A Trunk Full of Fun

Many years ago, when my children were young and sometimes bored on rainy Saturdays, an elderly lady in our church gave them a little suitcase full of old hats, ties, scarves, and jewels. It was an old suitcase, much repaired and spray painted a dull brown, but it served its purpose and more, making an appearance twice a year during junior high and high school dress-up days, and occasionally even being used as a play prop.

This fall, I decided that the time had come to pass it on to the next generation. When I dragged it from the attic, I realized that the 115 degree temperatures and dry conditions we had this summer had taken their toll. It was in need of glue, lots of glue, and paint--preferably gold and sparkly. So I painted. Claye and I searched for the smallest costumes, and we took it to Missouri, stuffed and sturdy.

When we arrived, it was two days before Halloween. Zaya and Mim weren't going trick-or treating, but they had a little party to attend, and had already planned costumes for that. Zaya was going as a black hole. His mom had painted a black sweatshirt with "glow in the dark" planets, the USS Enterprise, a Looney Tunes rocket, the death star, and some Ty fighters all being drawn into the swirling center of Zaya's stomach. He donned black hat, pants, shoes, and gloves and went around saying "Fear Me!". Occasionally he would grab something or someone and say "Schluck" as he pulled them toward the void.

Mim went as the more traditional Princess--Princess Leia, in keeping with the space theme. She suffered from wig-itchiness, though, and wasn't quite as brave as the real Princess would have been...well, maybe not. Star Wars never had itchy wig adversaries. Maybe she would have caved too, especially since her father wouldn't have helped by putting mole-skin on her ears and cheering her tears away.











The next morning we opened the trunk again, and the grandkids played "Newsies".

Zaya ran around yelling, "Pape, Mum, buy a pape?" and Mim played two roles: the office supplier and money collector, and the wealthy client who not only bought a pape, but adopted the poor little paper boy and took him into her home...

where she entertained him by being a royal jester.

Hours of fun in a little suitcase.

Lots of Little Visitors this Evening

We've had lots of little visitors this evening. First, we hear the slam of a car door, then a few excited squeals, adult cautionary voices, and the fast pitter patter of strange feet coming up the sidewalk. We've had bugs and princesses, cheerleaders and super heroes. Most are carrying light sticks and little sacks for candy, which is appealing to them, but not any more than being able to ring the doorbell and wait for a benevolent human with a bowl of candy bars in her hands. Most of the little ones are already eating candy; it creates a sticky mask across their upturned faces.

The adults hovering behind these creatures remind them if they don't say thank you fast enough, and grab them before they dart into the street. A few older ones have been unaccompanied, but even those waited patiently while I doled out the reward.

This little lady was quite elaborate in her pirate costume. Whatever she was wearing, I think it involved too many layers, because she looked a little warm...maybe it was just from running from door to door. Her brother said he was a jester, but he looked like a harlequin to me

All evening I kept surprising those who knew me from our Wednesday night church program for children.
"Hey! You're the story lady! I didn't know where you lived!"
Well, now they do, and I think that's a good thing.






Now they know a safe house in the neighborhood. The candy corn girl, cheerleader, and lollipop-licking superman go to our church. I invited them in so I could see their costumes better and decided to start taking pictures.

It is cool outside, but by no means cold. In short, a perfect evening for some family fun. Around here it's all a treat.

Silly Putty

If you have grandchildren, you might want to pick up some silly putty. Yes, it still exists, and it still comes in those little plastic egg shapes. They do make it in new colors though.
Zaya's is bright orange, and Mim's is a palid pink. Their first creations were to be expected.

Zaya made a brain. He showed it to me and described the cerebrum convolutions as that "thinking, piled up area on top". Then he went on to show me and that "smoother area in the back and the brain stem to control breathing and such".

Mim made a tornado. "Look!" she said as she twisted it around, "It's tornading" Hum. Interesting new verb for an Oklahoma girl. So I wrote silly putty limericks for them:

Dark storms from the west are invading
With ominous clouds circulating.
We run helter-skelter
For underground shelter.
The tornados are tornading.

The top of the brain looks all scrunchy
Full of thoughts like: "It's time for my lunchy".
The back's lightly grooved,
With a surface that's smoothed
And the stem's made of nerves in a bunchy.

Sunny and Stormy

I had a couple of visitors last Sunday afternoon--lovable little girls. These affectionate sisters are just eleven months apart in age, and look a lot alike, but there is a great difference in their dispositions.

Since my house is still full of toys my own grandchildren have outgrown, it was just the right mix of playthings for them. I fed them eggs, ham and orange juice--all healthy stuff, of course. Then I broke down and gave them each a handful of m and m's. Sunny saved her green ones for when Stormy began to cry for more; then she handed them over one at a time to pacify the storm. That was pretty much a pattern all day. Their mom can't figure out why the younger one cries all the time when she doesn't get what she wants. I told her to blame little Sunshine, who loves her sister and doesn't like to see her cry.





Stormy put the frog in the bucket, screwed the magnifying lid on, hung it around her neck and called it her "Ribet in a drum".

Anyway, they are precious little girls.

Wheels Turning

Most of the time when I find myself saying to my students, "Do you understand?" it means I feel certain they don't. They have a certain blank stare that sings: "Oh I'm far far off in another place, and the words you say bounce off my face". At times like these I feel that I'm making about as much sense as a scolding prairie dog preaching from his little hillock of earth.

But every now and then ...there's a different atmosphere in the room--wheels turning. As a teacher, I've come to appreciate that certain look in the eyes of students. It's invigorating to see an idea catching hold of a brain or sometimes a lot of brains at once and pulling them along. The students even look different at such times, for they sit quite still, paralyzed with the new knowledge. Suddenly, they are eager for silence, wanting the truth to sink into their brain and find other situations to affect. Then they start to wonder at the different light it brings to each of those. It's a great feeling when the bell rings on totally quiet moments such as these, and nobody moves.

I'm privileged to witness this often in high school students. But over Christmas, I watched it over and over as my five year old grandson played with a little microscope. He was mesmerized by all the new things he saw...and weren't you? Think about it--the first time you saw the ocean? the mountains? the Grand Canyon? a large cave with curtains of rock and stalactites hanging down? a bat's wing? We live in an amazingly intricate world and there is such wonder to quieten us in awe. So, here the little fellow sits, huddled on the floor with his microscope quietly marveling, as the twenty-two other people in the room talk boisterously, play loud games and lively ones, snack on too much sugary stuff, and catch up on a year's worth of each other's lives.

A Book Young Children Will Love

Here's a book that children absolutely love. It's all about manners. Yes, that wasn't a typo. Manners. It's called, "Do I Have to Say Hello?


Years ago, my own children received it as a gift from their own "Aunt Delia". They enjoyed it. I packed it away, and now the grand kids have discovered it. The format consists mainly of multiple choice questions dealing with correct behavior and polite responses in various situations. The wrong answers are so inappropriate that everyone cracks up, but the lesson is taken, nonetheless. As an added bonus, the drawings are ludicrous and particularly amusing to elementary children.
I recommend that every adult read it aloud to a child. They both might learn something and it's great to laugh together.

Brave Adventures for World Conquerors

It was the last day of school for my pre-school grandchild, and he invited me along for a picnic on the grounds of the small, private school he attends. In order to accommodate an interesting mix of activities, there were several scattered stations, and children moved from one to another whenever they heard a whistle. . . or as they desired. (Nobody was being too legalistic here). There was frisbee throwing, tetherball, three-legged races, and a softball throw--none of which interested the youngest children. (or their camera-toting grandparents, oddly enough.)

Zaya and Mim rushed over to the "learn a song" station first, where Zaya bravely practiced a song for the talent show finale while Mim clung to her mother, intimidated by the cheerful energy of the bright, young mom who ran the music DVD.

Presently, face-painting tables beckoned. Zaya left the jumping, singing, choreographopolis and raced over to watch as several children got sports logos painted on their faces. Rushing back to where we were loitering, he excitedly asked his mom if he couldn't have U-O painted on his. She didn't understand what he meant, until she saw the OU symbol on several little faces. So, when she explained that the symbol was only a football slogan, he opted for a painting of the planet Saturn instead. There was only one hitch: no face-painters, just parents and grandparents dealing with children who wanted great works of art painted on their cheeks with a four-color selection of basic elementary school tempera paint and a very limited supply of brushes. Too late, we noticed this. Mim had already decided on a butterfly. So, Grandma did the honors, decorating their faces as requested. The butterfly was rather plain and the planet Saturn seemed to be on fire, or at least windswept into the universe background, but it doesn't take much to thrill young children, so we were all blissful together.

From there we explored..."the outer games" as Zaya put it, still thinking in spaceship mentality. We looked first at a couple of horses that someone had forgotten to remove from their trailer before he drove to the picnic parking lot; next we found a little playground behind the school, quite removed from all the older, frisbee-involved students. Then, past all the slides, swings, and teeter-totters, we found every child's dream: a large mountain of red dirt piles. After I scouted it and pronounced it safe, my little explorers went crazy, running up and down, sliding every now and then into a soft crevice carpeted with lime-new grass. They gloried in adventure as they conquered mountain tops and set up their kingdoms; they built launch pads to expedite further explorations, then blasted into the sky, riding rockets bound for nameless planets. It was a thrilling game, and it held their interest until lunch, when we all sat on the grass and ate.

While we were eating, we visited with the family of one of Zaya's classmates, a lovely little girl I'll call Esther, who ran and hugged him when she recognized him this morning. Her mother is from Russia and has been a good friend to my daughter this year, sharing time at "Moms in Touch", which is a prayer support group for the teachers and students at the school. Esther's dad is from Ghana, and teaches computer classes at the local university.

So we had three continents represented at our picnic...North America, Asia, Africa...and the strong, steady, south wind nearly blew us all out into the half-ripe wheat pasture together.

How interesting that so many worlds meet on the Oklahoma plain, where explorers once carved out kingdoms in the red dirt. Overhead is still the same blue universe and the same God looks down at his children.

Whatever happened to Jeanine Burnside?

Once, when I was young, I lived in Puebla, Mexico, on a farm outside the city. A visiting family came to church one Sunday morning, and Jeanine was in my class--a little girl, outspoken and laughing and so very American. Whether they lived in our city for a summer, two weeks, or a couple of days--that I don't remember. I just remember that right away, we hit it off. She was freckled, and funny, and full of ambition, and we played together for hours. That was the summer my little sisters and I had turned our camp trailer into an orphanage for lost dolls--all the cabinets were bunk beds with blankets hanging down and an occasional plastic foot. So when Jeanine came over we all played refugee camp. Outside we traveled--by foot and by bike-- on perilous foothills along the wide "river" and under the pines taking the longest detour around the edges of the farm to bring the wretched, abandoned doll babies to the safety of our home. There we fed them and swaddled them and put them to bed where they lay contentedly while we "adults" discussed world shaking events and gave them an occasional pat. Jeanine had just read a new book and was raving all about it. I still see her great green eyes and the dramatic way she moved her little hands in wonder. Such stories! Such lands! Such dangers far removed from our world!

Later, of course, I sought the book in the English speaker's library--a tiny room tucked behind a metal gate midst the three and four story buildings downtown. And the miracle was that I found it, for there weren't too many books on those shelves, particularly not children's books, not by the incomparable CS. Lewis.

I've often wondered what happened to Jeanine. She grew up, I suppose, and only faintly remembered that pine-fenced farm on the outskirts of a foreign city where little girls saved starving doll children from the evils of the world, while listening to tales of Aslan and Dragons on the Lone Islands far from Narnia.

Written for Sunday Scribblings

An Angel, a Joseph, and a Mary

That's all who came to children's church today. Everybody was gone for Thanksgiving with one parent or another...or one grandparent or another.

Advent began with Wonderful Counselor, and one of the children dressed as a prophet to light the candle while the scripture was being read, so I talked the other two into dressing up in their Christmas program outfits so I could take their picture.

I love this time of the year--re-enactments and rememberings. We made clothespin dolls and dressed them with scraps of vividly colored felt--oddly enough--a Joseph, a Mary, and an angel, complete with a star-twined halo.

Babysitting Brave Boys

Last week I got to do something special.

We have a banquet every year to promote the school and raise funds. It's great food, and a good speaker, and I usually host a table, but this year I kept the nursery--not just little babies, mind you, but toddlers and elementary aged children as well. There were supposed to be eleven youngsters, but we ended up with seven--six little boys and a girl. They came in like a freight train, and proceeded to derail--toppling all the nursery toys with them. All the quiet tracing and coloring activities I had planned to do had to wait for a lull in the energy level. Fortunately, I had a group of student helper/volunteers...one helper per child, if you count Turtle and me. It was great!

They ate pizza; (we got plates from the banquet room). They ignored the chocolate chip cookies and got excited about coloring a long mural with markers and pasting fall leaves all over a hastily drawn tree. We had to watch them every second, however. These two little angels in the first video were occupied with dishes and setting the table (man style). I turned my back on them to get something and they decided to make the slide more exciting by "jacking" it up on blocks. One of the students called me and I was in time to stop them from launching themselves over their newly elevated creation, but they were on the ladder already...who knows what would have ensued...and then again, they acted like they had done this before. Kids.

Just For Fun

Here's a few really short videos from the Pumpkin Festival. For the Children, it was a magical day. What a great age, when little things make them so happy! An interesting conversation taking place while the third video is playing really contrasts the reaction of teen-agers, who would rather die than admit that a small town celebration like this can be entertaining.