Forensic Evidence (and some more tears)

Exhibit A. Hair. Stephanie's hair. Found disembodied on the family room floor. Clearly, a miniature crime had been committed. I'm not sure why, but it seemed like a good idea at the time to collect as much of the hair as possible and put it in a bag. So I did. And it's still in the bag. (What should I do with it? It's beautiful rich brown, curly hair. Yes. Natural curl.)

At the time of the crime, I was preparing to cut her hair myself. Well--trim it really. I had given the boys their haircuts the night before and she wanted her turn. So I set the kit down (did NOT know she could open it) and came back 5 minutes later. She was not there, but the hair was.

I tried not to show sadness. I didn't want her to feel TOO bad about it. I think she figured she could put it back on whenever she wanted, and when I looked sad, she started crying. So I told her she looked so pretty and I loved her hair. But really, how could I? She had given herself a mullet. A bad mullet. Wait... is there any other kind?

Just for context, here are a couple photos of her beautiful hair BEFORE the self-do:

See? Didn't I tell you? It was Bee-you-tiful! (Yes, I know. It will be again. But still... this cut came right before the visit of both sets of grandparents.)

And...here's the mullet:

And here's the result after a friend fixed it for us. I say "us" because it hurts me as much as it hurts Stephanie to have this hair gone. Probably more.

She's still pretty cute, though, isn't she? And the curl is still fabulous. Lucky little thing! Now she keeps saying things to me about her hair that let me know she's sad about it. She asked me later in the day of the fix-it cut, "Mommy? Can you see my hair? I can't see my hair." Another day, she told me, "Mommy, my hair is not working. It needs to go down." Then this morning she asked me for braids.

Clearly, this is my first girl. I can just feel some of you sneering about how idiotic it was for me to leave her alone with the kit. But I'm an amateur girl mom. I honestly didn't know. Still... I guess there's no use crying over cut hair.

Bloody Trail (and some tears)

      This was the sight that awaited me outside my bedroom door on Wednesday. Drops of blood in various sizes, along with a couple of blobs of some other unidentified liquid. The bloody trail continued down the stairs, so I followed it, wondering why there was no yelling coming from anywhere nearby. At the end of the trail was the cat, sitting under the kitchen table and trying to shake off the blood-soaked fur on his left cheek.

      Mako is a fighter. He defends his home territory and his beloved family with ferocity and great courage, but he does so without front claws. So he is also a loser. I'm guessing that, amongst the neighborhood animals, he is something of a joke. Another cat seeing him approach would be a bit nervous--he weighs 15 pounds and is "big-boned" (if one can use that term for a feline). But the moment the yowling turns into paw-batting and claw-striking, the other cat realizes Mako is an easy target. Let me take a moment here to say for any PETA people out there that we did not declaw him--he came to us that way.

      About a week before these photos were taken, Mako had been in yet another neighborhood brawl and had a good-sized puncture wound on the side of his face to show for it. We were "keeping an eye on it" to see that it healed properly. Translation: we didn't want to pay for a vet visit unless absolutely necessary. Nathan kept telling us Mako really needed to see a vet. And we assured him we had the situation well in hand. Monday, his cheek started to get swollen and I said, "If it's not better in a couple of days, I'll take him in." (Eric, I think, preferred to let Mako take the risk of infection and death, rather than go the vet route. Death of the cat is the ideal solution in his mind.)

     While I called the vet Wednesday morning (two days too late), Mako sat by the front door itching his face and waiting to be let out. When he rubbed his cheek with his paw, fresh blood splattered over the area. The photo below looks like it's from a crime scene.

       I wish I could have gotten a good photo BEFORE the vet visit and resulting clean-up, but I had to settle for just the AFTER photo, which is this one:

      The vet informed us that Mako's original wound had resulted in an abcess, which then swelled until it literally burst out the side of his face (because we didn't take him in when we should have). So now, for the tears... we had to pay for a vet visit that included his clean-up, an anti-biotic, a cream for the wound, and some kitty pain medication. Next time, we'll know better, I guess, right?

Happy November 1st

You can tell a lot about people from their garbage. Go ahead. Guess my weight. Just kidding.

What I love most about Halloween... wait... let me re-phrase that... what I love about Halloween... wait... one more try... the ONLY thing I really love about Halloween...is the candy. I do not get excited about any other aspect of Halloween. No, coming up with costumes doesn't thrill me. The mess of carving a pumpkin is something I dread (and skillfully avoid, by having Eric take charge of it--"But you're so much better at it than I am, Eric!") Trick-or-treating always seems like it will be fun, but then the youngest inevitably wants to be done before the other kids and is whining to be carried, the oldest wants to go it alone--where's the fun in that? And the poor middle child has a malfunctioning costume (once again), so he's walking like a penguin while his mummy bandages droop closer and closer to the ground. And then, of course, there's the sugar-induced mood swings, not to mention what the sugar does to the kids. :) But I sure do love all that free chocolate.

So it is with a substantial amount of sugar-induced glee that I say to you, "Happy November 1st!" Halloween is finally over and we can move on to the classier adornments of autumn.

Oh--and here are my adorable children, loving Halloween against my better judgment:

And here are their pumpkins:

The above is a mummy with crazy eyes, though it bears a resemblance to a sort of free-form artistic owl, in my opinion. Below is Nathan's, which he carved pretty much by himself.

2011 Halloween. Done. Check it off.

It starts...

Last night, when I heard a car pull up, I went to the front door to welcome Nathan back from scouts. I stood looking out through the storm door while he gathered his things and thanked his ride. He turned and smiled at me, but as he approached, his smile quickly faded and he started yelling to me, "Mom! Get down! Get down!"

I thought, "What does he think is going to happen? Are we going to be shot at? Is there someone lurking in the bushes?"

But then he said, "Why are you in your pajamas? That's so embarrassing! Get down! Don't let them see you! Oh my gosh!"

I, of course, started laughing and assured him that everyone has pajamas and these people had certainly seen them before. But he continued to shout commands at me and act as though I had a negligee on rather than just ordinary pajamas. I kept laughing, but I also started thinking back to those good times from my youth when my parents found new and creative ways to embarrass ME. You know, things like--making conversation with my friends, or wearing pants with an elastic waistband, or those funky glasses that change from regular to sunglasses as you go from inside to outside (now I think those are awesome). Nathan also recently informed me that my new pair of white Keds (that I LOVE) look like "old person shoes".

I'm reminded of a great Cosby routine where he talks about this very phenomenon with his own kids and says he had to drop his kids off at the corner because they "wouldn't want anyone to know they had parents!"

Nathan turns 12 next month. So I guess...it starts.

In Memoriam

Few things say, "It's going to be a great day!" like 12 dead tadpoles. Yes, that's right, we are officially down to 45 amphibians to raise. The price for all this glee is a few sad children. But I can live with that. I've tried to reassure them that it's not their fault and that tadpoles often don't live to adult froghood, while inwardly I'm celebrating and hoping soon to reclaim my tadpole-free life. I've grown weary of having containers of pond water on my kitchen island.

Our owl pellet lab went well. Once they got over the smell, the kids loved discovering all the tiny bones hidden in their pellets and then trying to identify the skulls. We were also able to clear up a few misunderstandings about owls. Some of the kids figured that since owls regurgitate these pellets, they must not have a "back door" for other waste products. Not so. They have a dual exhaust system.

Next Tuesday we will be dissecting earthworms. I wonder what extra rules I will have to create while we are using scalpels...

So this post is dedicated in loving memory to the creatures who, by being dead, allow us to have interesting science labs.

Last note. While writing this, I have been informed that we are now down to 44 tadpoles. So sad.

Hardy Little Devils

Zero down, 57 to go. Yep, they're ALL still alive. And I continue to waffle between stress over tadpoles not looking healthy and stress over none having died yet. Yesterday, we made an emergency pond water run because the pond water tadpoles looked listless (from what we could see of them through the murky water, which was the other indication we needed to take a trip to the creek).

We had our lab group on Tuesday and the kids were, of course, very excited to take home their little tadpole habitat. And we are happy to only have 3 habitats left in our care for now.

The lab went well and the kids are great. I introduced our "Lab Rules," of which there are were four. Simple, straightforward rules like--raise your hand, and follow instructions. After the first 5 minutes of lab, it was obvious I needed to add another rule: No pocketknives. I didn't see that one coming.

57 New Pets

I got these in the mail today. We now have 57 tadpoles. Hopefully I will not be writing in November about the 57 frogs we own. I ordered these for our first experiment in our Science Lab Group that I am running for homeschoolers this year. So when I say "pets", I really mean experimental lab animals. Mwaa-ha-ha-ha! Evil scientist laugh.

57 tadpoles. Aaaaacchhh! What was I thinking?! I hope I'm not in over my head.

I want Nathan to have the "classroom" experience again, even though he has school at home. This is the biggest reason behind my decision to teach a science lab to TWELVE kids. Yes, TWELVE! (Unrelated--have you ever noticed how, sometimes, when you type a word in all caps or type it a bunch of times, it no longer looks right to you? Twelve. Hmmm...is that how it's spelled?)

I wanted to start things off with a bang by doing a live specimen study. I hope it isn't a bang followed by a fizzle. But if these little guys don't survive until Tuesday 11:30am, this experiment will definitely be a fizzle. Tuesday is our lab, and we will be running an experiment over 6-10 weeks to test which type of water is the best growing environment for these tadpoles--spring, pond, or distilled.

On the one hand, I don't want the tadpoles to die, but I also don't want them ALL to make it to adulthood. Especially not the ones we personally are keeping. Alright. That's the intro. I'll be writing again soon. Let the obituaries begin.

Our Famiry...plus one

Last month, we disguised ourselves as a nice family with good manners and welcomed a Japanese middle-school student into our home for a week. Her name is Hikari and she is 15 years old. She had had 3 years of English in school, and, though we were impressed with her language skills, it was still quite difficult to communicate at times. But she was very sweet and we loved having her with us. (Side note: Please don't think I'm terrible for using the Japanese-accent way of spelling "family" in the title of this post. We find it very endearing and are sure we Americans make similar mistakes when trying to learn sounds in Japanese.)

We had prepared the kids for her visit by teaching them a bit about Japanese culture (what little we knew), but mostly focusing on the basics--manners. We are lacking in this category (again, see the post's title). They were excited for her visit and peppered us with questions on the drive over to the hotel where we would pick her up. We waited somewhat patiently for the bus to arrive, holding our little sign that we had made to welcome her.

When she finally arrived, we said our short greetings and hopped back in the car to drive home--just a few miles away.

Silence.

Never in the history of ever have my boys been so quiet in the car. I would have basked in that noiseless heaven if I hadn't been racking my brains for something to say to our guest. Anything. What else can I think of? She didn't understand the first few attempts I made. And why wouldn't that light ever change? We were never going to get home but be stuck in that awkward silence forever.

Okay. Yes, we did make it home. The boys couldn't stop staring and kept glancing sideways at us to see if we were staring too. She brought us a nice bunch of gifts to thank us for hosting her. Among these were an origami book and a box of origami paper. For a few weeks there, we were all addicted to origami. Evidence below.

There were, I think, 17 students in her group, each staying with a different host family, so as to ensure they used their Engrish skills. As a thank you to the host families, they held a "Japan Night" for us and fed us pizza and cookies and showed us some of their talents and culture. We had a blast! Our student was an excellent pianist (loves Jazz and also plays the sax) and so she and another student performed an awesome duet. The students also taught the American children a game that seems to be the Japanese equivalent of Red Light Green Light. As you can see in the photo below, Japanese teen-age fashion is as unique as American teen-age fashion.

Our cover (as a nice famiry with good manners) was blown very soon after Hikari's arrival by the many bodily noises my children made. For years, we have heard that burping is polite in Japanese culture, but I heard recently that the Japanese don't know how that particular rumor about them got started. In which case, we were extremely rude. Daniel produced a symphony of noises while Hikari was with us.

Speaking of manners...on the last night of Hikari's visit, she said she wanted to make some Japanese Miso soup for us. When it was ready, Stephanie was already seated at the table, hungry for dinner, so we let her get started on it while we called the boys to dinner. We all sat down and prepared for the blessing on the food, at which point, Stephanie stood up on her chair and loudly announced, "I DON'T like this SOUP!" Luckily, Hikari found it as funny as the rest of us did (Stephanie is a toddler, after all). The soup was actually quite delicious, but Daniel slowed down his intake when he found out that the green stuff was seaweed. And my intake slowed a bit when the communication barrier prevented us from learning the identity of some pale spongy rings floating in the soup.

Here is Hikari playing a duet in my living room, during the final evening of her stay.

And here she is with two friends who came over also. They were really nice kids. Again, that inexplicable fashion. Most of the shirts the kids wore had English words written in large letters. And they didn't always make sense to us. His shirt, for example, says, "PLAN AND FREEDOM DREAM." ??? Something seems to have gotten lost in translation there. Maybe it means--plan and dream freely? Anyway, the girl in the middle has a shirt that says, "Groove Joy". Our student, Hikari, is on the right.

We all really enjoyed having Hikari with us, but I think no one more than Daniel. One evening, when we had run out of things to say and things to do, I asked Hikari if she could think of anything she wanted to do. She asked if we had a Wii, which we do, so we did that. As we were getting started, Daniel began explaining how to do everything in very specific detail. When I could see it was slowing down our fun, I broke in to tell him that Nintendo is a Japanese company and she probably knew how to do it already. He was very skeptical of that until she whooped our tails at Mario Kart.

We were sad to see her go. Daniel cried when she left. He's so sweet. Luckily, her visit was closely followed by a very unexpected earthquake and then a hurricane, followed by the start of school and then 12-plus inches of rain in a few days, resulting in a day off school due to flooding. Never a dull moment.

Turn your wallet over to The Mouse

 My brother who lives in Florida has a saying--I don't know if it's his or just local--"Turn your wallet over to The Mouse." Meaning, obviously, that if you choose to spend time (and money) in Orlando, you might as well just put Mickey Mouse in charge of your wallet. There won't be much left when you leave. First, Epcot...

Don't ever buy these lollipops. Your children will be sticky for the rest of their lives.

Duffy the Disney Bear. Who? Apparently, Disney needed one more mascot. So they added Duffy. Duffy who? I don't know. But Stephanie loved him.

 

Hula-hooping in the America region at Epcot. It was very interesting to see how Disney summed up each country. America--hula-hoops and colonial architecture. Mexico--mariachi. Canada--moose. England--red phone booths. Germany--beer and cuckoo clocks. We had a blast and Disney is very family-friendly, but I would love for them to add Australia, Egypt, and Peru to name a few.

 

We used this phone booth to enter the Ministry of Magic. We went to Universal the next 2 days. Nathan talked me into going on a roller coaster called The Hulk, which turned out to be very fun, but mainly, we were there to go to Harry Potter World.

Now for a tour...if you haven't been to Harry Potter World, wait till you see how incredible it is!

Hogwarts castle is AMAZING! It is so much like what you see in the movies. We were completely WOW-ed. Inside is the main ride, which was really cool but also made me nauseous.

Professor Sprout's greenhouse. Pass through this while waiting in line for the ride. (You can also just walk through the castle.)

While hanging around the Hogwarts Express, we overheard the "Engineer" respond this way to a girl who asked where "the other Harry Potter ride" was. He said (in British accent), "Harry Potter's a person, love. He's not a ride."

  

The paintings are wonderful. Lots of them move and talk like in the books and movies yet they really look like paintings. The black ones above are the moving paintings--they don't show up in photos.

Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom. Holograms of Harry, Ron, and Hermione appear frequently at the top of the staircase and talk about the class. It was so easy to picture Gilderoy Lockhart coming down and talking about himself with his winning grin.

 

Entrance to Dumbledore's office. If only there was actually a moving staircase that opened when you said "Sherbet Lemon." Speaking of which, Honeyduke's sells Sherbet Lemons as well as many others, including Pepper Imps, which are yummy.

Dumbledore's office. So well done. There's a talking hologram of him also.

The Pensieve! Loved it!

                                              

The Three Broomsticks. I loved the design of this building. We ate there also. BUTTER BEER is the best thing!!! So tasty--like drinking a creamy butterscotch candy. Pear cider was also quite delicious.

Eric in Hogsmeade. Don't let the snow fool you--it certainly felt like Orlando in August. But I think the snow is a really nice touch.

There you have it! Crowded. Hot. Long lines here and there. Expensive. But SO MUCH FUN! We came home with wands for everyone except Eric, who said, "What would I do with it?" ??? Cast spells, of course! Play! Be a wizard! He's missing out. I bet he secretly wishes he spent the 30 bucks. What does he know, though? He washed his hair with lotion the two mornings we were in the hotel, till I pointed it out to him. He is a good man, though. He's still recovering from the injuries to his wallet. Obliviate!