No… no… don’t set me aside!
You picked me out of the cereal bowl!!! nooooo!!!!!
I spent my whole life for just this moment! I wanted to be digested, not left to rot in some garbage can.
I spent my whole life making myself sweet for you!
And now….
…and now…
….. you’re just going to throw meee awaaaaay.
My youngest goes off to “Weenitville” a great deal. It’s that special place in her own imagination where her own world unfolds. We named it after her when she was very young and she’s adopted it as her own special place, to reference her own imagination. A safe place to go within one’s self.
She’s a movie producer there – she often works out entire screenplays and “watches movies” in her imagination. Or so she says.
She’s a story teller there – she will weave the strangest plots in her own little world.
Wild stories rich in imagery and character development unfold in Weenitville!
Rachel told me one of these stories just the other day. She had been telling stories in 6-year-old mode? You know the kind of story? And then everything kind of goes up? And then it has a bit of inflection? At the end? But that’s really annoying to listen to. So I told her to tell her stories using her voice as a tool to shape the story. Like music. She had to work at it… and then she started from scratch.
The boy on his way to bed went into his closet to put his clothes in the hamper. Much to his surprise, when he opened the hamper, out came a genie! The genie asked the boy what the boy wanted and offered to grant him three wishes, but not all of them right away. They had to be a month apart. The boy, who was not a good student, asked the genie if the dog would do the boy’s homework whenever he asked and POOF! So it happened.
The boy asked the dog to finish his homework and he did! Only his grades got worse, because the dog was not doing the homework all that well. Also the boy was not learning anything and got further behind in his classes.
The next month the boy again found the genie in his closet and the genie asked him what he wanted. The boy asked the genie if the dog could do his homework well. Because there’s no point having a dog do your homework if it isn’t done well! And POOF! So it happened.
For the next month the boy’s grades skyrocketed! Everytime he asked the dog to do the homework the dog did it all! Happily, and perfectly! But the problem was still that the boy was not learning anything. He failed his test. His parents didn’t understand how he could be doing his work so well and not have a clue how to even do his math at all when they asked him questions, too. And so they were about to send him off to some weird special school.
The next month the boy again found the genie in his closet and the genie asked him what he wanted. The boy asked the genie, this time, if he could just undo the spells, because he really wanted to just be normal again. He wanted to learn his schoolwork. Maybe he wouldn’t get the best grades but that’s okay. He was going to do his best.
POOF! And so it happened. The end!
This kind of story makes a daddy cry. 
Today I was driving to work, peacefully finding my way through the rainy streets of downtown Black Mountain, when….
Some weird explosion beneath my seat just about made me jump out of it. I could feel it through the seat, too, a bump much like running over a log. Only I had not run over a log at all, or anything else for that matter.
“What was that?!” … I sat and thought about it for 15 seconds or so. Then it hit me….
An image of a brown bottle catching my eye a few days ago lurking under my driver’s seat came to my mind… “I really need to get that out of there. And clean up that back area a bit!” It’s very nice in the front where I am, of course, but the kids haven’t yet learned that just a sight amount of neatness, not too much, greatly adds to quality of life. And tolerability of life as well, as it turns out.
The smell. The inescapable smell. The frantic wondering of just what the underside of my driver’s seat might be like now….. Even with all four windows rolled down and worrying about getting pulled over for speeding, the smell was just simply overwhelming.
Sort of a cheesy aroma too, really disgusting in some ways, but in other ways, kinda interesting! That makes me wonder a lot about cheese!
