and we’d loved it.

A few days ago Luke reminded me that they were leaving for camp on the 19th, and we hadn’t gone to the Workshop yet. D’oh! So I decided we could squeeze that in amongst the errands I needed to run in Temec yesterday.

We were about 30 minutes into our commute down the hill when I got a call from the caretaker at Trinity: the Mighty Herd was loose and wandering down a paved road. Groan! I did a U-turn and headed back to help catch them.

It was baffling, because I had JUST walked the entire fenceline the previous afternoon, so I knew the pasture was sound. How in the world had the cows pushed their way out?

After the caretaker and I had gotten them back inside I hiked back down the fence again, looking for clues, and discovered that the cows hadn’t pushed their way out at all.

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All five strands of wire had been cut. There were quad tracks leading up to the break in the fence, and leading away again in a in a slightly different direction. Quad, not truck, so this wasn’t a theft attempt. Just a case of malicious mischief.

I had a little roll of baling wire and my fencing pliers in the car already (because I’m all MacGyvery that way) (and also it’s been way too long since I’ve cleaned out my car), so I showed the caretaker what I’d found, patched up the fence, and continued on down to Temecula.

First stop: my haircut. I do love a shiny new haircut.

And then the Imagination Workshop, and it was just as cool as we remembered!

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Elizabeth and The Impossible Triangle. A different camera angle reveals the secret:

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Behold Infinity (and my new haircut) in the Kaleidoscope Room!

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Luke is so completely in his element in this place. The gadgets, the gizmos, the whangdoodles!!

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Elizabeth is mostly just inspired to get in touch with her inner goofball.

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Anyway, we had a ball and I’m glad I made time for it, even if it was about 10pm by the time we’d finished all our errands and made it home.

I can’t believe summer vacation is halfway over already. Where does it GO? Clearly there is some sort of warp in the time-space continuum at work here.

I’m sure Luke will get it all figured out someday, and invent a device to counteract the effect.

Categories: Family, kids, Life, Love, Ranching | 2 Comments

Contributing To The Geekiness Of Minors, Part 3

Posted on July 10, 2009 by Debora

Earlier posts on this topic can be found here and here.

It’s hard to take Star Trek: The Original Series seriously in terms of plot, believability, acting talent and so on. Don’t get me wrong, the kids and I just finished Season 2 and we’re enjoying our almost-nightly episodes, but…we’re not into it for the realism.

Luke’s favorite part of the show is predicting which red-shirted ensign is going to die first in each episode. Last week we had a great moment when Luke was actually in mid-sentence: “Rest in peace, Redsh–” when a nearby alien suddenly decided to pull a dagger out of nowhere and fling it straight into the hapless ensign’s heart. Dude never even saw it coming, just fell dead in his tracks. Those shirts are LETHAL, man!

Elizabeth finds Kirk’s indiscriminate dalliances highly amusing. Some hot alien chick gets a close-up shot with the soft-focus lens and Elizabeth is all, “Oh, yeah, there’s gonna be kissing.” As soon as Kirk starts talking to the chick Elizabeth starts dubbing in her own dialogue in a sleazy Kirk-voice: “Hey, Baby. You look like you could use some kissin’, whaddaya say?”

Me, I just can’t get over how YOUNG they all are. They’re all smooth and fit and can dash across rocky alien landscapes with the greatest of ease! (I try to avoid watching the bonus material. Shatner and Nimoy look like a geriatric version of Laurel and Hardy in their recent interviews.)

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Luke and Elizabeth have been coming with me to my worship meetings now that Steve is, for the time being, out of the picture. (I’m not sure which I find more illuminating: the fact that he hasn’t so much as called the kids to say hello since The Blizzard Incident, or the fact that they’ve expressed zero interest in calling him. Apparently there’s no relationship there at all, other than the one between Elizabeth and Steve’s PS2…she has mentioned that she misses that.)

Anyway, this works out great on Thursdays, because on that day the meeting is at the church and so is the youth group thing. So yesterday Luke and Elizabeth got to frolic amongst their own kind and play games and make crafts and Elizabeth whipped up this bit of glue art:

She calls it, “Kirk gets buried by tribbles.”

Oh yeah. Resistance is futile.

I think it’s safe to say that their assimilation is complete.

Categories: Artwork, Family, Humor, kids, Life, Star Trek | 2 Comments

Wordless Wednesday: Swingin’ Sunset

Posted on July 8, 2009 by Debora

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Categories: Family, kids, Life, Wordless Wednesday | Leave a comment

Mike Mulligan Would Be Proud

Posted on July 7, 2009 by Debora

I guess Elizabeth has been getting a lot more attention on this blog than Luke, probably because her basic wiring is so different from mine that nearly everything she does and says is a source of fascination and/or amazement to me.

Luke isn’t hard for me to fathom, most of the time. He got my genetics, my wiring; for the most part he sees the world the way I see it. I instinctively understand most of his emotions and frustrations. He feels things Very Strongly, and part of me hopes he learns to govern his passions earlier in life than I did, while another part of me hopes that they never get worn down and dulled to the extent that mine eventually were.

But enough about all that maudlin stuff. Today I want to show off one of Luke’s truly awesome talents, one I hope he’ll continue to develop as he grows into adulthood.

It started when he was just an infant, and could not get enough of classical music. People told me that listening to it would help develop his spatial acuity or somesuch; all I knew was that the “Smart Symphonies” CD the hospital gave me when he was born was something he never got tired of listening to.

He was something like six or eight months old the time Elizabeth and I were putting together a 100-piece jigsaw puzzle and he was sitting on my lap, watching. Suddenly he reached over, picked up one of the little cardboard pieces, and snapped it confidently into place in one try. Then he just went back to watching.

When he was a toddler, he developed a hobby that I would have been much more supportive of if it hadn’t wreaked total havoc on our house. He would go through all the rooms, selecting apparently random household objects and putting them in a big pile on the living-room floor. When he’d found all the objects he needed, he would then assemble them into a tugboat, or a locomotive, or an airplane, or whatever he’d wanted to build that day.

This gift of his has gone through several incarnations over the years, and I’m sorry to say I probably haven’t given it the amount of attention and encouragement it deserves. This sort of creativity tends to be incredibly messy, and now that I’m an old grup I seem to notice the mess more than the results. And that is sad.

Today Luke asked me if he could get a steam shovel for his birthday, like the one in “Mike Mulligan And His Steam Shovel.” I told him that I didn’t think they made that particular model of toy anymore, because in real life steam shovels have been replaced by diesel-powered excavators.

He frowned irritably at that news, then shrugged and said that was okay, he’d just make his own then.

I am ashamed to say that when I saw him hard at work on the living-room floor amid piles of construction paper and scotch tape, I grumbled that he’d better clean up the mess when he was done. Honestly, what is wrong with me?

A little while later he called out that he was taking his steam shovel outside to play in the sand. I asked him if I could see it first, and he handed me this little marvel of paper engineering:

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The Chicago bolt in the main body is a pulley that raises and lowers the bucket by winding and unwinding the cord. The brad on the front arm serves as a hinge, to create realistic digging action. This is a fully-functional toy.

Luke’s long-term goal in life is to help save the planet by inventing a completely non-polluting car engine that runs on water or air or some other clean fuel. I would be the last person in the world to discourage him in this ambition, because I honestly believe that if he’s allowed to develop his gifts to the fullest there will be very little he can’t accomplish. I wish I could afford to give him all the resources he deserves, instead of making him make do with construction paper and scotch tape.

This is a boy who has something to offer the world. He never doubts his purpose in life, or his ability to achieve whatever he sets his mind to. He gets Very Frustrated when reality doesn’t accommodate his plans, but he never doubts the value of the plans themselves. He firmly believes that some realities need to be reshaped and reinvented. And so do I.

The fact that he cleaned up every last scrap of his steam-shovel-creation mess from the living-room floor without being reminded? Icing on the cake.

Categories: Artwork, Family, kids, Life, Love | 8 Comments

This Is My Angry Face.

Posted on July 4, 2009 by Debora

You can’t see it, but trust me. I am RADIATING anger right now.

The kids spent the night with Steve last night, because I had to be up and at the church crazy early to help with the parade float. So I called his cell a little past 8pm to tell them good night and give them phone hugs and kisses.

Except they weren’t home. Steve had taken them to the karaoke bar so he could hang out with his latest victim, who works there.

We have a verbal agreement that he will tell me if he’s going to take the kids out anywhere, because I like to know where they are. This hasn’t been a problem before, because he doesn’t usually take them anywhere, because I’ve told him that if he ever DRINKS while he’s watching my kids, or heaven forbid, DRINKS AND THEN DRIVES WITH THEM IN HIS TRUCK, he will lose his unsupervised visitation rights. Since Steve is unable to be in a place that serves alcohol without partaking, and pretty much everywhere he goes serves alcohol, this has meant that the kids don’t usually go places with him.

(True story: once he took them to the home of his oldest friend, a guy he grew up with, whose kids are about the same age as ours. The idea was that the kids could play together while Steve and his friend hung out.

His oldest friend told him, “Dude, come back when you can drink!” So the kids have not been over there since.)

But anyway, Luke and and Elizabeth spent the night with him last night, and apparently a Friday night at home was out of the question. So they went to the bar with him.

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This morning after the float was ready to go and before the parade started, I found where the Silkotches were settled in along the parade route, and asked Luke and Elizabeth if they wanted to walk with me to DQ for some ice cream. Luke was comfy where he was, but Elizabeth said she’d come.

I don’t really care for DQ ice cream — I don’t think it has any actual cream in it, or any dairy-related substances for that matter, but there was something I needed to ask Elizabeth: had Steve been drinking last night when they were out with him?

She confirmed that he’d been drinking beer.

Epic. Visitation. Fail.

She ordered an ice cream sandwich, I ordered a Heath Blizzard, and we headed back. When we got to where Steve was, I informed him that since the verbal agreement hadn’t worked out, I’d be filing a formal visitation agreement.

“I was drinking iced tea last night!” he immediately declared indignantly.

“Elizabeth says you were drinking beer,” I shrugged. “I already know you’re a [censored] liar; her I trust.”

“I had…one beer,” he weaseled unconvincingly. “Then I switched to iced tea.”

“Thanks for the confession. Anyway, you aren’t supposed to take them out at all without notifying me.”

“I already apologized for that,” he sneered, as though that was supposed to end the matter. “So why don’t you just run along back to your–”

And that was when my Blizzard hit his head. It exploded against his face and into his hair and all over his hat in the most satisfying manner possible, and then splooshed down to cover his shoulders and chest. Seriously, if I had PLANNED to fling my Blizzard at him I could not have achieved a more glorious effect. It was a thing of beauty.

I left him dripping there and returned to where the float was parked, already writing the new visitation agreement in my head. I’m not sure how much I can legally do just on the basis of my word (or Elizabeth’s word, really) against his, but I know that if I turn a blind eye to this once and at some point down the road Luke and/or Elizabeth are killed or injured because of his irresponsibility, I would be responsible by assent. And also I would have to kill Steve, if he survived the accident.

So. Yeah. I’m angry. I’m tired of living next door to the whole ridiculous lot of them. I am considering options that will get me out of this neighborhood without violating my move-away restrictions. It is Time To Move On. That might make things a little harder at first, but I feel very strongly that, for the well-being of my children, the time has come to get out of Silkotchland.

I know doors open when they’re supposed to, and it’s generally not a good idea to try to kick them open prematurely just because you’re angry, but this is about Luke and Elizabeth making it to adulthood relatively intact.

Let’s see where kicking some doors gets me.

Categories: Family, kids, Life | 7 Comments