Mr. Suggestible Strikes Again

Remember the whole Predator/Prey relationship I discussed before? For some reason I'm always the prey in Zaya's imagination. It's all taken a rather vicious turn in the last few days.

We've been reading a book called "Epidemic" which details the appearance and behaviors of many bacteria, viruses, fungi and protozoa and their effect upon people throughout history. Big mistake, as I'm sure you've guessed.

This morning Zaya has been Penicillin, and I was bacteria, of course. Daddy was smart and became a virus instead. But then Zaya decided he could eat viruses too. Why not? He has also been a yeast cell (Candida, no less) and Histoplasmosis, and a horrible variety of other things. (Shigella, E-coli, Adenovirus etc.) He's also been a macrophage (of course, I had to be a Shigella bacteria then.) and he swallowed me whole and than stuck a little piece of me out for his T-cell to come and recognize.

And we, as the victims, have to behave just right. When Zaya was Penicillin this morning and Art was supposed to be an E-Coli bacteria he said, "Daddy, that's not how you die. Your cell wall is supposed to break down." Art's cell wall broke down appropriately. Then Zaya the Penicillin decided to eat his nucleus. It's no fun to just keep your enemy from reproducing, apparently, you also have to ingest him. (Mim has thus far refused to participate. I wouldn't say she has a firm grip on reality either, but firmer anyway. She was busy playing with light and shadows in the bathroom with a flashlight.)

You might say that all of this is damaging to the psyche of a young child, but I remember reading my father's diagnostic manuals when he was in nursing school and I was Zaya's age. I don't remember thinking that it was gross or strange, just fascinating. And I turned out normally...right? Right?

Art says we need to get the little guy some basic physics books about machinery and such to counterbalance all the biology. If there's one thing motherhood has taught me thus far, it's that you can't make a kid enjoy something. It has to just happen. I wish him luck, though. There are no victims in physics. (Except the students, but there I go injecting my own prejudice into it.)

Art did get Zaya to draw out what he was imagining, and that actually worked for a time. He drew a Penicillin fungus and a bunch of different bacteria around it with cracks in their cell walls. Then he decided that this particular Penicillin could also destroy viruses and protozoa, so there are a few of those too. They might be hard to see in the picture above, but I labeled them.

What cracks me up, is that his post-PreK test showed that he had trouble with "visual memory" because he couldn't make a shape out of blocks that the teacher had built and then removed. However, every single one of these cells and organisms look exactly like the pictures that he saw yesterday when we were reading his book. (This test was to decide if he was ready to learn to read. Frustrating...and flawed, apparently.) More proof that kids will learn what they like. He never did enjoy playing with blocks. That's always been Mim's thing. (Maybe the physics books will be for her instead.)

In any case, I've had enough of being ingested and destroyed and chased around, so I stuck both kids in front of Bugs Bunny for a few minutes. Maybe that will reset the imagination train and I can cope with the rest of the day.

Tonight is the 4th of 5 nights of VBS at Grandma Lilibeth's church. That will be a post of its own, though. This one is already long enough.

Order Up!

Mim is sitting in the living room floor surrounded by change from the piggy bank. She's using it as onions and beans and whatever else to make "soup". (Yes, she has play food. She would rather use money. Maybe it's a girl thing.)

She says to Zaya, "Here's some broccoli soup, Zay!"

Zaya, sitting in a strange upside down position on the recliner, says, "I don't like broccoli."

"Yes you do, Zay!" (She's right, he does.)

"Well, but I'm not Zaya right now. I'm a Sea Pen."

"Okay, what do you like to eat."

"I eat tiny creatures from the bottom of the sea."



Mim, unfazed and using her best imitation of a lady from a crowded sandwich counter yells, "Tiny-creatures-from-the-bottom-of-the-sea Soup!"

Zaya...I mean, the sea pen... takes a bowl and enjoys it.

Host and Parasite

Zaya is making me run around being "an enemy of mine" this morning. He is a tick. When I walk close to him he attaches and starts sucking out my blood.

This is why.



Last night Art found this little tick in Zaya's hair. The removal procedure was just as effective as Mim's experience, but apparently much more painful. It was very traumatic for both Daddy and Zay, and there was much reconciliation to be done after the procedure was over. Zaya wanted to see the tick this morning, (we saved it, you know, just in case.) and has been one ever since.

He keeps camouflaging on things and waiting for me to walk by. It's more than a little disturbing.

Actually, by the time I finished writing this post he had changed into a Cordyceps fungus that attacks mosquitoes. Equally disgusting and all, but different in that flora vs. fauna way.

Sun Spots

I would just like to say to the internet world at large that, although I love summertime and I love Oklahoma, today is just too hot.

The highs this week are all 100+ and it feels like every last bit of energy, sanity and human feeling is being sucked out of your head when you're outside for more than five minutes. Yes, I have been known to exaggerate, but not today. I don't have the physical or mental energy to exaggerate today. Seriously, I barely have the wherewithal to type on this keyboard.

I took the kids swimming in a nearby town, which would've been fine except that the sun decided to poor all its wrath out on the kiddie pool. I promise you; people from a distance could probably see it like a lethal laser beam isolated on that one patch of concrete. Even the sno-cone didn't revive me today.

Oh, and tomorrow is supposed to be worse. Unless I am suffering from a total loss of all sense because of the last three days of swimming, I plan to keep myself and my children in the house all day.

Not that they appear to be suffering. Zaya is running around the house being a brittle star/salp/shark/squid/krill/Vampiroteuthis (don't ask) depending on which five minute period you talk to him. Mim is bringing me containers from my refrigerator and asking me "What's in this, Mama?" On second thought, maybe the sun has affected them too.

No, that's just normal.

Future Writer for House M.D.?

My children are very suggestible. Especially Zaya. When he hears of a new idea or thing, he assimilates it into his make-believe world almost instantaneously. For example, I read Rikki Tikki Tavi to him the other night, and he spent the next few days being a mongoose and a cobra. I have to admit that I sometimes make use of this for my own amusement. Does that make me a bad mommy? I feel a little bit like a mad scientist.

Last week I saw a board book at the local thrift store with large pictures of an eyeball. It turns out that it is from some eye-care product merchant, and the pictures are of several eye disorders.

I pulled it out today, and as of this afternoon, Spikit has had Macular Degeneration and a Cataract. We had details of his sufferings and blindness, as well as the cures.

Goki had Open-Angle Glaucoma and Macular Degeneration, but the doctor was able to fix it, and now he sees like this. (Pointing the the normal vision picture.)

Then we moved further still into fantasy land, and Spikit also developed Intercomma of the Lens. A disorder involving something that inserts itself into his lens, and conceived entirely in the fertile imagination of my son. Things began to get increasingly more complex in the next thirty minutes. Zaya ran around the kitchen and living room doing his little skipping jump, while telling me about the next three disorders.

These are, I promise you, verbatim, except for occasional parenthetical clarifications. I wrote furiously to keep up with him. The following are three disorders that would be entirely new to the medical community, and I hope they do not ever actually make an appearance on our earth, as they all sound horrible.

Interactive Fluid: The glands in the neck make alcohol instead of the other thing, and the fluid goes to the eye. Too much of it gets into his eye, and his eye vision changes. Everything will go blank. (Sonic has this.)

Microscopic Damage:This causes the bladder to expand. It gets bigger and bigger, and this causes your bladder to twist. Then your urine goes back through your ureters and into your kidneys. Then the ureters close up and the urine can't get back to your bladder, so you can't go pee-pee. Don't worry, lots of people can't get this, because it's caused by a special germ that gets into your bladder. If you take the vitamin before it twists and turns, you'll live, but after that, you'll die because you can't go pee-pee. It will take about three days. Paws has that but he's fine now. Actually he didn't take the medicine. He has some F-O-Y-D glands. (He spelled that out for me, so maybe it's an acronym; I don't know.) They are in his kidneys. They produce a special kind of hormone called Whitetip Brown Tan. It can go into your bladder. It will destroy the bacteria. Then Paws' bladder will work again.

Eco on the Brain: This problem is in the brain. It can make you not think very well. And your cerebellum will control all this part of your body (motions to the legs) and it controls where you walk. But else, it controls it bad. You will run into stuff. But this part of your brain, (motions to top portion) the squishy part, controls your stomach. But it controls it bad again. It will tighten or loosen it. The tighten will squeeze your food, so it comes out faster, so your poop will come out chunky, which hurts your intestines. But when it loosens, your food will come out as diarrhea. Some of the diarrhea will stay in your intestines. It will destroy some of the good bacteria in it. That is bad. Your intestines won't have enough bacteria. It kind of goes into your small intestines. That diarrhea will form soup-like chunks and that will poke in your intestines and that will hurt your small intestines and you'll have to get surgery. Do you want to know which character has it? Stickrit has that, but he got rid of it.

Splish Splash

My sister-in-law from Stillwater brought her pool to keep here in our little corner of Oklahoma for the summer. Bless her heart. There was much excitement, tears of joy and jumping up and down. And the kids were pretty happy too.

My other sister-in-law and I helped her set it up today, and the kids watched impatiently. When the water was about five inches high we let little tykes get in and splash around as it filled. By the time we left for the afternoon it had reached about eight inches, and I have a feeling they would be perfectly happy with that depth all summer, but it's not quite enough for the rest of us, so we'll probably fill it a bit more. Probably. Although it did occur to us that if we filled it about ten inches full, and then took the ladder out, the kids could play fairly safely with little or no adult supervision. Just kidding, really, please do not make any phone calls to the authorities. It was getting a little hot outside, what can I say?

Tomorrow's forecast is 101, and that's probably not going to go down significantly for the next three months, so we are looking forward to having access to a pool.

Send in the Reserves!

Today Zaya saw a letter at Grandma Lilibeth's house from the charity organization, Samaritan's Purse. The outside of the envelope mentioned the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and how they were being persecuted, killed or sold into slavery. He told me that we should pray for them, and I agreed.

When we came home, we found a similar letter in our mailbox, so I read the information inside. At devotions tonight we prayed for the Christians and others that are going through such awful persecution right now, and I tried to use the map to help the kids understand who the people are and where they live.

When Mim prayed, she asked God to send heroes and angels to the DRC. Zaya also prayed for heroes and angels, and just as Mommy was starting to get a little teary with it all, he said,

"and please send some of those snakes that you sent on the Israelites...if you still have them. Amen."

Daddy assured him that God could just make new ones if need be.

The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers...

We broke down and bought a trampoline for our kids. Like all parents before us, we hope it will be helpful in the constant attempt to get them outside using their bodies instead of inside drooling in front of another Disney movie.

So far, so good, but it hasn't been a full week yet, and you can see that we've already pulled out the sprinkler trick. What can I say? It was hot, and they asked so sweetly.