the mating game

why do i feel compelled to over-explain things to brooke? sometimes i hear myself telling her things when she never even asked a question on the topic, just because i feel like she needs to know things.

she's watching an animal planet show about cheetahs and, of course, there's mating. almost every nature show about animals shows mating and so often, there's violence involved. either the males try to kill each other for mating rights or cubs are killed to bring the female into heat so he can mate with her. there's often biting and aggression inflicted on the poor girl by her determined suitor.

we just found ourselves watching a part where the female was clearly not enjoying her experience. the male was chomping on her neck and she was snarling and trying to bite him back. finally he released her and she skulked away, showing her fangs.

next thing i know, i'm saying to brooke, "when humans mate, it's not like that. i mean, the girl isn't hurt during the process. and there shouldn't be biting. i mean, unless she likes biting, but then it wouldn't be to draw blood, just to.... well,  um...."

it shouldn't be like this.

then i tried to stop and think for a moment before going on with my horrible speech.

"well, sometimes it IS like that and a girl gets hurt and she's mad about it, but that's called rape. and rape is bad. rape is when a man decides he going to mate with a woman whether she likes it or not and while that might be okay in the animal kingdom, that's not okay with humans. and if it ever happens, the police must be told and the man needs to go to jail. and he should probably have his wiener chopped off."

mental hesitation. i clearly didn't pause long enough to think at my last break. why am i explaining rape to a nine year old innocent?

"but mostly with humans, the mating part should be nice. and last longer than thirty seconds. and the partners should love each other and stay together afterwards. and the girl shouldn't be mad at the end. and the male shouldn't kill her babies."

it should be more like this.

i'm such an awkward human sometimes.

the valentine squirrel

every family has some traditions that make certain days extra special. there are the standards like santa and the easter bunny. or you might have an adoption day celebration of some sort. when i was growing up, my mom was really good at inventing ways to make days feel special. at one point, she decided that whenever one of our family members who didn't live in our house had a birthday, we'd have dessert for breakfast. brownies and milk before school? yes please, and happy birthday aunt joan!

another little gem she invented was the valentine squirrel. we would get an annual visit from the mysterious squirrel. at night while we were sleeping on the night before v-day, the squirrel would hide 25 hershey kisses around our bedrooms for us to find and gobble upon waking. of course, we never found them all right away. sometimes months would go by before the last one or two would be discovered and one even turned up possibly years later when we moved. by then it was mummified, dusty and covered in white spots.

there was also a treasure hunt with clues that led us to some prize at the end and a basket filled with fun little goodies. it was kind of like easter in february, but without the bunny or eggs.

i've started doing the valentine squirrel with brooke for the past several years. each year i have more fun hiding the kisses because her ability to look for them improves, so i like to give her a challenge. she decided after the first year that she couldn't properly celebrate this holiday without an actual, physical squirrel to hold and play with. but do you have any idea how hard it is to find a toy squirrel?

we searched high and low for a couple months to find this elusive squirrel and one day at walmart, brooke spotted one in a lady's cart, walking through the store. so i ran to catch up with her and asked her where she found it. in the dog toy department! why didn't i think to look there? we found it, bought it and brooke promptly named it Tiny.

one year i made a cute little pink, hearty shirt for tiny to wear on his big day, but brooke immediately ripped it off and told me that squirrels don't wear shirts. duh. i guess i won't waste any more hours making clothes for squirrels. though, in brooke's world, dogs, cats and hamsters do wear clothes. obviously.

i haven't started on the treasure hunt business yet because i just haven't felt inspired to invest that kind of time in the process. and once i've done it the first time, i'll never be able to NOT do it again without brooke feeling let down. so i just haven't done it. however, she did get a bowl filled with paint bottles and sugar this morning.

i was awakened at 7:30 by brooke bouncing on my bed, squealing, laughing and telling me that she'd already consumed at least 30 pieces of chocolate. she woke up at 5:55 and got started right away. this is the one day of the year that i let her go buck wild with the junk food and we take a day off from school because there's no way she'd be able to concentrate with blood as thick as syrup slogging through her veins. plus, if she eats it all in one day, we can get back on track tomorrow and fondly remember the day when sugary goodness rained from the sky.

seymour

you know what a prairie dog looks like, right?

completely adorable and so fuzzy!

when i was 20, i was a live-in nanny for a family with three little kids. i'd been there for over a year when i went into a pet store one day and they were selling prairie dogs. oh my gosh, i couldn't stand the cuteness of these little guys! i was overwhelmed with my need to own one no matter what.

it was $100 for the critter and $200 for the cage which, fifteen years ago was really pricey. but it didn't matter if it was a thousand dollars. i was going to find a way to own one.

i went home and begged my boss to let me bring one to her house where i lived. she reluctantly agreed as long as it would stay in the cage and not make her house stink.

away i went, back to the pet store to pick out a prairie dog of my very own. i ooo'ed and aawww'ed over them all for a while and then picked out the sweetest little boy ever. i took him home and got his giant three story cage all set up for him. 

i loved him. i poured over maps to find a perfect name for him. i wanted to give him a name that would represent his roots, so i picked the name seymour after a town in texas where i imagined he might have been born.

seymour never liked to be held very much. he was definitely a wild animal even though he lived in a cage in my room. he was silent all the time, but seemed happy when i fed him every day. i kept waiting to hear the legendary prairie dog bark, but months went by without so much as a peep.

then one day i got sick. i had a nasty cold and couldn't stop coughing. and suddenly, seymour wasn't mute anymore. he barked every time i coughed. day and night. yip, yip, yip. i'm still not sure if he was making alarm calls or if he was responding as if my cough was conversational. once i was healthy again, i would often fake cough just to get him to bark at me.

the kids i lived with thought seymour was pretty cool. they spent a lot of time in my room talking to him, watching him, petting his little face and paws with their fingers through the bars of his cage.

unfortunately, he started getting aggressive after a few months. he would bite any finger he could grab and he chewed at the bars incessantly. sometimes i would come into my room and find a toenail on the floor and blood spatters on my rug from him trying to dig his way to freedom. he also started to smell really bad. my room became super ratty and gross.

i contacted the pet store to see if i could sell him back, but they weren't having it. i tried several places in the area like animal shelters, zoos, wildlife conservations places, but no one would even take him for free. one place did tell me though that it was prairie dog mating season and his behavior was typical of a male looking for a female. so there i was, stuck with this angry, stinking critter who was hurting himself in his desperation to get out of his cage. it made my heart sad every time i walked into my room or thought about poor seymour.

there came a time when i finally had to admit defeat. i couldn't keep a bitey, stanky, self destructive rodent in my nanny house any longer. and no one would take him. i couldn't think of anything else to do, so i drove way out of town in my little hatchback car with seymour in his cage in the back end. i found a place that was mainly devoid of humans and i set him free. he scampered off lickety split into the underbrush without so much as a look back.

i bawled my eyes out and then took his big, expensive cage and pitched it into a dumpster behind some shopping center because i never wanted to see it again. i didn't want to be reminded of my failure to make a lovable pet out of an adorable wild animal. i didn't want to think about the fate that probably awaited my little seymour now that he was back in the wild again.

when i think back on it now, i like to imagine that maybe he found a foxy little squirrel girl to shack up with and maybe they made some nifty mixed race babies. maybe he lived to be an old grandpa, telling stories to the kids about his former life spent barking at the coughing lady in the big house.

a week with the dogs

last week, as i mentioned in my last post, we were dog sitting for my sister. we only have cats, so it was very different to be in the house of dog, but fun. taking them for walks everyday was good for us, as well as them and going to petsmart with critters this big was definitely different. usually we go there to visit other people's dogs, but this time we were the ones with the dogs.

why yes, he does like to take a stick on a walk.

brooke had a great time with them and loved all the hulking dog-flesh surrounding her. she was able to walk angus, african boerboel, on his leash several times and she felt pretty powerful to be taking a dog, who weighs significantly more than she does, out for a walk.

kobe, great dane, thinks she's a lapdog and wants to snuggle all up in your grill whenever you sit down. she's ridiculously sweet, and we liked cuddling on the couch, though waking up with her whiskery nose in my ear every morning wasn't awesome.

brooke took advantage of the great weather we had on a couple days and took angus out front for some quality time together. she read him books and sang him songs and brought him a branch out of the neighbor's yard to chew so he'd be happy.

and we were all amused to find him sleeping on the couch later with his teddy-no-snouty tucked under his arm.

it was a good week, but i'm glad to be back here with our little purry buddies.

tipsy chickens x2

15 years ago, when chris and i were dating, i was living at my parents' house and i was working in a little office. one weekend, my parents and little sisters were out of town and chris was driving a limo, so he was out pretty much all night, which meant that i was left to my own devices that friday night.

after work was over for the day, a couple co-workers and i decided that we were going to go to tgifridays, across the parking lot for dinner and perhaps a drink or two. the tables were all full, so we sat at the bar. somehow i think i forgot to eat dinner that night and accidentally had about 5 drinks instead. i was drinking royal flushes, which i'd never had before (or after, for that matter) and they were just so fruity and delicious that i kept guzzling them and ordering more. eventually, my co-workers needed to go back to their lives, so they left me there because of course i assured them that i was absolutely fine and didn't need anyone to babysit me.

when i was finally ready to go, i tipped the bartender excessively, stumbled out of the bar, and back across the parking lot toward my office where my car was parked. on the way there, two men who were sitting in a parked car stopped me and asked if i had any tattoos. i did and showed them my body art. then they asked if i wanted a cigar, which i did, so i climbed into the back seat of that car with those two strange men and smoked a fat stogie. when i was finished, i got back out and kept heading toward my car. once i got there i realized that i really shouldn't be driving, so i managed to unlock my office door and bumble my way inside. i wasn't sure what i was going to do while i was in there, probably drunk page chris a few times or take a lil nap till i thought i was sober enough to drive my stupid ass home. i had only just tripped through the door when my boss returned to the office to check on me. i guess it had occurred to him that i probably wasn't in any state to be taking myself anywhere and he was kind enough to come back in order to taxi me home in his crappy chevette.

i got back to my parents' house; i went inside and collapsed into bed. it wasn't even dark yet, but i just couldn't stay awake. i took the phone to bed with me because i was hoping chris would eventually have time to call me back since i'd paged him repeatedly for no good reason.

around midnight i woke up sick and ran outside (it was closer than the bathroom) and puked by the back door, all over the ground and then crawled straight back into bed, still in my work clothes. around 3am i woke up again and by then i was approaching sober and noticed that the back door was wide open. i got a little bit nervous that i'd been sleeping with the house open and there was no one else home to protect my foolish self, so i snatched the phone out of my bed to try calling chris, but the phone had no dial tone. i ran upstairs and checked the kitchen phone. that one was dead too! i was suddenly positive that someone had cut the phone lines, snuck into the house, and i was in imminent danger of being raped and killed.

i ran straight out of the house to my parents' next door neighbor where i proceeded to bang and ring until the kind, little man came down in his pajamas to see what the heck was going on. (maybe i wasn't quite as sober as i thought) he came back to my house and went room by room with me, poking through every nook and cranny looking for the boogieman. we made it to my room last and that's when he discovered that my cordless phone had been left turned on in my bed, so the lines weren't cut, it was just off the hook. hence the lack of a dial tone. i felt rather stupid after that and walked him politely to the door and thanked him for saving me from my imagination.

i was able to reach chris after that, which was good because he'd been concerned that i'd paged him multiple times but when he called me back, he could only get a busy signal on the house phone.

the next morning i was feeling pretty stupid about my escapades of the previous night and i went out back to find a hose so i could clean off the patio where i'd hurled my royal flushes so indelicately, but the patio was practically spotless. where had the barf gone? that's when one of my sisters chickens came waddling over, pecking around the edges of the patio. finishing off the last scraps of my stupid evening till there was nothing left to show for it... but tipsy chickens.

schooling outside the box

sometimes homeschooling is great and i don't hate it at all. there are certainly days when i want to shuck that kid off to school & pass her aspie issues to someone else so i can have a break, but so far this school year, we're doing quite well. i've made a lot of changes in how i structure our days and it seems to be working nicely for the brookster. i'm more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of person, but she's not & since it's her education we're working on here, i need to be more flexible in accomodating her need for a schedule.

we've had great sucess in keeping the cats close at hand for intermittent "kitty therapy" when brooke starts to feel overwhelmed. it helps to defuse volatile school situations when she can dig her fingers into some warm kitty fur for a minute.

though, sometimes, the cats can be more of a distraction than a help...

i was trying to help her understand fractions a couple days ago and the little manipulatives we were using weren't quite making the point. so i wrote on her feet. i told her that if i was only in the mood to eat 1/3 of her foot, look how much she'd still have left!

and this one, brooke took of herself. she was doing an art project where she needed to make a realistic picture of someone lost in thought. she couldn't think of exactly how to draw it, so she set up my camera on a timer & posed herself in the position she wanted to draw her picture critter. here's her drawing.

and when we have to tackle things that i know are going to be really difficult, i try to think outside the box in order to make them more fun. for instance, yesterday we were needing to do some dictionary practice. brooke detests doing anything dictionary related. alphabetizing is really hard for her and spelling is rough too, so i had to come up with a way to make it less suckish. so i had her look up the following words: plop, boll weevil, tuna, fat, urine, hag, tinkle, spit, breast, tinkle, mud. then i read the definitions to her in a very prim, proper voice. today, she's begging for more dictionary time and she even said that if we don't have time for it during school hours, maybe we could do it after school. i would have to count that as a win.

i suppose i need to do a little work on phone etiquette though because yesterday when we were at my sister's house, the phone rang. brooke picked it up and said, "woof," then hung up. oops.

lizards on lunch break

as kids, we all have dreams and goals for ourselves. one of mine was to catch a lizard. i grew up in new york where lizards aren't generally available for catching unless i went to my neighbor's terrarium and that didn't count. however, my grandparents had a house in florida where they spent every winter and every couple years, we'd drive down there (it took about 22 hours in the car) to spend a week.

when we got down to the land of warmth and sand, my brother and i would always chase the lizards around and try to catch them. i never managed to do any better than to graze one with a finger before they'd zip away from me, but my brother caught a few.

we had read in books that lizards drop off their tails sometimes when they're caught by a predator and grow back a new one over time. this intrigued me beyond reason and i had wonderful visions of holding a lizard tail in my hand while the rest of him scampered away, scott free. it didn't seem disgusting at all to me, just amazing and i kind of wished i could drop off an arm or a leg if someone i didn't like ever grabbed me.


since we've moved to our current home, we now live in the land of the lizards. they're not the big, scaly ones, but rather the little green and brown ones that don't get more than a few inches long with soft skin that caves in a little on the sides when they breathe fast. brooke (and our cats) are excited by the lizards and brooke decided that it was her goal to catch one. huh, must be genetic.

she sits out on the back terrace and waits for them to shoot past on the railing that serves as the reptile highway. a few days ago she snuck up on one and made a mad grab only to end up with a tiny little tail chunk flailing about in her grip. she screamed and threw the tail into the bush & then ran to tell me about it. that's when i remembered how i had once dreamed of holding a tail myself, not realizing that they thrash about once they've come free.

my desire to possess a tail is gone.

today i let brooke go downstairs for lunch and almost as soon as she went down, she came running, squealing right back up to my room yelling "i finally did it! i finally did it!" when she charged into the room, she was holding a little lizard by the tail, with a great big grin on her face.

i was a bit concerned that the tail would snap off and there would be a crop tailed reptile running around my bedroom, so i took her picture and sent her back downstairs to release her critter outside. she stopped on the way to show the lizard to her little nim cat & kitty snatched that lizard right out of her hand, leaving the tail in brooke's fingers and charging off with the rest of it in her mouth. she played cat and lizard with it for a couple minutes before we managed to get it away from her and cart it back outside. thankfully nim is more pouncy than bitey.

i guess that little lizard will have quite a tale to tell to his friends later today. and i bet he'll remember his mama's words of wisdom and not go into people houses again.

living the island life

last week i went on vacation with my family to a little island a few hours from here called kiawah. it's close to charleston, sc. chris couldn't go cuz he was busy being a good employee, but i had a blast with my family. my 3 siblings were there along with all three of brooke's cousins on my side of the family. with all of our schedules being super busy and us living in different states, it's rare that we get to all hang out for more than just a few hours at christmas some years. my parents rented a huge, gorgeous house for the week, including a nice in-ground pool out back & a yard that dropped into a lagoon.




i felt like we were spending a week inside the lifestyles of the rich & the famous, only we were driving a 12 passenger van rather than a rolls royce.

one of the most exciting parts of the trip was all the alligators that live on the island. and there aren't any fences, just open spaces with marshes, swamps, lagoons and ponds where the gators are free to roam about as they wish. there aren't any restaurants or shops on the island, and you can't get in without overnight accommodations, so if you're there, it's probably mainly to go to the beach or lay around in your big ritzy house. the main mode of transportation is bike, so we rode our bikes everywhere, including into the ocean on the beach.

on our first morning i stopped to take this picture and moments after that, i resumed my little ride along the path that went right between 2 lagoons. as i was passing through, i saw a line of bubbles approaching the shore only a few feet away from me. brooke was ahead & my mom was behind me when suddenly there was a huge growling roar coming from the water right where i'd just seen the bubbles. the roar came three times as we zoomed along the path & raced for home & since there was no place for machinery or other large things that could have made the noise, we could only conclude that it was a gator growing at us for getting too close to its space. it was pretty intense.


we saw several swimming through waterways and under bridges we were standing on & i was able to get a couple decent pictures. thankfully we didn't have any bad encounters with the gators, even riding through alligator alley beside our house every day.





we also had some pretty fun encounters with crabs. there were lots of different types of crabs to watch & play with, the biggest being a horseshoe crab. my brother was the crab harasser & he kept chasing & catching lives ones so we could get good looks at them. the kids spent about an hour with one horseshoe crab giving it sand massages, singing it songs & rolling it over to watch how it's stomach muscles flapped around when it moved.

the beach was huge and clean and mostly empty. there were tons of things to see and collect and examine. the waves weren't too rough and no one got too hurt. all in all, it was about a perfect vacation.

it was a little bit sad to come home and get back to real life after a wonderful week soaking up sun, laughing with kids, riding bikes down interestingly murky paths, and eating wonderful food. but at least i can look back at my pictures and remember it all with a smile.

gerbils and helium

when i was a junior in high school, my whole family (consisting of 2 parents, 2 teenagers and 2 toddlers) took a month long drive from our house in ny, all the way out to california, down the coast, back across the country and up the east coast. we stayed in a different motel 6 almost every night and spent most of our daylight hours on the road. it was a wonderful trip and we got a chance to learn a lot about our great big country while traveling fairly cheap.

while we were gone, our pets were left with various friends around town, but when we returned, we discovered that one of our gerbils hadn't made it. our friend didn't want to tell us about it while we were still on the road for fear that we'd feel sad and it would dampen our trip, so she put the gerbil into a butter tub and stuck it in her freezer.

this gerbil was not an especially treasured pet. we always had lots of pets and my brother went through a phase of rodent collecting, so it was just one of several. we didn't know if this one was male or female, so it was named Herm. in other words, we didn't know if it was a her or a him. hence, her/m. never mind, the joke goes flat when you have to explain it.

it was october when we got home and by the time we had the little buttery body back in our possession, the ground in our part of the country was already getting too hard for digging holes. we didn't want to flush herm down the toilet, partly because, well, yuck, and partly because it was questionable if it was too large to make it through the pipes. so we opted to leave the critter cadaver on ice through the winter.

the next spring we remembered that it was still there and we had a long distance move in our near future, so we needed to go ahead and get herm into a final resting place. my brother was often colorful in his sense of humor and liked to do things a little differently, so he came up with an unusual plan for disposing of his little dead pet.

it was his senior year at the time and we planned a big graduation party for all of our friends. we rented a helium tank, but no balloons so that guests could just fill up their lungs with it and we'd have a big, noisy munchkin festival. we converted a small shoe box into a lovely, satin lined coffin for herm and we even attached little poles to each corner so that it could be carried like a proper coffin to the burial place.

we drafted 4 strong male friends to be pall bearers and carry the corpse through the yard on their shoulders to the garden. we had friends who participated in being loud and raucous mourners as the somber procession moved through the yard. we had a "pastor" on hand who said a few kind words and a prayer at the grave sight. a couple people stood by the hole and recounted their memories of herm while wiping tears from their eyes.

slowly, herm's casket was lowered to the ground and placed gently into the hole we'd prepared. all our party guests took turns throwing handfuls of dirt into the grave until the hole was filled. a stone was placed at the head of the hole with "HERM" engraved on it.

we fake cried a little bit more and then commenced with the revelry and helium huffing. and a good time was had by all.

cat crazy

our house is filled with kitty drama. actually, ever since that dang stray showed up last april i've had far more cat shenanigans than i ever planned or really wanted. the stray had a litter of 4 in brooke's playhouse last may and of course we eventually had to let brooke bring one inside to keep for her very own. that fluffy grey ball of cuteness is nim. or as we often refer to her, nimcompoop.

nim has been a trouble maker ever since she came into our house. she harasses our older cat, sophie to no end and now that we've moved, she has a new cat buddy to pester. meet mooch. he belongs to my in-laws and is a very good natured, even keel kind of guy. he used to be a fighter back when he was younger, but he seems to have retired in his old age and now he lives for tuna and naps.

from their very first meeting back 5 weeks ago, nim has been in mooch's face, chasing him and annoying him to no end. he usually just runs away from her and cowers, but this week i've seen the tables turn. you've got to understand ~ mooch weighs 21 pounds and nim weighs 7, but she has clearly been the bully in this scenario. i've been wishing that mooch would give rotten lil nim the beatin' of the week and show her that this was his house first & he is not to be trifled with.

finally it seems like moochy is coming out of retirement and he's been putting her in her place with a speed slap here and a chase there. and now that he's been fighting back rather than running off, i've seen them start to hang out and play together. i wonder if he'll lose some weight now that he's got a sneaky nimburger chasing around with him all the time. maybe i should hire someone to chase me around in the hopes of reducing my waistline.

there's no snuggling amongst our three kitties, but they are learning to share space and co-habitate peaceably most of the time now.

sophie tries to stay out of the fray & naps upstairs in the window seat on a giant pillow. yes, she looks just like mooch, only about half his size.

nim rips and romps around the house, looking for fun in all the wrong places.

and mooch sits by the door, begging to go out.