Squirrel Alphabet Spaghetti

Somewhere there is a photo that Alexis will some day hand to her psychologist and say, "This. THIS is why I'm here." She was probably around a year old when it was taken and it's of her sitting in the middle of our grassy yard screaming her bloody head off with her arms stretched to the sky as she pleads with the gods of toddler pity to saaaaaaaave her from the hooorrrrible grass.

I discovered very early that the kid hates getting her hands dirty. It's possible that I used that to my advantage for a long time. If you sat her down in the grass, she would stay there because she wasn't willing to let her precious paws touch the filthy grass.

Do you know how much you can get done when your toddler is rendered immobile by nature?

It was pretty fantastic.

But then one day the kid had the nerve to go and figure out how to stand up without using her hands. My fun and games were over, except that I kept figuring out new ways to screw with the kid and her dirty hands neurosis. You will never ever catch her touching a bathroom wall because I once told her just how many germs were on those walls. She might lick one of those walls, but she won't put her hands on them.

Recently She Who Freaks Out About Dirty Hands has been taking her other flavor of crazy to a new level. She is not and has never been a good sleeper. At all. Still, when my six-year old repeatedly throws herself at me at 2:00 in the morning bawling because there are ants in her bed, I start considering revenge. She's been waking me up two or three times per night for the past few weeks and I AM SO DONE WITH IT.

There are no ants. I've proven it to her a dozen times, but she forgets that inconvenient fact in the middle of the night.

Enter homemade slime. I realize it makes no sense at all to make your kid make slime as punishment for waking you up all of the time, but remember that part about her waking me up all of the time? I'm so tired I'm no longer coherent. What's that squirrel alphabet spaghetti?

Slime is super easy to make. It's just a teaspoon of Borax, a cup of water, and some school glue (we used clear school glue because I wanted see-through slime).

I called Alexis over and told her my plan. We were going to make slime to put in some jars as Halloween decorations. Here's the thing, though. Slime doesn't just magically POOF itself into existence. You start by dissolving the Borax into the water. Then you put some glue in a bowl with some food coloring (if you want it to be colored, that is). Then you pour a little of the Borax water into the glue bowl and ... well, it looks like this.

It's very "unset Jell-O" like both in look and feel. You have to mush it and squeeze it and squish it for a few minutes to get it to turn into slime.

Oh, Alexis! Guess who gets to squish the slime!

She should have HATED it.

She didn't. At all.

Dammit.

At least I got some fun slime out of the attempted torture. And, hopefully I planted the seeds of some spider nightmares while I was at it. I'm done with the ants, after all.

When Muppets Get Furrier

I have two rules when it comes to the barking four-legged furballs that end up living in my house.

1. Thou shalt not have poop that is bigger than that of a human.

2. Thou shalt not shed.

So. Smaller dogs that don't shed. There are plenty of breeds that fit that description. Technically, we have two very different ones right now. Cody the Havanese is PERFECT as far as my two rules are concerned. He's neurotic, but technically perfect.

And then there's Penny.

Penny is most definitely 100% Tibetan Terrier. She mostly fits my two rules.

The poop is not the problem. The shedding is.

So, the thing is that there's a catch in the whole "Tibetan Terriers don't shed" thing. The catch is that at some point during their puppyhood, they grow an undercoat. Mind you, Penny needed more fur about as much as I need to keep taste-testing the Halloween candy. Which is to say, it's not needed. At all. It's still happening, though. When their undercoat comes in, Tibetan Terriers go through a shedding phase. Fortunately, it's short and it's only this once, but OH EM GEE.

I may not survive the Shedding Muppet Phase.

You guys, I combed her from head to toe the other day and wound up with ... this horror.

SO. MUCH. FUR.

And now I think we can all be certain that it's best that I don't have dogs that shed. I'm clearly not built to tolerate it.

The Nerd Can't Be Stopped

Her joy is found in words. She wraps herself in them, holds them tight, and shares their beauty with the world. Alexis spends her every waking moment talking, reading, finding joy in words.

That's my explanation for why she started talking early. It's my excuse for how she managed to teach herself to read so soon. It's why she does things like walk downstairs at midnight to tell me, "Momma, I can't sleep because when I talk my throat hurts."

Words are Alexis' security blanket.

Life has taught us all a lot about how Alexis should use her love of words. An inexperienced kindergarten teacher taught us to go with the flow. Lay low. Don't stand out. We learned that it was perfectly OK if Alexis worked on letter sounds at school while reading Charlotte's Web all by herself at home. Extra work was a burden none of us wanted to deal with ... not even occasionally.

With a new school came a fresh start. Alexis was no longer labeled as "ahead," and we left it that way. The husband and I purposely made a decision that we would let her determine the path she would travel. If she wanted to volunteer that she has known how to spell all of the words on her spelling test literally for years, so be it. If she wanted to ace the tests without any effort, that would be OK as well. No homework is really a very wonderful thing for all parties involved, and that's what we got because the work was and continues to be so simple that Alexis can finish it without giving it a thought.

We have graduated from gathering around the table to struggle through annoying homework that was created specifically to challenger her nightly to ... I don't know that Alexis has had homework yet this year. She sometimes finishes work at her after school care program, but even that is generally limited to one or two minutes.

Is she challenged by school? No.

Do we care? HELL NO.

Alexis spends so much of her spare time wrapping herself in words that it really doesn't matter. She finishes chapter books weekly and continues to read well above her grade level. She creates her own challenges and it's perfect. Absolutely perfect.

But then one night she came bounding over to me, demanding that I check my email. "Momma, there's a permission slip I need to take to school tomorrow!" she reported.

She was correct - there was a permission slip waiting in my inbox. I opened the email and read the details of a voluntary - NOT REQUIRED - not graded - OPTIONAL assignment.

Alexis wanted to do it. She wanted to assign herself a major project to be done outside of school hours so badly she was vibrating from the excitement of it all. "Momma! Please! Pretty please! I want to do a project on electricity!" she nagged and nagged and nagged.

That no nightly homework thing she was fun while it lasted. I guess nerdy kids find their destiny no matter what you do.