Christmas Wrap-Up

This is where I go through all the pictures and videos we've taken over the last month or so and share them, because I'm not getting to these things quickly or efficiently enough anymore to come up with pithy and catchy themes/titles for my blog posts. But, the kids being funny has always been the point anyway, so here goes.

I'm not sure if I've posted anything else about this before, but this was something Gabe started early in December. One day, after school, he started, well, pratfalling. In the living room. He just started running a little ways then falling on the floor. When simple falling wasn't as amusing anymore, he started jumping up on the couch or bouncing off it onto the floor. And he had a name for this activity. The Funny Nationals. This is him doing some of that outside in the little bit of snow we got the week before Christmas (I figured I better get the kids out in it to play since last year we only got one snow of about this much and it was pretty much gone before we even had a chance to get out in it).

This was a game of some sort that sprang up from Norah wanting a cookie. This has been a difficult holiday season in terms of Norah's portion control--in fact, she has lost all sense of it. And she had problems in that area to begin with. We're going to have some work to do in the coming months to get her back off the snacks, which is getting more difficult now that she can reach just about anything she wants and knows how to open the packaging. She's also started hiding food. Each of the kids received the required stocking stuffers of chocolate Santas and assorted mini chocolates. Most of them ended up in a community bowl--in fact, we thought ALL of them had. But over the course of the next two days, I kept finding little Hershey Kiss wrappers around the house (the candy bowl was up on the hutch so the kids at least had to ask for something, so they weren't coming from there). After the second day, I discovered that Norah had secreted a stash of Kisses into one of her Hello Kitty toys and was periodically going upstairs to sneak a few candies out.  I have to give her props for adapting to her environment, to creating the reality she wants, but man it's tough teaching her about portion control and getting her to grasp the concept.

The second half of the video. I'm not sure what the point of the game was, again, but it was pretty funny all the same.

Norah's punching balloon skills.

The Jumpoline. Norah's big present this year. This thing was a nightmare to put together. It took four adults (well, two adults, then three adults, then I reluctantly stepped in to help for the last half hour) over two hours to put this thing together. Our goal was to put this upstairs, probably on the landing. Which we didn't remember until AFTER we'd put it all together. It doesn't fit up the stairs. Not by a long shot. And there is no way we're taking it apart again. So this might become an outside toy, which will ruin the music/noisy electronic thing on it--but that's no real loss, as you can hear on the video. To date, this was the worst Christmas assembly we've experienced.

Yes, she's on the toilet. No, this doesn't have anything to do with Christmas. But it's still pretty funny.

Norah's fashion show. Modelling some of her Christmas clothes, but mostly just being Norah.

Just a few pictures to add.

Self explanatory, really.

Libby made Gabe a set of dinosaur bone wall stickies out of thin foam. This was the first one Gabe put together, a kind of Land of the Lost Sleezstack looking thing. My budding conspiracy theorist!

Norah in her new headwrap thing. In the bathroom, of course, where all good pictures are taken.

And, finally, Gabe and Finn wearing beards. Not sure why Gabe doesn't have a shirt on. He often doesn't, for no good reason.

Christmas Programs Pt. 2

And here are some more videos.

Gabe's program. Not the first video (which was one of the better ones) because Blogger still doesn't like that video.

Gabe staying quite well-contained. Not sure how his teachers get him to do it because I sure can't.

Norah's Dance recital. 

Part 2

The whole time I was watching Norah doing her dance routine, all I could think of was this. Go on. Watch it. Dawn French is, of course, awesome. 

And that's it for the videos. I guess we must have forgotten to take the camera to her gymnastics thing. Oh well. 

Here are a few bonus pictures to go with these.

Hopefully I'll have time to add anything else Christmas related here before it becomes completely irrelevant.

Christmas Programs Pt. 1

It would appear that this year is our first full-fledged foray into the wonderful world of children's Christmas programs. For two years we've had a slow introduction with Gabe in preschool, but this year we took things to a new level. Norah had a preschool program, a dance recital, and a gymnastics program (yeah, what the hell? THREE programs for a three year old? We have nobody to blame but ourselves). Each of Norah's programs were pretty short, though--understandably, since getting a three year old to even stand still, much less actively participate in a program, is pretty difficult). Gabe had a full-on Christmas program, though. With eight songs and little speaking skits in between.

We, of course, took about 2 gigs of video. I won't share all of it here, but since I can't remember what's on each of the little ones I took (remembering that I still have to keep them under 2 minutes if I want them to have much of a chance of loading on here), so you'll just have to hope that you get lucky and get the good ones!

But first, here's a video of the kids decorating their Christmas houses. We got them each rice krispie treat houses to decorate, because rice krispie treats are delicious and gingerbread is terrible. And I had every intention of eating these houses if the kids didn't get to them (they didn't, I did). This was a "shirts optional" event, obviously, as all good house decorating events are.

Sadly, nothing super entertaining happened during this preschool program. Just sort of general pre-k mayhem and chaos.

And now Blogger is freaking out, so I'll just keep trying to post more later.

Racism and Other Fun Things

Wow, it's been a month since my last post. It's amazing how having a job, no matter how little it pays, cuts into time to document the lives of one's children. How do normal people with full time jobs find the time to write volumes about what their kids are doing? Surely the lives of those children will be ruined forever by the nearly complete lack of comprehensive documentation that they can never go back and read over or watch on youtube.

But I do feel a little guilty about the disparity in coverage. Gabe can't complain. He got PLENTY of airtime over his first five years. It would take him a month to slideshow through all his pictures, watch all his movies, and read all the blog posts about the crazy stuff he was doing. Norah, however, is getting the short end of the stick. There ARE a few factors contributing to this that are outside my control--but I have to admit to a certain level of burnout as well. I've been updating this blog for almost four years now, over 400 posts. That's a lot of goddamn words about not a whole lot of anything. And I feel guilty about that bit because I was hoping to sustain my enthusiasm at least until she made it into Kindergarten.

But the factors that are out of my control tend to exacerbate things, too. For one, working at the bookstore is cutting into my blogging time. It's always just busy and noisy enough in there for me to have difficulty focusing on writing, so I can't do it at work, despite the fact that we're usually not doing much actual business. Second, there is Norah herself. She is, of course, still cute as a button. And she's funny as hell--but she's a completely different kind of funny than Gabe. Gabe's funny easily translates to video documentation and his antics almost always lend themselves well to storytelling. His physical comedy is very easy to work with. Norah, on the other hand, is more cerebral. She says and does some funny ass shit, but it is rarely possible for me to capture it on video--and without that tool, I tend to forget what's happened too quickly to expound upon it here on the blog. Further complicating matters is her blossoming performance shyness. She's already showing signs of unwillingness to perform in front of us, and getting her to repeat something funny when she does it is pretty much impossible.

All the same, we have managed to get a few funny videos of her doing stuff recently, which I'll share in a bit since I've been too distracted to dedicate individual posts to them.

On to the main thing I wanted to talk about.

Last night, after school and before dinner, Gabe came into the kitchen while I was cooking and said something along this line: "One of the kids (he gave a name, but I'll not put that on here, just to be polite) knows a Chinese move."

"A . . . what?" I asked nervously, partly because I wasn't even sure if I heard him correctly. "He knows a Chinese what?"

"A Chinese move."

"You mean like martial arts?"

"No. Like this . . . ." And he proceeded to do something pretty racist.

I vividly remember the many racist schoolyard chants from my youth. I cringe to think of them now, but I can generally picture one friend or another performing them even to this day. Maybe it's the guilt that keeps their memories fresh in my mind. Among them is the old chestnut "Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these." The corresponding pantomime went like this: Chinese = squinted eyes pushed up at the corner, Japanese = squinted eyes pushed down, dirty knees = rub the knees and look at these = pull up your shirt to show your boobs. Classy stuff.

Well, this kid at school showed Gabe the Chinese part of that rhyme and Gabe shared it with me. Which led to a conversation about racism. A fun word to introduce to a five year old. It ended up boiling down to "It's not nice to make fun of people for how they look." My reasoning and admonishments, however, completely failed to sink in and Gabe happily showed his new "move" to Libby when she got home. She presented him with the same basic argument that I countered the move with the first time but added, "You wouldn't like it if people said 'This is Gabe!' and made a weird face, would you?" "I wouldn't mind," he said. "It's funny." And the thing is, he probably wouldn't. At least not now. It all goes back to that earlier thing about his brand of comedy. Unless things got out of hand, he probably wouldn't have his feelings hurt if someone was making fun of him a little bit. Is a knack for self-deprecation a liability for understanding political correctness?

And, speaking of being PC, I have to admit to pretty mixed feelings on all of this. As I said, I grew up with all of that nonsense HEAVILY represented in my community. We were a bunch of racists--partly because our community was 100% homogenous, but partly because our generation was one of the first to exist in the newly non-segregated world and we were all still figuring out how the new world worked. And here I am, a grown up, and I have a very strong sense of propriety when it comes to sensitivity. Do I start insisting that my child stands up to the other kids in school who come from families who aren't as sensitive--and, at that age, just refusing to participate is a kind of "standing up" to the other kids--and run the risk of making him a target for harassment himself? Sure he might be able to sway the opinions of a few of the kids to think the way he does, but the odds are probably greater that those kids will bring that story home and my kid will suddenly be the one with the "goddamn PC liberal socialist communists who are destroying our country" parents.

The dynamic of Gabe's school, it's worth noting, is going to prove very interesting through the kid's grade school lives. It's about an even mix of rural folks from around the school and hippies from the Newton area. So there is little doubt that our kids are going to at least get plenty of exposure to a broad range of personalities and world viewpoints.

Since we already gave Gabe a bit of a talking to about racism, I guess we'll see how it plays out. So far, he's not been terribly forthcoming about how well he's getting along with the other kids at school. I can see his goofiness either making him really popular or an easy target. Fortunately for him, he's one of the biggest kids in his class and his toughness is remarkable, so any bully his own age would likely have a go of it (except, of course, that we've raised him to be a gentle giant, so his size really isn't going to do him any good). We haven't had any reports from the school, either, so I guess we have to assume that he's getting on pretty well. I suppose it doesn't do much good to worry about these things until we're given an actual reason to worry, but it's pretty stupid the pitfalls and potential pitfalls we have to try to not worry about.

And, now, onto other things. Here's a funny video with Norah. If you are offended when three year olds moon you, you should probably skip to the next video.

I'm not sure what her obsession with butt stuff is these days. With her butt bombs and mooning and sticking her butt against us and farting . . . . I mean, it can't possibly have anything to do with the fact that I laugh hysterically when she does all of these things, right? This poor girl. I am cursing her with my own weirdness. I suppose she's striking a pretty good balance so far between girliness and tomboyishness. Maybe it will all work out. A pretty princess who will fart on you and laugh.

Not to be outdone, here are a couple videos of Gabe from Sunday. Our friend Sandy helped him cut some rotten pieces off our deteriorating picnic table. There was really no NEED for them to be doing this, but they did and he loved it because he got to stomp on things. My favorite part is the hat. A couple times, when he was jumping and swinging the hat around, he looked like he was doing a "tarnations" dance after a bear destroyed his gold panning equipment.

And here is the obligatory list of pictures that I found on the memory card while downloading the videos.

We always assumed it would be Gabe who climbed the door frames (which, apparently, is just a universal kid thing, like pretending things are guns even if you've never really seen a gun). Of course, after seeing Norah do it, Gabe had to take his turn, too. The fairy wings are unrelated.

Thanksgiving pictures.

Post Thanksgiving drive home. Gabe is watching Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It was the only thing he wanted to watch for a couple of weeks. Mostly because he liked to see all the bad things happening to those kids. Hopefully he wanted to see it because of the punishment/comeuppance/justice aspects and not because he likes to see people done away with in creative ways.

Norah isn't all that taken by Wonka. This is the first time she's EVER fallen asleep while there was TV to watch.

Gabe with his slingshot.

From the stomping session.

Gabe's butt crack with his slingshot.  If he's aiming at the windows of his playhouse, there will be a reckoning in his near future.

I'm not sure who thought this was a good idea.

Oh yeah, Poppa made this for him. I guess I know where to send the bill for those windows.

Best Halloween Costumes Ever

Halloween was last week, but the kids have known what they were going to be for months now. During Gabe's Star Wars kick, he decided (with gentle coaxing by me) to be Luke Skywalker. So, also with gentle coaxing by me, Norah obviously decided to be Princess Leia. I mean, how perfect could it be? Blond haired, blue eyed boy with a natural tendency towards feathered hair and a brown eyed brunette who spends 90% of every day referring to herself as a princess! It's like Lucas wrote those parts with my kids in mind.

The pulling off of the costumes is 100% not of my doing, though. Over the past few months, Libby has been thrift store shopping for pieces, and then she spent several hours sewing and putting them together. She is an honest to god trooper about these things and deserves all the credit for how awesome they turned out.

Well, except for the combing of Gabe's hair. I did that. And I don't think I did a terribly great job of it. His hair just wouldn't part/feather the way I wanted it to and I'll be damned if I could remember how I created my glorious feathers in the 80s. I managed to get a GREAT flip on the sides, but his hair just wouldn't stay parted no matter what I did. Little disappointing, but now I guess he looks like Luke after he took off a stocking cap and then stood in a wind tunnel, which isn't a set of circumstances he was LIKELY to do, but anything is possible with Lucas at the reigns.

Speaking of hair, Gabe was a trooper on that end, too. To perfect the costume, Gabe allowed us to grow his hair out pretty much since the beginning of the year. It was long, shaggy, and miserably hot for him all through the summer when, after even a little bit of running around, his head was a matted, smoldering wad of misery.

Man he can be cheeky sometimes.

This one . . . I dunno. Lots of attitude going on here. High school could be interesting.

I know it's not really canon for Leia to be wielding a lightsaber while wearing this outfit--and I honestly have no idea what color her lightsaber was supposed to be when she did eventually get one--but lightsabers make GREAT light sources for kids walking dark streets! They are like glowsticks, but not sucky!

Was all the suffering and trouble worth it? As I didn't have to go through any of it, I give a resounding YES! The costumes were adorably awesome and the kids had a great time with them.

And speaking of Lucas at the reigns (which I was, you know, awhile back). Norah was SUPER excited that she was, technically, a Disney Princess for Halloween as well as being Princess Leia. A twofer! She's still a little fuzzy on her grasp of the twofer, but someday she'll truly appreciate it. Probably after she starts listening to classic rock stations on Tuesdays.

If only I'd thought to get out that grappling hook I made in high school! I could have let him try to reenact the swinging-over-the-big-chasm-thingy scene from Star Wars! Such a missed opportunity. 

A pretty hilarious video of Gabe trying to catch a doughnut without touching it. Not really Halloweeny, but he's wearing his costume, so that counts, right?

Norah's New Thinking Noise

A couple weeks back, we were driving somewhere or other and I looked over my shoulder and saw Norah sitting in her car seat, and I was struck with a memory. Of her strapped into her conversion seat, looking out the window or whatever, and going "Nnnggguuuuuuuhhhhh, nnnggguuuuuuuuhhh," over and over again. Or sitting on the floor in the living room with a washable marker, drawing an infinite number of little circles that really looked more like Jesus fishes, going "Nnnggguuuuuuuuuuuhhh, nnnggguuuuuuuuuuhhh" over and over. Her thinking noise. Here's a video in case you've forgotten what it sounded like:

She just sort of stopped doing that noise somewhere along the way, and we didn't really notice its absence. Which is odd, considering it was the background noise of my life for so many months. But there you have it.

But recently she's been doing something a little different. While she's working on things, she will talk and sing constantly, seemingly without breathing. I'm guessing this is a girl thing. I've gotten pretty good at selectively blocking most of it out, which irritates her when, in the middle of an hour long monologue, she asks me a question and I somehow miss it. Gabe hasn't quite gotten used to blocking it out, yet, as you'll see in the video.

Goddamn blogger.com. It doesn't like the video. It also doesn't like the other one of Norah looking at a toy catalog that is pretty funny (family probably already saw both of these anyway, I think Libby emailed them out). But here's the youtube links, just in case:

Thinking Noise
Spiderman!

The Nuclear Option

The problem with going nuclear is that there is nowhere to go from there, and that is pretty much the place we've found ourselves already with Norah.

Disciplining Norah is turning out to be MUCH more difficult than it ever has been with Gabe. Gabe, is one of nature's pleasers. He wants to make people happy and, when he knows there is a threat of trouble, he will try to self-correct to keep people happy. Well, in broad terms--specifically that doesn't always pan out, exactly. Gabe gets genuinely upset if he knows someone is disappointed with something that he's done. Norah, not so much. In fact, and this is the frustrating part, there doesn't seem to be much that Norah won't just shake off.

Strangely, typing this out reminded me of a scene from Malcolm in the Middle, a show that I didn't watch very often and, really, has had next to no impact on my life. I'm not sure why this scene would stick in my mind, but it is particularly relevant right now and fills me with a sort of quiet dread. The scene involves the parents and the second oldest child (I can't remember any of their names). The oldest and second oldest children are notorious problem children. When this episode takes place, the second oldest has discovered a love for cooking, the first thing he has ever truly loved doing. When he does something bad, his parents ground him from the kitchen, and he becomes genuinely upset at the prospect. And the parents become giddy and explain to the audience that this is the first time they've ever had something to hold over his head that might dissuade him from doing bad things. They sent him to his room and he just played and didn't come out when his grounding was over. They grounded him from TV or video games and he just found something else to do. Nothing they did had any effect on him until he actually loved something enough to miss it when it was gone. And they didn't find that thing until he was in high school.

I'm afraid that is what is going to happen with Norah, and we're starting to see evidence of it already.

Her picky eating has become a problem. In the good ole days, we could reliably get her to eat "things that are brown." Now, there are about five foods that she will eat--and all of them are dairy or pre-packaged and fried. And there is little that we've tried that works for changing this, but we keep trying. And last night and this morning we got fed up and went nuclear on her--choosing the most severe punishments we could think of to try to get her to eat what I made for dinner last night.

First, let me point out what I made for dinner. Specifically, something that I thought both of the kids should not only tolerate eating but should butt dig. I made fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy. My intention was to make an actual fried chicken by cutting one into assigned pieces and frying them, but I'd never cut a chicken up for frying before (I've always just baked them, because it's easier and less messy--and picking meat off a cooked bird is pretty simple), and I made a terrible mess of it. So I ended up with a bunch of strips and chunks of chicken that I ended up cutting off the mangled carcass--and, really, that was probably best since the kids are reliable chicken nugget eaters.

But when I presented it to them, they both turned up their noses and declared that they hated it.

We made the standard threat that they would go to bed without dinner if they didn't eat. This really upset Gabe, and he spent the next forty-five minutes slowly eating the mashed potatoes and corn (which had to be pretty awful towards the end as neither is very good cold), but he got to stay up until his normal bedtime for his troubles.

Norah, on the other hand . . . . After threatening to send her to bed early without dinner, she pretty much jumped out of her chair and said, "OK!" and cheerfully started getting ready for bed. We bathed her and dressed her and put her in bed, and she went to sleep without a hitch. But before she went to bed, we warned her that she was going to have to finish her dinner this morning or she wouldn't get breakfast.

So we pulled it out this morning for her breakfast. And she refused to eat it again. Moreover, this morning there was a Halloween Parade at Gabe's school. We were all going to go watch him walk main street in Walton and visit all the stores and businesses in the little town (three of them). Norah seemed excited about the prospect. So, when she refused to eat her food, I said, "If you don't eat, you're not going to the parade. We'll just have to stay home and mama can go with Gabe and watch."

She acted upset at the idea, but still refused to eat. I coaxed and cajoled and threatened for fifteen minutes while she sat in her chair and resolutely didn't eat. Finally, it was too late for us to go along to the parade and we told her that we'd be staying home.

She "Ahhhhh!"ed a bit, but then pretty much took it in stride and hasn't cared a bit since then.

In other words, we dropped two bombs on her, and she just crawled into her bunker and ate some canned beans (something she'd never eat) then came out when the smoke cleared and acted like nothing ever happened. Which worries me. As a three year old, having to go to bed early and not being able to see a bunch of people dressed in costumes walk in a row are about the height of punishments. There is pretty much nowhere left for us to go at this point. Hopefully we don't have to wait until high school to find something that she loves enough that taking it away will help steer her in the right direction. Though I would definitely be OK with it being a love of cooking. I'd be happy to turn over some of those responsibilities to someone else.

Butt Bombs

At some point in the last week, Norah has started doing what she calls "butt bombs." I guess it's something they did in preschool. Although it isn't the most socially acceptable thing in the world, it is pretty funny and I love that we have her in a preschool that teaches her indelicate things. Prim and proper is boring, even if socially acceptable.

In its pure form, I have no idea what it's supposed to be. It's morphed into something 50% about farting and 50% about pretty much anything butt-related.

But, even though I don't really know what it's supposed to be about, I do know that it's fun to say.

Butt bomb. Butt bomb. Butt bomb.

Fun.

Norah has come up with a few little dances and pantomimes that she does while she repeats "butt bomb" over and over. And she's developed three or four different voices that she uses to say the phrase--including one best described as "creepy, possessed little girl," which is great.

I have to admit, I have mixed feelings about her dramatic flare. On the one hand, she's going to be interesting and, more than likely, a lot of fun if she keeps this kind of performance knack up. On the other hand, drama. I'm not great with drama. Something to better adapt to in the future, I suppose.

It's interesting, really. Both of my kids seem to have a flare for performance. It's interesting because it seems to fly in the face of any sort of "nurture" arguments that might be made. I certainly have ZERO flare for performance--unless passive-aggression is a kind of performance. Yet, despite the fact that my kids spent most of their developmental time around me, they are becoming performers in their own right. 

The fundamental difference in their performance types is also pretty interesting. In many ways, they are like a classic comedy duo. Like the Smothers brothers, or Abbott and Costello (though I was always more of a Laurel and Hardy fan), or Chris Farley and David Spade. The slapstick goofball and the straight man. I guess Sonny and Cher would be a more suitable comparison (as I certainly wouldn't wish a comparison to David Spade on anyone). Gabe's performances are undirected, scattered, high-energy, and usually physical. Norah's performances are more cerebral and low-key. Both funny in their own ways. At least life should remain interesting around here.

Anyway, today I tried to get her to perform some of her butt bomb stuff for the camera, with not-great success. Still, here is what she was willing to do for the camera.

 

 Plus, a bonus video I found on the memory card!

Power and Karate

The other day, the kids and I were driving into town and, as usual, they started to bicker back and forth. What, exactly, the cause of the bickering was, I have no idea. They are pretty much constantly at each other for one thing or another and I do my best to ignore them until their whining gets to an unavoidable volume. Usually. This time, I happened to be paying a bit more attention to what they were saying as they argued and I couldn't be happier that I did.

In counterpoint to whatever Norah had alleged, Gabe replied, "I'll get five days of timeout if I use my full power."

Which is a pretty awesome concept. However, Norah topped it with her comeback.

"Well, I have all the karate," she claimed.

Love it. ALL the karate. Gabe wouldn't hear of this, of course, since he had taken karate lessons himself and, thus, must have SOME of the karate about him somewhere, but I was too busy laughing to hear anymore of the details.

Full Days and Flat Gabe

Gabe started full days at school last week. It's kind of a big deal, for all parties concerned. For Gabe it represents a total shift in how his life works. He's having lunches away from home. He has no opportunity for naps. He has a full day of focusing and interacting with people. He is, in effect, growing up fast.

They are going to start reading within the next month or two. READING. In kindergarten! Everyone! When I was in kindergarten, it was a half day and we had a nap time. Only one kid in our class could sort of read by the end of the year (I won't drop names, but I can give a hint: the shortened version of his first name spells "tap" with the letters mixed up). We didn't do anything but play and color and occasionally create an art project. Already Gabe has made pretty huge steps towards reading. He's recognizing letter sounds and he's asking us to point to words as we read them so he can see what they look like. And he's subtracting and adding. It just seems impossible to me. Less than three months ago the kid was picking his nose, eating it, then proclaiming, "I LOOOOOOOVE boogers!"

For Norah and I Gabe's absence means something else. Norah is handling it pretty well. She had kind of a tough go of it the first month or so that Gabe was gone during the mornings. As it turns out, Gabe has been our activities organizer for the last few years. His high energy and need for constant movement and activity kept everyone else in the house busy and occupied, too. There was always something going on, and Norah was able to reap the benefits of that activity. Gabe thought of something crazy and usually loud to do and Norah joined in the fun. With Gabe gone, Norah was forced to rely on her own imagination--or, worse, mine--to come up with things to do. Sadly, our brains work about exactly the same way. I'm great at coming up with things for my brain to do, but I'm pretty terrible at coming up with things for my body to do. Norah is the same way. If left to her own devices, she might sit in the same chair for an entire morning, talking and singing to herself or watching TV or playing with a handful of squinkies or lalaloopsies (her two favorite toys for well over six months now, remarkably enough) and her Batmanmobile.

And the attitude. She was throwing SERIOUS attitude. All the time. Agonizingly so. Then, when Gabe came home, they were pretty much at each others' throats the entire time. That part, actually, hasn't changed all that much, but at least now there is about four hours less of it.

But this last week has been kind of different. For one, she's getting good naps again. Gabe hasn't been much of a napper for at least the last six months--probably more like the last year, really. And, obviously, if Gabe wasn't napping, then Norah felt she didn't need to either. She still got a few a week, but the days when she didn't nap, she was a terror. Now, without Gabe keeping her awake and setting an example of not napping, she's settling down easily and taking nice long naps. After the naps, she's as cheerful and pleasant as can be. And, in the mornings, she's getting better at keeping herself occupied. The nicer weather has allowed us to play outside some, which helps, but even when we're inside she thinks of things to do and keeps us both busy. So, it's been good.

We'll have to see how long it lasts, though. One of the other side effects of having Gabe out of the house for such a long time each day is that I feel obligated to work at the bookstore more during the week. Up til now, I've pretty much only been available on nights and weekends. It was just too tough to have both kids in the store for extended periods of time. I still DID have them in the store for about 6 hours a week, but god those 6 hours were a misery most of the time. Every five minutes I was going over to them and telling them to be quiet or stop fighting or stop whining or whatever. But now Norah and I are going to be spending two full afternoons together in the store--from the time she gets out of preschool until we go to pick Gabe up. They are two big stretches of time (longer than she's ever had to stay in the store) each week. I brought a sleeping bag and some pillows to put in the little "kid hole" closet we have here, in the hopes that she'll lie down for a bit and nap (which, besides providing her the nap she needs to not be a Betty the rest of the day, will also make the time go by much more quickly, for her at least).  Hopefully it works and she adapts well.

In other news, Gabe has a project that he's doing for school. They read a story called Flat Stanley, about a kid who gets squashed by a chalkboard and then is sent around the world on various adventures. The class was then told that they would be making a flat version of themselves to send to friends and family members for adventures. And we heard through the grapevine (from the parent of another kid in Gabe's class) that Gabe FREAKED OUT about this project. Full on freaked out. I guess he misunderstood what was going to happen. He was under the impression that, instead of a picture being taken of his face, his actual head was going to be detached from his body, flattened, and attached to a construction paper body. Eventually it was straightened out (and he would never really admit to us that he had freaked out, though he sheepishly admitted that he thought they were going to squash his head), and Flat Gabe arrived at our house Friday.

Flat Gabe, with non-real head attached.

So that project is underway and, more than likely, most of you will hear from us someway or other to find out if you want to participate in the Flat Gabe project (which is also the name of Gabe's band).

How I Am Unintentionally Preparing for Whichever End of Days Scenario Happens at Some Point in the Not-So-Distant Future

A month or so ago, Libby and I stumbled upon a show called Doomsday Preppers (on the Science Channel, I think--though I think that was a bit of a stretch for appropriateness). Normally, I am not a fan of reality programming. At all, really. I can't think of a single reality show that I've watched more than an episode of and thought, "I'm going to watch that again and genuinely enjoy the experience!" And I'm not one of those people who will watch a show like that Honey Boo Boo show because "It's like watching a train wreck." I wouldn't watch a train wreck, either. I would probably try to call emergency services or make my way to the wreckage to try to help people out. But that's just me.

But this doomsday show kept my attention for a couple hours--through three or four episodes, anyway, so however long that took. The concept is pretty straight forward. A crazy person or crazy family makes preparations for one of the various end of times scenarios floating around. The episode is spent describing their preparations and introducing us to the family and their crackpot theories. Then, at the end, they are given a grade based on how likely it would be for them to survive the disaster of their choosing and they are given constructive criticism on how they might improve their survivability.

I'm not sure what caught my interest. Possibly that particular kind of crazy/paranoid appeals to me. I mean, what kind of experiences must a person have endured to come under the unwavering notion that the magnetic poles are going to shift. Seriously. One of these people had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars preparing for exactly that catastrophe. There is a one in several billion chance of that happening ever, much less in this guy's lifetime. And if it DOES happen, it's difficult to see how it is going to have catastrophic effects on much of anything. I guess his theory was that it would unleash a powerful EMP field that would kill all electronic devices? Yet he installed CCTV cameras all over his little bunker. Truly remarkable.

Apocalypse IS a kind of fun topic to think on. And there are so many options these days. Financial collapse. Asteroid strike. Zombies. Plagues. Aliens. Pole shifts? You name it and it can wipe out humanity! Really, with all the things we can be scared of, it's pretty amazing that we can get anything done in an average day.

But I have neither the obsessive-compulsive personality nor the financial means to dedicate myself to such an undertaking. Of course, I could still mentally and physically prepare for such time as modern civilization ends. I could be training my body and teaching myself valuable skills to help my family survive. But, meh. What if there ISN'T an end of days during my life time? Then all that effort would have been wasted. Better just to hope that my neighbors or someone we happen upon has been making preparations and is willing to let us join the community they have formed behind their walls of stacked SUVs and corpses.

OR I can rely on the survival skills my son is learning at the school we're sending him to.

This morning we were going through our morning routine of periodically nagging him to get ready while he distracted himself with anything nearby and then getting him ready for him after a few frustrating minutes when, rather out of the blue, he started talking about working in the school's garden and he mentioned propagation. He used that word, specifically. Libby asked him what it meant and he said, "Making a new plant by using part of an old plant." Pretty much spot on. The kid can't put slip-on shoes on reliably. He can't remember to wipe himself after he takes a dump 1 out of 5 times. But somehow he can remember this horticultural terminology. Boggles the mind.

And after he said it, after the shock of him knowing what such a complicated word meant wore off, my first thought was, "I'm glad he is learning this stuff about growing food. It will come in handy after the apocalypse because I suck at gardening." So, maybe my interest in the Doomsday Preppers show wasn't sideshow curiosity so much as it was a kind of kinship striving to come out. Too bad I don't have a few hundred thousand dollars lying around so I can build a suitable bunker.

Stickers

When I was mentally composing this post last night in bed, as I sometimes do when I am not going to sleep as I should be, I pieced together a neat little intro that went like this: "For the last year or so, Gabe has been really into stickers."  Stock stuff, obviously. Nothing zazzy, just jump right in with a brief intro to the topic. Then I thought about it a little longer and realized that isn't even remotely the case.

To my way of thinking, pretty much EVERYTHING has been "for the last year or so." That's just the time frame my brain automatically goes to. High school? A year or so ago. Gabe's first birthday? A year or so ago. And so on. I have a poor grasp of time, I'm afraid. But that's beside the point.

As I thought back, I remembered that I had referenced stickers several times in this blog and, specifically, how much Gabe loves them. Most notable was the time he put "polka dots" on the TV. And I don't even know how long ago that was. A year or so, I'd guess.

He likes stickers and he really always has. I fail to see the appeal. Yes, there is a certain satisfying tactile sensation. Picking at a corner, there is always a slight thrill when you actually get it to come up without tearing. Peeling the sticker back and then having endless possibilities with it. Where should it go? Should it be part of a tableau, carefully crafted with other stickers to create a real or imagined scene reenactment--awesome in its pure expression of the perfect potential for the characters (or whatever) involved? Or should it be a piece of an elaborate, baroque, and meaningful decoration, wrapping around a treasured picture or object? So many options! It's like a metaphor for life itself with all of its myriad possibilities stretching out to infinity!

But, meh.

 Last night, Gabe had his first book fair at the school. Obviously not something that we NEED to participate in, what with the whole owning a bookstore thing going on, but we did it anyway because Libby has fond memories of the ones she went to as a child. We didn't have book fairs at our school. It was too small and, really, I was about the only student there when I was going that enjoyed reading. So it would have been a pretty disappointing affair with only me sitting on the floor in the middle of a spray of books. He had a tough time deciding on what he wanted.  Well, he had a tough time deciding on what he wanted that we were willing to buy him.

He WANTED a new Star Wars sticker book. It would be, I think, his fourth or fifth. But the sticker books are kind of expensive and we can order them from the store at our cost, so it didn't make much sense buying one there. He was hugely disappointed and settled on a Lego picture/story book that I'm pretty sure he will never look at more than once.

On the way home, we had a little discussion on the subject of wasting money. We've not been great about this in the past, choosing to buy our kids WAY more than we should be and giving in WAY more than we should do whenever they whine about wanting one thing or another. Partly we want to give them all the things they want (whether that is best for them or not), but partly we just want them to shut the hell up and caving in early means less aggravation in the long run (so, you know, laziness). But we're trying to be more responsible about those things now, and this seemed like a good teaching moment.

"Gabe, you don't NEED another sticker book," I reasoned. "You have a half dozen or so big, thick sticker books. Spiderman, Superman, three Star Wars books, and a generic Lego one, as I recall. You haven't used all of the stickers in ANY of those books yet."

"But there are too many stickers in them!" was his reasoning.

"And so you want MORE stickers when you already have more than you can use?" Bam! Suck on that logic, five year old! My superior adult brain just schooled you!

"Yes," he replied simply. And there goes my logic in the toilet where it usually ends up.

"Well, no. That's not how it works. I tell you what, when you use up all the stickers in your other books, then maybe we can look at ordering you a new one."

He sighed and I thought that was the end of that.

After we put him to bed, things were pretty quiet upstairs for quite awhile. I figured they had both gone to sleep because neither had napped. But, after an hour, Gabe came down holding one of his sticker books up with an excited look in his eyes.

"Look, dad! I used up all the stickers in this one!" And he held up the book for my inspection. He carefully flipped through all the pages to show me how empty they were.

"What did you do with the stickers?" I asked, somewhat nervously. He didn't have any paper up there, just books, furniture, and walls. But he's always been pretty good about not putting his stickers on non-sticker-friendly surfaces. Ever since the polka-dot incident, anyway.

"I put them on the books."

"Which books?" I asked, again, afraid that he had just picked out some of his chapter books and started filling the pages with stickers.

"The sticker books."

"Ah, I said. Good work." And I left it at that.

A little while later, Libby talked with him a bit more about it and Gabe said, as he began to work on the second book in his stack, "This is going to take me all night!"

And it might have. We're talking thousands of stickers here. But, instead, he went into the extra bedroom and fell asleep in that bed because his bed was filled with books. I inspected them and saw what he had done with the stickers.

 

 

 

Figuring out what he did with the stickers wasn't tough to spot. In effect, he had simply pulled each sticker out of the book and randomly applied it to the back of another sticker book. Not exactly what I had in mind when I told him to "use" the stickers. I imagined them having some sort of actual, planned application. Silly me. Also, apparently Blogger thinks I'm captioning still and won't let me align left or use a real font or even hit enter to start a new paragraph. So that seems like a good place to call it a post.

Gymnastics, Sort of

It really is pretty fascinating to watch as the world opens up in front of Gabe now that he's in school. I'm getting all kinds of interesting bits and bobs from him every day on the car ride home.

The other day he said, "I heard the best name ever today, dad! One of the kids in my class has the best name!" He was genuinely excited about this kid's name. I mean, excited. About a name. It was a little weird. "What was his name?" I asked. "Carl!" It is a kind of awesome name, really, especially since nobody uses it anymore. That hard K sound just doesn't come along often in American names, and add it to a sound that a drunk pirate might make and you've got naming gold.

Today I found out that there is a kid in the other kindergarten class that is shaping up to be Gabe's nemesis. I'm not sure what the kids name is--often Gabe is entirely unclear on the names of his classmates, changing them randomly as he tells me stories about the things they did in class--but Gabe has expressed a distinct dislike for him. I'm not sure what is going on, but it sounds like a bit of mild bullying of some sort.  I gave Gabe the standard Beta Male advice: If one of the kids is hurting you or one of the other students, be sure to tell a teacher or another adult. Probably I should have said, "If the kid is hurting you, hurt him back!" but I'd really rather put off visits to the principles office at least until grade school. Especially since the school is fifteen minutes or so away. Even if it does perpetuate the Beta Male line in our family. But, anyway, this is the first person I've ever heard Gabe express dislike about. He's generally a VERY friendly kid and rarely has a bad thing to say about anyone (a trait he obviously gets from me). So this kid must be a real d-bag.

But one of the more interesting things that is developing is his physicality. He's always been a physical kid, obviously. Running around and jumping all over the place pretty much non-stop. He's got ninja moves and lightsaber/jedi moves and army moves and power ranger moves and soccer moves and pretty much every other move he can think of. It's pretty remarkable, really. The kid is one big bruise. Just today, while running around the house jumping and kicking, he slipped on the pant legs of his army costume (they are too long, as are most of his pants, since he's 90% torso) and fell on the floor in ways that surely would have broken my hips at least three times. But he just gets back up and keeps going. Unless he slides into a wall or door or something. That usually phases him for a bit. But only a bit.

Anyway, I'm not sure if it's something they've been doing in recess or if it's just another aspect of his physicality that he hasn't really played out much here at home, but he's been exploring various gymnastic moves here at home recently. He's attempting cartwheels and backwards somersaults with a bit of regularity. The cartwheels mostly amount to him putting his hands on the ground and jumping his feet up into the air a foot or so. But the backwards somersaults . . . .  Well, just watch the video.

Norah Goes Back to School

It really does suck being the second child. And it kind of sucks being the parent of a second child, too. Having one child is pretty easy. That kid isn't going to know what options are available unless exposed to them, which means the kid can't whine and complain about not being able to do those things all day every day.

Staying in our boring home with nobody but me as entertainment, for Gabe, just WAS. There weren't really any other options as far as he knew. He didn't know there were channels other than the pre-K ones we watched while he was up. He didn't know there were schools where he could be around and play with dozens of other kids his own age. Moreover, he didn't have an older sibling coming up with things to do all day to entertain him. Again, he just had boring old me, so he got pretty good at coming up with his own entertainment and thinking of things to have me set up for him to do.

But Norah knows what's going on out there in the world now thanks to Gabe's participation. In some ways, it's probably forcing her to grow up a little faster than is entirely fair. She is hearing more chapter books and watching more Ninjago or Star Wars than Gabe would have ever been exposed to at three. She sees Gabe going off for most of the day while she is stuck at home with me and then gets to hear about all the fun things he's doing all day. In other words, she THINKS she's a five year old like Gabe and is VERY unhappy that she is still only three and can't do all the same things he gets to.

She's also not great at coming up with things to do all day. She just kind of putters around, acting bored. Though, she's going to have to start getting better at that soon because we're about 90% sure that we're going to cancel cable. And when she doesn't have the TV to entertain her, she's going to have to start coming up with things on her own (and, you know, me too I suppose).

But all of this has, I think, propelled us into what is, to my ears anyway, the most annoying phase yet, the "I want!" phase. Over the last week I have had to ban the use of it in the house because it instantly turns my brain red. If she utters it, she gets to spend a few minutes up in her bed as punishment. This seems extreme to me as I type it up, but it, honestly, is the nicest thing I can think of whenever she says it. And she says it A LOT. Any time we say "no." Any time she has an inkling for anything. Any time she has a thought, really. "I want! I want!" Oy. I'm sure Gabe went through a similar stage, but I don't remember being so frustrated and irritated all of the time like I am with this phase of hers. Maybe it's the tone of voice that she uses. It's both unsympathetically, autocratically demanding and gratingly whiny all at the same time. Like Hitler after being hit in the face by a dodge ball. I feel confident that I would also be infinitely annoyed by that Hitler, too.

Anyway, because she simply MUST be out doing stuff now that she knows the outside world exists, we've got her signed up for a few extra-curricular activities besides preschool. She gets to do a fairy dance camp that lasts the whole fall, which, I expect, will keep her happy and distracted for the sum total time that she is actually at the dance camp. But preschool is the big one, and it finally started again last week. These first two weeks are just one morning, so we're not fully into the swing of things (and I really think that, once Gabe goes to full days, she'll start to lighten up some because, I swear, 90% of her bad attitude is directed and making his life miserable), but we will be soon.

She's so cute. It's so hard to believe that such a sweet looking little girl could be such a pure force of evil right now.

It just breaks my heart to see the seething malevolence boiling just below the surface here. Her eyes are a little closed here, so you can't see that her eyeballs are rolled all the way back into her head.

On the way to school. Here you can see the wheels turning. She's thinking, "I wonder how I can break Daddy's will to live when I get home from school." Answer: with extreme prejudice.

Walking the path to school. There are bible verses on the red stones in the middle of the path. They sizzle when she steps on them.

See that blank one? There was a bible verse on there. When she stepped on it, the words actually flew off, squealing like trodden mice. They swirled miserably for a few seconds then dissolved into the ether.

The stairway down to her classroom. Did I mention that her backpack is filled with thumb screws and iron maidens and stuff? It totally is.

Norah at the table, plotting how she will finally cave in my skull. Weapon of choice: rolling pin. I do appreciate the Vaudevillian feel of that kind of end. It's like she's a character in The Lockhorns comic strip.

Obviously I kid here. I feel like I need to mention that from time to time--especially since I still believe that, of my two kids, only Norah MIGHT have the gumption to actually go back and read any of this nonsense later in life. I love my daughter and would take a rolling pin for her. She's just not making it easy right now, and I, too, like to whine.

Jokulhlaup and Virvelvind

It has been a rough year for pets in our household. Back in March, our first child (well, until we had real kids and realized how much more work they are than cats--but to our young minds it seemed fair to call her our child), Tsunami, had to be put down. She'd been shitting on the floor for four or five years--and me, being the dutiful, dedicated and loyal person I am, kept cleaning it up two or three times a day (but, really, I spent four years cleaning crap out of diapers, so it's not like it was all that much different)--but then she started peeing on the floor several times a day, and we decided it was just too much. We felt pretty terrible about it, but we still had one cat left.

Well, sort of. Neither of us really . . . well . . . cared all that much about Typhoon. I mean, she was cute, and we didn't mind her company, but neither of us were particularly attached to her. We inherited her a decade or so ago from my brother Jon when he did a semester of study in Ireland and couldn't take care of her anymore. Then, like a douche, he refused to take her back. So she has been our second cat, and pretty much the red-headed step child in the family (sorry to any red-headed step-kids out there, I just don't have any other common idioms to describe Typhoon's second-class status . . . . Hey, that works, second class status. But I'm not going to take the step-child thing back, so suck it gingers!). We're not talking Harry Potter treatment here. We didn't blame her for everything and lock her in a closet or anything. And we pet her and played with her and cared for her pretty well and all of that. But there just wasn't that much attachment.

Anyway, we still technically HAD one cat left, so my statement is fundamentally true. But Typhoon, apparently, must have drawn some inner strength or other from tormenting Tsunami on a daily basis because, as soon as Tsu was gone, Phoony started to quickly decline. She was always kind of a mess. She had recurring ear mites that we could never get rid of. She always had fleas--somehow, even though our cats never go outside and we treated her all the time. She had bad teeth and had to have half of them removed a few years ago. And she was bulimic--binging and purging all the time all over the house (that was probably our fault. I always wondered if she was trying to pretty herself up so we'd love her more than that aforementioned step-child). So, probably it was a surprise that she lasted as long as she did.

The first few months weren't too bad, but over this past six weeks, she stopped grooming (which, on a longhair cat means thoroughly knotted fur) and eventually she stopped eating. She dropped to about half her healthy weight. And she started breathing really heavy. Eventually, she just looked to emaciated and sad and we couldn't put it off any longer and hope for the best. And this week we put her down.

Yet, you ask, how can you already have two new cats in your house when Typhoon has only been gone for two days?

That's a good question and links directly back to Libby's unique brand of manic-depression. She is in a cat-manic phase right now. For the last five years, while Tsu had been crapping on the floor, Libby lamented that our cats simply wouldn't die and stop making a mess of our house.  Very nearly every day she expressed a wish to never, ever, have cats again. She hated the hair all over the house. She hated the smell. She hated the mess and hassle.

And then, last week, she started shopping online for cats. And her interest was rekindled. She took the kids around to a few different humane societies to visit their cat rooms. I tried to talk her into waiting awhile, to let our house air out and for our appreciation for pets to build back up. I figured the kids were too young still to really care all that much whether we had a pet or not around. And they have the chickens, right?  They're cuddly. And we could take a break from having pets. Specifically, I could take a break from feeding the animals every day and keeping up on the litter and doing pretty much all of the other chores related to keeping pets. I have, after all, been doing it every day for the last 17 years (yeah, that's how old Tsu was).

But no.

So, when it was decided that we were going to be getting a new cat sooner rather than later (one, I hoped, as we could wait awhile and get a second one later, after the first one had some time to settle in), we decided to try getting some input on names from the kids. This was actually a pretty awesome exercise. They came up with some great names. We were over at a friend's house, and the kids were jumping on their trampoline while we asked them for name suggestions. And, just as fast as Libby could type them into her phone to remember, they were spinning out new names.  Here's the list she got down:

Log, Saggy, Boob (seriously, these were the first three words out of their mouths), Pickle (not getting much better), Googoo, Peppers (OK, moving on to something else now, thank goodness), Pee (I guess not), Poopinthepot (my third favorite), Boozle (fourth favorite, and the last ranked name I had.  Interestingly, this was a name that Berke Breathed came up with, for Bloom County, for the little illustrated bubbles that appear above a character's head to signify that they are drunk, but I doubt my kids had read that particular strip yet, so I'm not sure where this came from), Doodle, String, Conner (I loved this odd, actual name that Gabe threw out there--it was the only one he ever gave, and I'm not sure that he even knows a Conner), Gaggy, Blink, Canker, Music, Loser, Squigglympics (this is my absolute favorite in the group--I love the idea of olympics for squiggles more than just about everything), Beaver (here we go again, what are these kids watching?), Jumprun, Cuttinggrass (this was Gabe's experimental, juxtapositional phase), Fighterpod, Firepie (my second favorite name and the one that I was closest to adopting as one of the cat's names, if we hadn't decided to go back to our natural water disaster names), Shooooo, Mutter, Hotjellies, Peanut Butter, Podder, Loggers, Dog, Momma, Sister, and Brother. Obviously, by the end, they were just grasping at straws and naming whatever happened to be close at hand. It happens, eventually, to most of the great artists as they tap their creative reserves and start phoning it in. But their early career was genius!

Libby had one rule that I hoped would work in my favor--the cat would have to choose the kids. Meaning, the cat would have to cuddle up to and appear fond of our children before we would commit to it. Being small children, I liked my odds of all cats pretty much hating to be around them. But it didn't work out that way. There weren't MANY options, but there were some, and that was enough.

And, actually, the first cat that chose them was a pretty good option. It's actually kind of weird. She looks pretty much exactly like Tsunami, only calico. A touch smaller and a touch lighter, and her head is bigger than Tsu's, but they move exactly the same way and have about the exact same fur (length and feel, obviously not color). She's a fat little puff-ball, and she makes me happy. Her original name was Sparrow, but I thought that name was lame, so we worked on some others. Gabe couldn't say Sparrow properly at first and kept calling her Spiral, which I kind of liked. Norah wanted to call her Carrot, which I also kind of liked. And we experimented with Poopinthepot (would have been Pip for short), Firepie, Boozle, and Squigglympics. But none of them seemed quite right, so Libby set out for the internet and found a few natural disaster options.

Jokulhlaup. Now I just have to remember how to spell that.

We settled on Jokulhlaup (huh, spellcheck doesn't recognize it as a word, weird). It's an Icelandic word meaning an ice-flow/mud slide created when the heat from a subterranean volcano melts a glacier. Pretty specifically awesome, right? Plus it has the link to volcanoes for Gabe. But the dealbreaker was coming up with a useable nick-name. Because, let's face it, nobody but Bjork would ever going to use that full word all the time to talk to a cat. I think we're actually still a little up in the air about it. Libby likes Jokul, but it's pronounced Yokel, and I don't really think I like that much. And the kids have a bit of trouble saying it. The other option was Yokie (I didn't even bother with the J thing at the beginning because there's no need for me to be pretentious about those things anymore--I'm not going to impress anybody), and that one has stuck with the kids, so, more than likely, that's what she will end up being.

And I hoped it was going to end with that. For awhile, anyway. Maybe six months or so, then the kids could pick out another cat, maybe a kitten, that would really bond with them and be their cat.

No dice.

Libby did some more shopping online. We ran back to the humane society where they found Yokie to see if she had any cage-mates that she particularly got on with. There weren't, and none of the cats chose us--in fact, they all seemed kind of put-off by us. So things were looking hopeful. Until last night. Libby took the kids by the humane society in Wichita on their way home and I (stupidly) had forgotten to unload the pet carrier from the back of the van. And she found another cat.

And, weirdly, she's pretty much exactly like Typhoon. Skinny, lanky, frisky, almost exactly as much younger than Yokie as Typhoon was younger than Tsunami, and kind of stupid. And kind of annoying. I'm holding out hope that she'll get normal. She's only a year old, so she might age gracefully. I hope. As it is now, she's the new step-child in our house and she'll have to get fat and fluffier if she wants to win me over. Because I, apparently, am a cat bigot. I likes 'em fat and furry and I'm kind of indifferent to them if they aren't. We learn new things about ourselves every day.

Naming this one was a bit faster process, but only because our friend Liz happened upon a good one and we weren't left to the researching on our own. You know, it's actually kind of difficult to find good results with web searches of keywords "natural water disaster names" and similar veins. I was finding very little the first time I looked.

Virvelvind. Slightly easier to spell but just as foreign. Also, she looks like a ferret. But she's MUCH more playful that Yokie, so she's probably going to be the kids' favorite.

But Liz found Virvelvind. Apparently, it means cyclone in Danish. Mmmm, cyclone of danishes, though I can't find any English websites to much back that up right now. Oh, there's one, but it's just a general definition and it appears that it also might mean tornado. Well, tornadoes can happen over water, right? That's what we're going to assume, anyway. And we're calling her Vindy. Virve was too tough to say and, besides, reminded me of that band Verve Pipe, famous for that song on the commercial a decade or so ago that I can for some reason still remember.

So, we have two cats again, less than two days after the last of our old ones died. As I said, when Libby decides she's into something, she's INTO it. And now, for better or worse, we've got two new animals that are going to be living with us for the next fifteen years or so. And I get to change their litter and make sure they are fed and watered. So there's that.