Terrible Peaches-Related Carnage

This post is dedicated to Gabe's uncle James because it contains two of his favorite things: shoes and zombies.

First, the shoes. Over the last week, Libby and I have been trying to get the house back into shape—doing some spring cleaning, finishing up a few projects, and just generally getting the house ready to have a mess of people in it on Saturday for our annual wine party. Part of this cleanup was the semi-annual Bringing Upstairs of Libby’s Shoes, which have been piling up in our back room for quite some time. As the seasons change, and the pile up of shoes gets too unreasonable thanks to the addition of new-season shoes, we always reach a breaking point (usually, quite literally, as I trip and fall on some errant boot that’s cascaded off the pile and into the walking path, which leads to much cursing of some people “having more shoes than God could have needed in his thousand millennia” and suchlike. On a side note, Molly should be pleased to know that I no longer put shoes in the freezer when I trip on them. Sadly, our freezer is just too full for such poignant lessons). So we make three or four trips upstairs with armfuls of her shoes (and usually one or two pairs of mine—one pair of winter shoes or two pairs of summer shoes because I’m a bit of a prima donna and have to have sandals AND flip flops). This time, we got distracted halfway upstairs and stopped in the dining room with an armful of her shoes.

And Gabe LOVED it. He stacked and sorted and lined up and tried on her shoes for about two hours all told last night. Right before bedtime, we finally thought to get out the camera and caught a little video of him trying on and attempting to walk around in some of her shoes.

Terrible Peaches-Related Carnage

This afternoon, we decided to capitalize on his newfound zombie impersonation skills a little bit with Peaches and the rest of his bedroom.

It was a slaughter. A bloodbath. Just awful. Twice I said, “Oh, the humanity!” in an unironic way.

You just don’t know how easy a target a stuffed animal makes until you’ve watched one being overtaken by a zombie. They’re just defenseless unless someone is actively trying to save them. And, since I was the only one there to help them out, and I was too mortified to move a muscle, it was a near complete destruction of the cozy little bedroom scene.

What, exactly, set off the normally reasonable Peaches is tough to say. My bet is that someone said she looked fat in the outfit she was wearing. That usually does it. But whatever set her off, she didn’t bother with starting off slow, she dove right in with all of her brain chomping muscles working double time.

She started with the “bed” toys (the ones that rarely leave the crib since they’re the ones Gabe insists on sleeping with each night) because, obviously, they were the easiest prey. Even if they COULD have moved on their own, they wouldn’t have had anywhere to go. It was like eating the brains of stuffed animals in a barrel. She started with the biggest one—Fat Bunny.

Fat Bunny, surprisingly not as filling as one might assume.

After Fat Bunny and Crotchy, she moved on to Elmo, savoring the kill just a little too much (or some might think, and I would agree, just enough, considering it IS Elmo).

Doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo, Elmo's Brain.

Then she did something quite unexpected, using her amazing zombie muscles, she leapt into the air and tangled herself up in the mobile that is hanging above Gabe’s bed so she could feast on each of the little insects hanging up there.

If only zombies could fly, this would have been so much simpler.

From there, she moved along the top of the crib and found the Wonder Pets, huddling in terror on top of the set of drawers that are built into the bed. They tried to use teamwork to defeat their foe, but that only made her job even easier as their heads were deliciously close together for her dining enjoyment.

Wonder Pets, Wonder Pets, we're on our way, to help a zombie's digestion and smell of decay.

Next, she jumped off the bed and made her way to Creepy Baby and Maria, who were having a tea party around Gabe’s table (the picture was taken after Gabe's video, so Maria's not in the picture). Oh the sweet, sweet taste of human baby brains! So tender, so unspoiled, so nourishing!

Creepy Baby, it's what's for dinner.

It was a veritable orgy of grey matter! And Gabe got to help! Sort of. Though, as you’ll note in the video at the end of the post, I did also teach him how to say, “Ohm nom nom,” so he’s almost got his zombie repertoire complete! Actually, I guess it is complete. They say, “Braaaaaains!” until they find a head to bite into, then they say, “Ohm nom nom” as they’re eating. And that’s pretty much all zombies do. Eating is just about all they do. They’re actually pretty similar to small children in that sense, except they don’t poop.

Holy crap. Revelation! Zombies are like small children without the poop! Why do people waste their time raising children when they could just get themselves a zombie and have one less mess to clean up? Think about it, people! Granted, the food will be bit tougher to come by, but, really, breast milk isn’t what you’d call an “in your dairy case” item either—we’ve just CREATED food to fill the gap, and I imagine that science can do the same for brains. Think about it, science!

So from the tea party, Peaches climbed up into the urban jungle habitat and made quick work of Dag. Poor big monkey.

I kept seeing the dinner scene in the palace in Temple of Doom in my head while I was taking this picture.

And the tray on her buffet was filled with Karl Weathers, who was sleeping on Dag’s couch at the time. But Karl, having heard the unsettling crunching noises coming from Dag’s bedroom, was prepared for trouble. He put up a valiant fight, wrapping the demented head nosher in his strangulating coils.

This Saturday, don't miss the Sci Fi original, "Urban Jungle Zombie"

Sadly, since Karl had been away from the wild for so long—reduced to coiling bottles of Gatorade and packages of pimento loaf in the place of freshly caught meals—he was desperately out of practice, and he stupidly wrapped Peaches up with her mouth still in biting distance of his head. Sorry, Karl. On the up side, I suspect the Sci Fi channel would JUMP at a movie proposal of his recent real life experience, which might even help put him (or, rather, Carl Weathers, who he’s still standing in for) back on the entertainment map.

And that was where the feasting stopped for the day. Exhausted, her belly nearly bursting with fresh brains, Peaches collapsed onto Dag’s couch and began to sleep the intoxicated sleep of the over fed.

Where that puts the state of the bedroom as a whole is difficult to say. While Peaches didn’t kill or infect everyone, she certainly made her mark. Realistically, by tomorrow morning, everyone in there should be a zombie unless they had the good sense to lock themselves in the closet with enough supplies to wait out the armageddon. And I think we all know that Gabe’s stuffed animals don’t have enough sense to do something like that.

Presumably, a Night of the Living Dead type aftermath adventure will have to happen next. Though, with luck, it will end up being a little more like Shaun of the Dead.

Oh yeah, one more thing on a zombie related note. Just Monday, I learned what ZOMG means. OMG, obviously, is the standard acronym for Oh My God and has been a staple of internet chat rooms for, what, more than 15 years now. But ZOMG is one that I’ve seen a few times but never cared enough to look up. Apparently there are a few different meanings (one is that the “z” is meant to be a mistake, hitting it instead of the shift key, another is that it’s just used for emphasis, because a caps-locked abbreviation isn’t emphatic enough, I guess), but the one I choose to believe is the REAL definition stands for Zombies! Oh My God!

Which means that, in Gabe’s playroom, if his toys have texting options, they have the only actual, legitimate reason for anyone in the world to ever type that exact bit of webese vernacular. I hope they are using their opportunity wisely.

And on a self-effacing note, before I looked it up Monday (on wiktionary, I believe, though it might have been urbandictionary, I can’t remember), I had completely failed to make the connection to OMG. I was, literally, reading it as the word “zomg” and then dutifully ignoring it as too stupid for me to care what it meant. So, that’s just how out of touch I am with the leets and the txtrz (that last word, curiously, I can’t find in urbandictionary, so I’m going to have to assume that I’m coining it right now—which is awesome because it means I’m BOUND to understand what it means when it catches on) these days.