some saturday nights you smell like baby puke

...and then you blog about it.

A baby puking is one of the saddest, scariest things to witness. I imagine new parents experience it on the regular, but as an old-hand babysitter tonight marked my first ever Baby Puke moment. The baby is now okay, wiped down, soothed, no longer spewing bits of pasta and tears.

There are times when you can say "poor baby" and mean it without an ounce of sarcasm.

Baby puke moments are those times.

"The Day I Lost my iPod Forever"

"the day my DS was robbed out of my sister's hands"

"the time I was embarrassed because I fell in the toilet at my birthday sleepover"

All entries in one of my fave 7th grader's composition books.

I guess even when my job sucks, it is awesome.

conversation with 5th graders about The Future

We've been working on Future Self portraits in Art.

Me: So who can tell me some of the things that might happen in the future?

Class: Flying cars! Robots! Living Underwater!

Me: Okay...and what about something more personal? Who can tell me about a personal future thing?

Lavell, a genius ten-year old, shyly raises his hand. I call on him.

Lavell: Exploding chickens.

Me: Okay, Lavell. Please explain how exploding chickens are personal.

Lavell: ...It's their business.

AWESOME.

the hard part

WIRE.


Kids love it, and grownups love to give it to them to make stuff.

We're making 3D sculpture/puppets in camp, and entering what I call The Hard Part: frame-making. After withstanding roughly half a million dubious stares after telling the class to simplify their puppet's skeletons, I am pleased to say things paid off big when we got to said Hard Part.

3 times today I sat amidst a sea of smaller-than-mes, warning them that wire is awesome, but fairly frustrating and sharp. Ten minutes after the warning they were banging out asymmetrical circles with the best of them, light dancing in their mad-scientist eyes. I wanted to take those moments and throw them up like a smoke signal to the world. Shit is hard, then it is a cool hand puppet version of a trash can with felt garbage popping out of it. Or a talking cupcake. Or a sock puppet that isn't made out of a sock but looks like it's made out of a sock.

Pretty amped on kids right now. And pretty amped on skeletons.

Internet, you're funny.