Lickitung

Scene: parents' bedroom, early evening
Dramatis personae: MOTHER (reading), DAUGHTER (drawing My Little Pony comic), DRACHMA the Kitten (licking backside daintily)

Enter FATHER, with flea treatment squirt bottle. Places bottle at back of DRACHMA's head, squirts flea treatment on cat.

DAUGHTER: What's that, Daddy?
FATHER: That's the kitten's flea stuff, sweetie. Don't pet Drachma on the head because you don't want to get that on your hands, it'll make you sick.
DAUGHTER: Well that's silly, because if Drachma licks it off he'll get sick, too.
FATHER: That's why I put it on the back of his head, sweetie, because he can't lick it off the back of his head. If Daddy could lick the back of HIS head Mommy would give him all her money.
MOTHER: (Snort)
DAUGHTER: I don't get it, why would she do that?
FATHER: You'll understand when you get bigger.
MOTHER: (Snort)

Suck Hot Flaming Laser Death

Since I REALLY don't want to think about waking up tomorrow to find my country re/electing an entitled clueless dick, here's some cute kid pictures...

from our local laser tag place.

I took the Boy and his pal Vinnie there Sunday and they romped and raged and blasted the birthday kids with photoelectric death.

I played the first game with them and here's the proof that 22 years of military experience makes you better than 18 random suburban dads, soccer moms, and cake-fueled nine-year-olds at wielding faux electronic weaponry;

I am become Death, Destroyer of Birthday Boys.

OhmiGod! The kids are climbing the walls!

These are from the preceding weekend. Little Miss wanted to show what she had learned:Yeah, that'll get you a full ride at Stanford, sweetie.

But it did inspire the Boy to show us what HE could do. So here they are, climbing the walls:Sadly, the Great Louse Invasion still goes on - Mojo is home today steeping the Girl's head in some awful prescription Pemetherin^TM goop that's supposed to kill the little bastards. However, we've already tried the over-the-counter insecticide shampoos, which I read are already full of Pemetherin and have, apparently, facilitated the breeding of a race of super-lice immune to the toxin. Great.

I welcome our new ectoparasitic masters.

Missy Explains Bugs For You

Little Miss took advantage of the nice evening yesterday to build a little house for the friendly bugs on the deck.
Here she is patiently explaining all about bugs to Daddy, who doesn't know about bugs.

Funny little girl.

Oopsie Ow

My daughter has always loved stories; telling them (although her style is as circumloculatory as you'd expect for 3.9 years old...) and hearing them. And, although neither her mother nor I have encouraged her, she has turned out to be quite a Pretty in Pink sort of little girl. She loves all things soft, plush, pastel and princessy. And that includes the "Disney Princess"^TM brand of story. Like most little ones, she can - and prefers - to read and re-read the same story over and over again. So we know the stories of Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and their sisters pretty damn well.Recently, however, she has developed a devilish little strain of anarchic humor which is known generically around the Fire Direction Center as the "Oopsie Ow Version". "Oopsie Ow" means that the Daddy is required to throw figurative stones at the poor princesses. They now have to slip, trip, fall, bump their heads, wrench their backs and suffer embarrasing catastrophic loss-of-coolant bladder accidents. Their reaction has to be an agonized wail of...you guessed it: "Oopsie OW!"

Instead of kisses, their princes receive smacks on the earhole or kicks in the backside. It's all very slapsticky, and elicits great peals of laughter from Small Miss. Even her brother, who usually scorns her princess stories as sissy girl stuff, has been known to creep up next to my lap to join in the enjoyment of Cinderella punting Prince Charming square in the kisser with her bare foot as he tries to glass-slipper her, or Boots the Monkey flinging his poop at Dora and nailing her between the eyes. Oopsie Ow!I'm not sure what fertile soil sprouted the Oopsie Ow; the Girl doesn't seem to translate all of this comic misfortune into a larger sense of malaise with the world or a cynical view of princesses and princessing. Which is good - a cynical four-year-old would be just too Wes Anderson.

But having the notion that not only is real life not like a fairy tale but that even fairy tales aren't always like a fairy tale?I'm surprisingly okay with that.

Teach a Girl to Fish...

Little Miss spent part of a rainy Saturday gutter fishing for leaves.
No real point here other than the utter cuteness.

She's a great swimmer, too - she paddled around the shallow end like an adorable little otter in a pink floatie.

Cleats up

Saturday we had a nice break in the weather, so Little Girl, Big Man and I went to our little Portsmouth Park to have a kickabout. Let's say that Missy has the enthusiasm but not the technique quite down.But given her style, I suspect that she's well on the way to becoming a savagely brutal outside back or an all-in mixed martial arts fighter.

I'm not sure which one frightens me less...

Slammed

I'm way behind on everything but work this week - we're out on a big drilling program for Portland Water Bureau (and, of course, everything ELSE we need to pick up) so just as an example I left the house before sunrise yesterday at 5:30, spent the day drilling holes in southeast Portland, then back to the shop to drop off logs and samples, e-mail data to the client...and then back in the truck to ride up to north Portland to read the inclinometer at the north portal of the BES "Big Pipe" project. I got home some time after 8:00.

Whew.

But I had to post this. Understand that the Peeper is SO over "Thomas the Train". Done. Finito. Thomas is as stale as last month's bread. His little sister does give Thomas a prop or two but way less than she's all about Barbie or Dora or even Little Ponies, dear God may I claw my eyes out before I have to watch another "Little Pony" video... So last month the Peep put all his Thomas wooden trains up for sale on Craigslist and raked in a bundle - seventy bucks, which is wealth beyond dreams of avarice for a six-and-a-half-year-old. The entire wad was blown, incidently, on a monster Star Wars LEGO toy. Six-and-a-half-year-olds have the financial self-control of a Goldman Sachs investment banker. But then, you know that.

Anyway, the nice woman and her little boy who bought the lot were very...Portland. Intelligent. Polite. Well-informed. Clad in fleece, natural fibers and Gore-tex, and probably active in good causes, like fair-trade coffee and the public option for health care reform. And Nice Mom knew exactly which of the made-in-China Thomas toys she didn't want; that is, the ones that some nameless Chinese toymaker had slathered with enough lead paint to retard an entire daycare.

One of these was "Old Slowcoach", who we had bought back when the Peeper was about four or so knowing that he was over the whole "toys taste so good, let's put one in our mouth and relax" thing.

So Old Slowcoach stayed behind, sadly, while all his other train friends went to their new home to play with the Groovy Girls and gender-neutral blocks and balls that Portland parents prefer - we are ones ourselves, or at least were before the ur-boy butterfly emerged from the gentle toddler crystalis and spread his armored wings, flying off to blasters and lightsabers and everything that explodes or shoots something.

But the entire farrago brought one thing home to our little family: the lead-paint issue as it relates to toys, ingestion and brain development. And, also in typical Fire Direction family style, the way it settled into the family patois was more than a little warped. So now, when one of the children is going a bit out of control, or being extra silly, or funny, Mojo or I will roll our eyes at them and ask:

"Has one of you been licking Old Slowcoach again..?"

So...here are the kids after an Old Slowcoach lollipop:

All Cozy

After we got home from IKEA little Miss found her kitty Lily sleeping on the couch and decided that they should both take a nap.So she made a cozy towel nest for the cat, who tolerated it with the indifference that has made her the most kid-friendly of the two furry little moochers for whom we provide support staff, and then snuggled down herself.Which lasted all of four minutes, of course, since once the TV was on the girl climbed up on her stool to stare at the screen from six inches away.We need to get that girl's vision checked soonest. We really do.