Suspicion

11.12.07

As I sit down to write this, the dog is grounded to Outside.  I don’t know when she can come back in.  I just have to wonder… why is everybody around here so darn naughty?

 

I had a lovely “girls’ night in” last weekend.  One friend brought pizza.  One brought chocolate.  Dark chocolate.  Ghiradelli chocolate.  With raspberry.  We hauled our winter scrap-booking projects out and worked and gabbed the night away. 

 

What remains is chocolate.  Two bowls on my dining room table filled with rich, dark, sensual chocolate.

 

Except that all of a sudden I realize the bowls are empty.  The table cloth is torn and scratched.  And the dog is acting down-right psychotic.

 

Oh no.

 

Did I hear somewhere that chocolate is fatal to dogs?  Hmm.  That would be two problems solved – waistline and constant aggravation.  Whoops, did I say that out loud?  Nah, no matter how aggravating the dog is, my child’s devastation would be worse to deal with.  At least I think it would be, although… she didn’t have any issues with flushing the goldfish…

 

Anyway.  Before I got distracted by the Case of the Missing Chocolate I was going to talk about counting bears.

 

Funny how you can tell there’s something up with your kid even though you can’t nail down exactly why you think there’s something up.  Is it body language?  Facial expression?  That creepy sixth sense that mothers just seem to have?

 

A few days ago when I picked my daughter up from school I could tell there was something going on.  Maybe it was the way she peeked into her jacket pocket and then wanted to go home immediately.  This, the child who never wants to go home.

 

“Hey, what’s your hurry today, Miss?”

 

“Nothing.  I don’t have nothing.”

 

Uh-huh.  Okay, I’ll bite.  “What do you have?”

 

“Nothing.  I didn’t find nothing.”

 

“What did you find?”

 

"It’s a secret."

 

I’m definitely intrigued now.  Last year when she didn’t have anything, I found 20 plastic character rings in her backpack.  The kind you might find on the top of cupcakes.  My daughter insisted she “found” them.  When I asked the teacher if my child should have so many rings, she cracked up.  All the kids had been looking for their rings all day long.  “But I found them, Mom.  I did.”  Upon further questioning it was determined that whenever another child set their ring down somewhere, MY child scooped it up and tucked it into her backpack.  Finders keepers and all that.

 

This time her secret was a tiny red plastic teddy bear.  Small enough to easily enclose in her fist.  “Can I take it home, Mommy?”

 

“I don’t know,” I said, “Let’s show it to the afternoon teacher and you can ask her.”

 

The afternoon teacher shrugged.  She didn’t know where it came from.  It was okay for my girl to take it home.

 

But the mystery of the bear grew a little more at home.  “This is my counting bear, Mom.”

 

“Why is it a counting bear?  Does it belong to a game at school?”

 

“No, no,” she insists, “It wasn’t part of a game.”

 

“How many counting bears are there?” I ask.

 

“Lots,” she says, “But this bear was nowhere.  I found it.”

 

Two days later when I picked her up from school I found EIGHT little counting bears in assorted colors piled next to her mailbox.  I am now eight times suspicious of one little red plastic bear.  I gathered them up and showed them to the daytime teacher.  “Do these belong somewhere?”

 

“They belong in the math center,” she said. 

 

I looked pointedly at my girl, “They belong in the math center,” I repeated, “and they need to stay at school.”

 

I could see she was agreeable, but I suspected it was mostly an attempt to keep me quiet about the little red counting bear that was already at home.  “I can keep the bear at home, right?” she whispered.

 

I made a compromise.  “Yes,” I said, “until you’re done playing with it, or until you feel bad about having it home.  Then it can come back here.”

 

I’d like to tell you how it all worked out, but I ungrounded the dog 5 minutes too soon, and now I have figure out if the room-sized rug can be saved.

 

Sometimes a mess can turn your stomach.  Sometimes it just smells likechocolate.

 

CafeMom and other stuff

10.30.07

There is a place on the internet called Cafemom, if you mothers out there aren’t already spending way too much time on the internet.  One can spend hours there writing journals, reading journals, venting, ranting, giving advice, and arguing Christianity versus Atheism.  Mostly the last one, and whether that is good or bad depends upon how much you like impossible arguments.  Me?  Well, I get enough of those at home, thanks.

 

“It’s too cold to wear shorts today.  Yes, I realize the sun is shining, but it’s still too cold to wear shorts.  Trust me, it’s too cold to wear shorts.  Ok, let’s put on your shoes so we can go.  No, it’s too cold to wear sandals.”

 

And on and on and on, world without end, amen. 

 

But here’s something cool:  I joined a group of people on Cafemom who have 4 year olds.  Which means I’m not the only person in the world arguing daily about the weather.  I’m also not the only person in the world who has a kid who can wipe the front but still can’t reach the back.  I have to tell you, this makes me feel great!  I can always findsomeone else living with the exact same weirdness that I live with.  And that is a cool thing.

 

The downside is I can always find people who are happy to let me in on the little secret that my soul will burn in hell for all eternity because I think church is boring.

 

I guess you can’t win them all, can you?

 

Once in a while I find cute little messages in my inbox that say, “I will pray for you.”  This is meant to insult me, which I find amusing because I’m okay with people praying for me.  I pray sometimes, too, although I don’t go around bragging about it.  Go ahead and pray for me, especially if you think your prayers are going to hurt me, because I don’t think it works that way.  And if you think it does, then perhaps you need to re-examine your definition of what it means to be Christ-like (definition number 4 of “Christian” at dictionary.com).

 

Anyway.  That wasn’t my point.  My point was that my beautiful daughter is quite normal, as much as a 4 year old can be considered normal.  She can be the sweetest, most well-mannered child in the world, and an hour later the most horrid little brat ever.  She argues, she dawdles, she races.  She doesn’t want to hold my hand in parking lots.  She doesn’t want to wear her seat belt.  She gives me a hundred kisses, but she loves Daddy more.  Until she skins her knee, and then only Mommy can make it better.  Until Mommy says she can’t have a 3rd bowl of ice cream, then she only wants Daddy.

 

I think her grasp of the English language is phenomenal.  The other day she said with perfect diction, “Yes, yes, indeed, indeed.”  The same day she was laying on the landing at the bottom of the stairs and said, “You can’t expect me to walk up all of those stairs – I’m just a little baby!”  The same day the printer was disconnected from the computer and she screamed, “Now I can NEVER print any pictures EVER AGAIN!” The same day she watched the movie Narnia in it’s entirety without falling asleep even for a minute (wow, I can’t even pull that one off).

 

Every day she says or does something that knocks my socks off.  She navigates the pbskids.org website like a pro.  And the telephone – she suddenly loves talking on the phone.  A friend called me the other day, and his son wanted to say hello to my daughter, and the next thing you know a playdate has been scheduled.  At THEIR convenience.  I had to wrestle the phone away from Little Miss Grown-Up.

 

In fact, she acts so grown-up that now and again I make an error in judgment. She’s been talking about a “Spooky Walk” at school, so I figured a li’l haunted garage would be right up her alley.  I even called it a spooky walk for her benefit.  But the pale silent child that came out of that garage was not the same spunky costumed fairy that went in.  Um, whoops.  She recovered, however, when she remembered the warning that had been called into the garage as she entered, “Take it easy, there’s a 2 year old coming through.” 

 

Nothing offends her sensibilities more than being called a 2 year old.  Not even a scary guy in a glowing skull mask that appears out of thin air.  Whew.  Saved, once again, by the indomitable spirit of a 4 year old.

NaNoWriMo

10.15.07

Countdown: 18 days.  As in, “How long until that challenge-thingy you signed up for starts?”  18 days.  As in, “How long before you can start writing that novel?”  18 days. 

 

I mentioned in a September column that I planned to challenge myself and sign up for  NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writers Month). Well I’m all signed up and ready to go.  Thank goodness I have a column and can write something, because plot and character development have been spinning ‘round my brain for so long now that NOT writing it all down is excruciating.  Nobody mentioned what an exercise in self-control this is.  Or maybe they did and I didn’t pay attention.

 

So here I am calling on anyone who’s ever said, “I should write a novel.”  Now’s your big chance!  Signing up is easy – just log onto nanowrimo.org and click the button that says “sign up.”  You create a profile that mostly consists of a large empty progress bar that measures word count.  Then you can browse forums on the site, add writing buddies to your profile, and even (so they say) find regional and local people who will be working on the same challenge.

 

In these last weeks until November 1st you can daydream and brainstorm about plot and character and motivation.  Do some research, post messages in the forums, and mostly get yourself psyched up and excited to write. 

 

I already warned my husband that there would be no cooking or cleaning in the month of November.  He raised an eyebrow at me and said, “So what else is new?”  I would take offense at that reaction, only then I’d have to cook and clean to make the point that I am perfectly capable of cooking and cleaning, and that seems like a trap I don’t want to get caught in, so I’m going to let it slide.  Which, I think, might have been his point.  But whatever.

 

Lookie there!  The above paragraph contains 89 words.  A word count of 50,000 is all you need to “win” NaNoWriMo.  50,000 words is about 200 double-spaced word processor pages.  Heck, that’s no problem.  My 2nd novel was 90,000 words, and that one only took me a year an a half to complete.  Fifty thousand in a month shouldn’t be awful.  1666 words a day.  I usually try to get 800 words into a column, which takes me about an hour, so double that daily – it’s do-able.  Heck, break it down like that and it’s not even all that scary.

 

Hmm, let me think what else you need to know to join NaNo.  It’s free, but participants are welcome to donate money to help cover administrative costs.  You’re supposed to write a fictional story of 50,000 words or more from scratch.  No bringing an already-started, stalled, or half-completed project to NaNo.  Some of the beauty of the contest is that it encourages free writing and discourages editing.  Pound out the words.  Put some flesh on an idea that until now has only been a skeleton.  Fiction, fiction, fiction!  No biographies,  autobiographies or memoirs –  unless it’s a biography of your fictional character.  Any genre – literary, historical, mystery, mainstream, young adult.  Heck, a whole bunch of people out there don’t even know yet what genre they’re writing, and probably won’t know until they find out what kind of trouble their main characters get into.

 

I discovered all kinds of things I didn’t know when I wrote my first novel.  I was charmed and amazed that once the story gained momentum I, personally, had very little control over what happened.  Story logic picks up a flow of its own once you’ve created people who live and breathe on the page.  Give them passion, intensity, and motivation, and it can be difficult to micro-manage the story process from intolerable problem at point A to happily ever after solution at point B.  There are times you need to brainstorm what’s going to happen next, but writing feels phenomenal when characters do and say things the writer never expected, but it’s right and true even if it changes the direction of the whole blessed story.

 

I’m going to write about a girl who’s hired as a bounty hunter to  – ahh, well, never mind.  There are 18 days left before even I will begin to find out if thegirl has a screw loose or what.  Inthe meantime I’m going to keep all this story pressure building up inside in hopes that it’ll flow out effortlessly come November 1st.   

 

Sometimes the only way it’s going to get done is to just sit down and do it.

 

NaNoWriMo.org.   Or nanowrimo.org.  Caps or no caps, either way is fine.  Now come  join me and write a novel in November.

Home-School?

 10.02.07

 

Quite a while back I received an email from someone I had met once, very briefly, in a casual setting.  The letter exhorted the beauty and potential of my daughter and begged me to think about home-schooling.  This person knew nothing about me, my life, or my values and beliefs, and yet here was a letter telling me that God wants me to educate my child at home.

 

Now, I am one of those people who believe that if there is a God, He knows all our hearts.  Therefore I’m pretty sure He created 4K just for me.  He knew I was struggling with my smart and busy daughter who has the attention span of a butterfly, and that the day sometimes has more hours than I have patience.

 

Introduce the Kindergarten Readiness program known as 4K.  Five days a week my darling gets up, gets dressed, and goes to school, and I have a blessed 3 hours alone.

 

Home-schooling might very well be the most attractive option for some families.  When I picture it in my head for our family, however, I can feel my blood pressure rising.   For one thing, if she won’t let me teach her how to put her pants on, how on earth am I supposed to teach her how to read and write?  We love each other to the moon and back, but we get frustrated with one another on a regular basis.  And I already find it exhausting to keep her busy for a whole day – I can’t imagine that schooling her at home would be an improvement.

 

By the time she was 2 and a half I was doing the countdown to school.  And by the time she was 3 she was counting down with me.  “When can I go on the school bus with the big kids?  Mom, can’t I go to school?  I’m big enough, see?  I’m THIS big!”

 

All the way around this 4K program is a beautiful thing. 

 

And this is where I have to say… thank goodness for people who love to hang out with little kids and can teach them stuff.  Because lord knows, I’m not very good at it.  For me it goes like… “Oh, you want to have a picnic?  Cool, let’s make a picnic lunch and eat it on the picnic blanket!”  My daughter is all for the idea, go mom, you came up with a great idea, yay! 

 

Sure.  Only while I’m making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and slicing and peeling apples she gets impatient.  “Mom, can I have my sandwich and start without you?”  “Mom, I’m taking the apples, please can you put some apple dip in a bowl for me?”

 

By the time I’m ready to eat, half of the meal has been removed from the tray and consumed.

 

I carry the tray to the picnic blanket in the dining room and set it down.  She says, “I’m done eating.  Picnic’s over,” and she’s off to find a new activity.  I can’t keep up.  I eat by myself.  Then I clean up the mess I left in the kitchen because I was trying to hurry.  I’m not designed to switch gears at full throttle 35 times a day.  It makes me tired.

 

Daycare provider is so far down on my list of career choices that it’s not even on the list, which is why I am so thankful that it’s much higher on other people’s lists.  If it wasn’t for the wonderful, caring, and accommodating staff at my daughter’s school, I would be a basket case.  I’d also be living with a little person who has terrible table manners.  And worse, I’m sure.  As it is now I just give her the “mom eye” and ask, “What happens at school when kids eat like Cookie Monster?”  That’s all I have to say because the power of the naughty chair follows her home.

 

I’ve learned other tricks, too.  Like, do you know how important it is for a kid to be the line-leader?  All I have to do to get my daughter moving from point A to point B is to say in a song-song voice, “I’m gonna be the line-leader,”  and bam!  There she is racing past me screaming, “NO!  I get to be the line-leader!  Me, it’s me!”

 

That one is useful to me every single day.

 

Some people probably should home school and are very good at it.  For the rest of us, the school district could make it a threat to ensure we carry out good discipline techniques in the after school hours.  Think about it.

 

Hoppers

09.17.07

I generally don’t give much though to grasshoppers.  I mean, I vaguely remember finding one now and then as a kid, catching it, having it spit on me, saying, “Ew, gross,” and letting it go again.  I don’t have a particular childhood memory centered on grasshoppers.  I don’t remember them being in my pool, in the car, or sunning themselves by the hundreds on the slide of my swing set.  Maybe because I had a metal slide.  (Fried grasshoppers, anyone?)

 

I definitely don’t remember anything quite like the “Grasshopper Run.”

 

What is the Grasshopper Run, you ask? 

 

I’ll tell you.

 

First let me set the scene.

 

A black-topped driveway leads to a peaceful 2-story white house with blue shutters and a wind-chime on the back door that tinkles.  A nice large yard has mostly green grass and a swing set with swings, a slide, and a climbing rope.  There’s a pool in the yard covered with a tarp.  Beyond the pool is a field of high grass and wild flowers.  Idyllic, really.

 

A child stands poised at the edge of the driveway, her merry eyes so blue they glitter like sapphires when she laughs.  They’re glittering now as she grins with anticipation and delight.  “Say, ‘ready, set, go’ Mom!  Say it, say it!”

 

“Ready… set… are you ready?”

 

“Yes!” she shrieks.

 

“Are you reeeaally ready?”

 

“Yes!  I’m ready, I’m ready!  Say it, Mom!”

 

“Ready… set… GO!”

 

She leaps into the grass and runs toward the field, grasshoppers popping up by the hundreds with every step, until she’s almost engulfed in a cloud of hoppers.  Her arms flail and giggles and squeals fill the yard.  When she reaches the edge of the field she turns back and hollers, “Did you see that, Mom?  Did you see it?  There’s a million grasshoppers!”

 

There is only one rule for the Grasshopper Run.  And if you think about it for a minute it’s fairly obvious.

 

Keep your mouth closed.

 

I stand on the driveway laughing, every now and again shaking hoppers out of my hair and brushing them off my clothes.  The driveway isn’t exactly a safe zone.  There is no safe zone.  The hoppers are everywhere.  They leap into the house, hitch rides with me in the car, and float in the pool awaiting rescue.  And rescue them we do, several times a day, and finally tarp the pool because we don’t want to be responsible for any drowning grasshoppers.

 

I haven’t had one spit on me yet, which I think is odd, because when I think of the hoppers from my childhood what I remember is weird brownish-orange spit.  They hop.  You catch them.  They spit.  They hop again.  That’s it.

 

I don’t remember clouds of grasshoppers.  Grasshoppers on the house, in the house, on the car, in the car, on my clothes, in my car, leaping, hopping, popping, pooping.  But no spitting.

 

There are more revolting swarms of bugs than grasshoppers, that’s for sure.  Army or Tent Worms – those are gross.  Actually, they are so gross that I think we’ll just be moving right along and not talking about them.  And let’s not talk about the moths they turn into either. 

 

At least hoppers don’t turn into something equally nasty or worse than their original form.  And we do get breaks from them because every few days a crowd of blackbirds descends upon our lawn.  A hundred birds – two hundred – it’s hard to count them as they march across the yard in an oddly organized formation, filling their bellies with hoppers and ruining, for a few days at least, the game of Grasshopper Run.

 

Sometimes plagues of insects are really yucky.  But sometimes they make for an awfully fun race across the lawn.

 

 

 

School's... in?

09.02.07

Whoa.  Kids are going back to school, and for the first time so is mine.  It feels kind of exciting, to tell you the truth.  I hear these weepy “put the kid on the bus for the first time” stories from other moms and I have to say… I don’t get it.  I’m not crying, I’m plotting and planning all the things I can get accomplished knowing my girl will be in school for 15 hours a week. 

 

FIFTEEN weekday hours.  I can get my hair cut.  I can go to the dentist.  I can go to the optical shop and pick out glasses.  I can do household shopping all by myself.  Let me repeat that –  I can do household shopping all by myself.

 

Do you have any idea how fast I can buy toilet paper and laundry soap and groceries without a 4 year old alternately dragging her heels and running wild in the aisles?  Without the constant pleas of, “Mommy?  Can we get this?  Mommy!  I need this!  Please please please?”

 

Weepy stories?  Not me.  I’m doing the happy dance.

 

Now granted, I am not putting my child on a bus.  Even I probably am not ready for that one.  But her daycare is offering a 4K program this year, which is a lot equal to half-day kindergarten for 4 year olds, and she’s expected to be there from 8:30 to 11:30 Monday through Friday even when I don’t need childcare.  And it’s free.  Hey, works for me.

 

I bet you can guess that I don’t consider home-schooling an option, hmm?  Yeah, let’s run right out and NOT get involved in that.  A lot of people are doing it.  Quite a few people have expressed outright horror that I might allow the government to educate my child.  I’m not horrified at all.  Like anything in life, I expect we, as a family, will be filling in gaps and expressing our views to our daughter on a daily basis.  If we need to learn more or learn another viewpoint about something, we have the internet.  We also have a library card.  There’s a lot more to education than what happens inside a classroom.

 

I’m not sure I’m smart enough to home-school my child even if I wanted to, although proponents of this type of education tell me that intelligence on my part (the part of the teacher) isn’t anything to be concerned about.  Um, ok.  That seems a little not quite right, but whatever. 

 

One huge barrier to home-schooling (besides the fact that I don’t want to do it) is that my active, bright, busy little girl doesn’t behave all that great for me.  In fact, sometimes we don’t get along at all.  But I went on a big field trip this summer with her daycare and witnessed, with my own surprised eyes, that the girl I deal with at home is not the same girl they have at school.  She loves the kids, she loves the teachers, she listens, and she follows the rules.  Unbelievable.

 

I love my daughter.  I think she is the most amazing human being I have ever met.  I really do.  But I was a grown-up without a child for many years before I was a mom, and I love being alone with the thoughts inside my head.  I’ve missed having that kind of time.  So I really am looking forward to school days. 

 

And my Little Miss is looking forward to it, also.  Almost every day she asks with a sigh, “Oh Mommy, why does it take so long to grow up?”  She’s hoping to learn how to write her name this year.  And because she wants to know everything about everything, learning to read is another item on her agenda. 

 

I’m going to challenge myself this fall.  September and October will be months of organizing my house and my life.  I’m going to go through closets and get rid of stuff, which is one of my favorite things to do.  This house is  reaching maximum overload with toys that are not played with and “that’s my favorite” clothes that are too small.  But just try to get go through a kid’s closet when she’s prancing behind you, screaming, “I need that!  Hey, that’s MINE!”

 

In November the fun begins.  I am signing up for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writer’s Month).  My fingers will be clicking the keyboard every spare moment as I make an attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in just four weeks.  I have an idea that has my imagination spinning and my fingers itching, and I’m raring to go. 

 

Some people home-school to avoid public education.  I say… bring it on!

 

 

 

 

4 Years = 4 Minutes

08.19.07

 

It takes two… adults, that is.  For paper mache.  Heck, I can’t even spell it by myself. 

 

My daughter likes to say, “Four year olds can do a lot of things all by themselves, can’t they?”  Like fastening and unfastening overalls.  Like buckling their own seat belts.  Like pouring their own milk – at least if it the carton isn’t too full.

 

She was desperate to have a piñata at her birthday party.  A piñata in the shape of the number 4.  I’m pretty sure she got that idea from a little friend who had one shaped like a 6 at his birthday.  I thought it was a fun idea, but remembered how hard it was to break the number 6, and how much candy was inside it.  I didn’t have a clue where to buy a piñata in the shape of a special number 4.  Then a brainstorm.  Hey, if we made it ourselves it would be smaller (and thus hold less candy) and thinner (thus being easier to break). 

 

Sometimes I’m pretty deep into a project before I recognize it was BAD IDEA.  I wish the light bulb in mybrain were more like a stoplight, with green for “fantastic!,”  yellow for “caution, you might want to think this through,” and red for “what kind of an idiot are you, anyway?”  This could save me  a lot of aggravation.

 

Making a piñata in the shape of a number 4 with paper mache doesn’t seem like all that big a deal.  I mean, we did it in grade school, right?  1 teacher to 30 kids.  It couldn’t be that awful.  And besides, 4 year olds are great little helpers. 

 

I distinctly remember having this last thought.  4 year olds are great little helpers.  It’ll be a fun mother/daughter project.  We’ll enjoy each other and laugh as we make a little mess (I did have the presence of mind to know this project would get messy – only in my daydream the mess happened somewhere in the last stage of the project, the stage that involves tempera paints). 

 

4 year olds are great little helpers – but their attention spans are 4 minutes long.  If you have a project that takes less than 5 minutes you won’t find a more diligent little worker than a 4 year old.  But it definitely takes longer than 4 minutes to paper mache a piñata in the shape of a number 4. 

 

Fortunately I had the presence of mind to blow up the balloons and tie them together the evening before our big project day.  Which was no small feat itself.  I learned that even tied-together balloons aren’t going to hold their shape all by themselves and politely wait for newspaper strips soaked in flour and water to glue them in place.  But hey, holding balloons into the shape of a number 4 sounds like a great job for a 4 year old.

 

But here’s what else I didn’t take into account on this little project;  there is nothing more fabulous when you’re 4 years old than burying your hands up to your elbows in flour.  Who knew that flour is the most amazing substance on earth?  That’s it’s powdery and soft and silky, and spits fun little “poofs” into the air that slowly waft down to cover the kitchen floor.  And the dog.  And the new kitchen table, and even the mommy. 

 

Here’s a bit of advice about making glue.  Put a little flower in the bucket first and then slowly add water.  Because doing it the other way – adding flour to half a bucket full of water – is perhaps not fastest or most economical method.  A half a bucket of water takes a whole heck of a lot of flour before it reaches the consistency of glue. 

 

And of course, if you do it backwards the 4 year old gets to play with flour for the entire length of their attention span.  Which actually doubles when it involves things like flour and water and results in an astronomical mess.

 

I don’t think I even have space here to begin to get into howimpossible it is to pull the glue-soaked paper out of the bucket, squeegee the excess glue off between two fingers, and place the paper over the balloons in such a way that the whole mass will eventually resemble the number 4. 

 

But trust me on this one – it’s not a job for one person.  And amazingly enough, once the vat of glue mixture is thick enough to use, and the newspaper is torn into strips, and the flour has been put back into the cupboard – the 4 year old is done with this project and wanders away to watch a movie.  And there’s mom, up to her elbows in glue, back aching because there’s no way I’m doing any paper mache on my new kitchen table, muttering, “Stop moving, you stupid balloon, you are the crossbar of the number 4… get ON there newspaper, no, not like that, flat, oh for goodness sake, 4, number 4, who’s bright idea was this paper mache thing, anyway?

 

Sometimes an idea should get the green.  Sometimes somebody should just stop me before I even get started.