kids

Curse Those Internet Bugs!

Posted on September 30, 2008 by Debora

The kids’ school Fall Festival fundraiser was Saturday, and other than the fact that I TOTALLY FORGOT that I’d promised to make cookies for the cakewalk, the whole thing seemed to be a grand success. I was helping with the throw-darts-at-balloons booth, and we had brisk business from start to finish. I was mildly concerned that we might run into, you know, complications, what with handing sharp metal implements to tiny toddlers and rowdy eight-year-olds and goth teens, but we didn’t have a single problem all day. Other than the wind occasionally gusting up and blowing our dartboard down, which usually necessitated the replacement of a bunch of popped balloons. I kept an anxious eye on my cardboard jail a few booths away, and saw that they’d solved the wind issue in the simplest possible way: the guys running the jail booth just stood on each side and held onto it when it threatened to blow away. Kids loved the jail concept, and there was a steady stream of “prisoners” in and out of it the whole time.

Steve brought the kids to the Festival around noon and they seemed to enjoy it, though I didn’t get to see much of them while they were there. AND there were plenty of baked goods for the cakewalks even without my forgotten cookies, so all was well.

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One by one this past week or two I’ve watched my favorite bloggers succumb to the the vicious cold that’s been going around. Maybe I should have been more careful when I visited their blogsites, because sure enough that nasty little bug CLOBBERED me Sunday morning. I snuffled my way through church and our Sunday dinner party, went to bed early, and then got maybe four hours’ sleep because I felt too crappy to doze off. I really need to stay away from sick peoples’ blogs; those internet virii are freaking relentless.

Monday I dragged my sorry self down to Temec to do my weekly shopping. I would have put it off, but I had an appointment to get my hair cut and didn’t want to reschedule. I had her touch up my highlights at the same time, and asked her to match the chlorinated silver shade because I’ve decided I like it that way. I’d post a pic, but this cold is seriously kicking my butt. Aside from the pretty pretty haircut I’m about as photogenic as a day-old serving of cold Spam in a dirty ashtray right now. Pics later, when my nose isn’t red and my skin isn’t chapped and I don’t have purple shadows under my eyes.

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When I got home from Temecula yesterday I didn’t feel like doing much of anything that involved effort, so I went to hang out with the kittens for a while. They live in the back of the house for now (the kids’ rooms and the adjacent playroom), so I hadn’t really seen much of them. The kids attend to their food and water, and other than cleaning out their litter box a few days ago my life has been simplified rather than complicated by their arrival. But I felt like it was time for me to get to know them, so in I went to officially introduce myself.

Except they wanted nothing to do with me. They skittered under furniture when I tried to pet them, indignantly objected when I cornered them and picked them up, and wriggled free as soon as they got the chance. I was an unwelcome invader in their little kitten lives. This worried me, because I’ve adopted kittens in the past that have turned out to be irredeemably non-domesticable, and that wasn’t what I’d wanted for my kids. I finally left them alone, feeling disappointed in their lack of sociability.

That evening, Elizabeth called me into the playroom to show me something she’d made out of marbles and plastic blocks. Luke and the kittens were in there too, so after I’d admired her marble sculpture thingy I sat down on the steps to see if there was any interaction between the four of them.

HA. I needn’t have worried. The kittens treated Elizabeth like a big fun climby toy, and from time to time Stripes would leave off frolicking to come over to Luke for petting. He would absently stroke her while going on with what he was doing (building beautiful little houses and cars out of paper), and then she’d dash back and scramble up Elizabeth again.

So, no worries about the four of them not getting along. I guess I’m the only suspicious-looking stranger here. I can live with that.

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Elizabeth says she has renamed her kitten “Madcat.” You know, like Dr. Claw’s feline henchman. I’m not entirely comfortable with the fact that she’s named her cute little kitty after the evil pet of of an evil genius, but I suppose one must pick one’s battles wisely and let the little stuff go, right?

Is it bad that when I saw this pic at the Cheezburger site I immediately thought of my sweet girl?

Siiiiiiiggghhhhh.

Categories: Family, kids, Life, School | Leave a comment

Saturday Sampler: Exposition

Posted on September 27, 2008 by Debora

I chose today’s excerpt because it combines a few elements that 1) require some explanation, and 2) recur often enough in her comics that I might as well get all the explanations out of the way in one post.

Okay, so first of all there’s the whole El Chupacabra thing. I hardly know where to begin with this one without making my lovely girl sound like a complete looney, but here goes.

When Elizabeth was seven or eight, she began to imagine that one day she would transform into a new, magical, powerful creature. She would gain rabbits’ ears (for super hearing), a cougar’s tail, dragons’ wings, sharp talons, a unicorn’s horn, and a “powermark” (the source of her magic) on the bridge of her nose. She talked about it all the time, and at some point for some reason her PE coach dubbed Elizabeth’s alter-ego “El Chupacabra.” Elizabeth latched right onto the lyrical sound of the name, and her creature has been “El Chupacabra” ever since.

I thought it was just a passing phase she was going through, and didn’t fuss too much about it. But it didn’t pass; in fact, it worked its way slowly but steadily deeper into her self-image. When she was in third grade I finally had to put the smackdown on the situation when I was called to pick her up from the school principal’s office. Apparently she had been dragged there kicking and screaming “WHEN I’M EL CHUPACABRA I’LL BE THE ONE IN CHARGE! AND I’LL CONTROL YOU ALL WITH THE POWER OF MY WILL! AND YOU’LL ALL HAVE TO DO WHATEVER I WANT!!”

Righty-o.

I knew it would do no good to order her to drop the El Chupacabra bit entirely. It had become too much a part of her mental landscape. I told her she could still talk about it at home, but from now on her alter ego was an absolutely verboten subject at school. She mostly complied, slipped once or twice, was immediately punished, and eventually it stopped being a big problem.

But it didn’t go away. Deep in her heart my brilliant, creative child really believes that one day she will shed her mundane chains and emerge as a powerful, magical creature.

The reason I bring all this up is because Elizabeth is a character in many of her own comics, and that’s how she draws herself. So that’s why she looks like that.

The second thing that might need an explanation is Elizabeth’s habit of indiscriminately co-opting other artists’ characters into her own universe. She doesn’t see anything incongruous in drawing a story that contains, say, Calvin (from the Calvin and Hobbes strip), Otto Mattic (from a favorite computer game), and Buizel (the Pokemon critter) interacting with one another.

Most recently, Eve from WALL-E has joined the party.

The third thing you may be wondering about in this week’s offering is the addition of random splashes of color. I…actually don’t know what that’s about. It’s new, and may or may not be a permanent thing.

So without further ado, I give you an excerpt from “Elizabeth And Sparky, Book 4.”

(Oh, one more bit of ado. Sparky is the dragon. For some reason he only appears in one frame of this scene.)

Categories: Artwork, books, Comics, Dragons, Family, kids, Life, Sampler Saturday | 2 Comments

Enamored

Posted on September 25, 2008 by Debora

Luke: “My kitten is SO CUTE!”

Me: “She sure is. They’re both very cute.”

Luke: “But I think Stripes is the cutest with her cute little fur and her cute little paws and her cute little face and her cute little eyes and her cute little ears and her cute little tail and her cute little nose and…how can she possibly be SO CUTE?”

Sometimes love comes in very small packages.

Happy Love Thursday, everyone.

Categories: Animals, Cats, Family, kids, Life, Love, Love Thursday | 2 Comments

To Sleep, Perchance To Snuggle

Posted on September 22, 2008 by Debora

Before the addition was added on two years ago, Luke and Elizabeth used to share a bedroom. They had a set of bunks in there, but they usually preferred to share a bed as well. When Luke was finally presented with his own room, he loved everything about it…except sleeping alone. For a while there Elizabeth had mercy on him and would come in and sleep with him, but eventually she decided she was just too old for that and Luke was on his own. And oh, the lonely hardship he so vocally suffered.

He more or less got used to sleeping alone, but he never liked it. We tried to get one of the dogs to stay with him, but they want to be outside at night. Finally I asked him if he would like to have a small breed of puppy, to sleep with him and be a little friend when Elizabeth doesn’t feel like playing with him. Luke said no, he wanted a cat.

I had mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, our dogs see cats as food, not family. I wasn’t sure we could convince them not to eat any small animal we brought into the house. On the other hand, we really need a cat or two. Gericault and Brodie keep our property admirably free of squirrels and rabbits, but apparently hunting mice is beneath them; I’ve had to start putting rat poison in the cupboards. So, a mouser or two would be very welcome here.

When I heard that a friend of a friend had a cat that had just produced an unwanted litter of kittens, I made a spur-of-the-moment decision to let them know I’d take a couple (Elizabeth wanted one too, and kittens seem to do better in pairs) when they were old enough to leave their mom.

And Saturday that long-awaited call finally came!

So yesterday, after church and before our Sunday dinner, I took the kids over to pick out their new babies.

Choosing turned out to be pretty simple. I asked the kids to please try to fall in love with female kittens, because they make better mousers than male. Turns out all the kittens were an identical jet black but one, a little striped tabby that Luke was immediately smitten with. He chose that one and Elizabeth chose the only other female in the litter.

Luke named his “Stripes,” and Elizabeth’s is “Soot.”

When we got them home, the first thing we did was introduce them to the dogs. Gericault apparently assumed that I was offering him a snack, and matter-of-factly helped himself to Soot. My thundering yell of “NO!!” made him drop her in confusion, and I smacked his nose for good measure. This was a bitter blow to Gericault’s deeply sensitive soul, and for a while after that he pretended to be completely unaware of the kittens’ existence. If I put a kitten right in front of him, he would turn his head away and study the artwork on the walls or whatever.

Brodie seemed to grasp right off that the kittens were off-limits, and he’s shown no interest in them at all since the introduction.

So far so good. We shut the kittens in the back of the house while we ate supper, and then the kids brought them out to snuggle on the couch while they watched a Looney Toons dvd.

This eventually proved to be too much for poor Gericault, who is not prepared to give up his position as Family Snuggler-In-Chief.

But he managed to restrain his jealousy and not do anything antisocial.

The kids love having the kittens to sleep with, and the kittens seem to be settling in pretty well. Other than a mild case of sticker shock when I saw what high-quality kitten food costs these days, I have no complaints. I suppose the real test will come when we start letting the little tykes have the run of the house and Gericault inevitably finds himself alone with them one day, but so far everyone’s getting along fine.

Find the mice, kitties. Tasty tasty mice! Real cats don’t need no stinkin’ cat food!

And welcome to the family. :^)