Super Mommy!

Usually I’m the one tapped for story telling in the car. But recently I got a real treat.

Sierra has been telling stories of adventurous dogs an their intrepid trainer (who bear a remarkable resemblance to her dog Dyno and herself, except for their ability to fly) for years. So it’s not surprising that her sister decided to start her own story line.

We were in the car alone, which allowed her to step out on stage on her own. “Do you want to hear a story?”

Relieved that I was not being called on to be imaginative while negotiating traffic I responded with great enthusiasm. “Yes! Yes!”

“Do you want to hear the story about Super Mommy?”

“Definitely. I definitely want to hear about Super Mommy.”

She took a deep breath. “Okay. This is the story about how Super Mommy got her powers.”

“Oooo. I need to hear about that. Maybe I can get some super powers.”

“Once upon a time, when Super Mommy was just Mommy she ate a salad that had poison.”

“Oh dear,” I said, a bit worried we were off to a bad start, although at least Mommy was having a healthy last meal. “Poison?” Had there been a little too much in the news about food safety lately?

“Yes. Poison. And the poison gave Mommy her super powers. The fairies put in the poison and that was how she got the power to fly. And that’s just one power!”

“I think you mean potion.”

“No, it was poison.”

I decided against the vocabulary lesson, intrigued by the possibilities of fairies sprinkling flying powder in my Caesar salad. “Okay. What other powers did Super Mommy get?”

She ticked them off on her fingers. “She’s faster than a cheetah. She can hear really good. She can be invisible.”

Yes, but can she find matching socks from the every growing pile of clean but still piled laundry, butter and precisely cut a waffle into precisely one inch squares, sign 17 separate permission slips with tiny typing, AND get the dishes into the dishwasher in two minutes flat so we aren’t late for school otherwise everyone loses their Lone Star Yellow perfect attendance Star and won’t let you forget it until High School if even then?

Super Mommy went on to save the world from evil cats all the way home.

I don’t know about you, but I feel safer knowing she’s out there. Maybe she can come by and help me sort socks.

Amusing photo seen on vacation...

I *knew* that's what they were called.

Halloween left overs

two snow leopards, a banana and judo dog.

Yep. It's a Prosapio Halloween.

A Halloween Prisoner.

Fifth Grade RULES

There is nothing better than being in 5^th grade. Nothing. Nada. Nichts.

First of all, unlike MY fifth grade when I was a kid, Sierra’s fifth grade is top of the elementary food chain. Fifth graders are the final class at the school, literally rising above all others.

Fifth graders get to roam the halls every hour because they change classrooms throughout the day. They have a home room, which is incredibly high school like and therefore really cool.

(Of course last year when we discussed this whole switching teacher thing, Sierra was mortified. More than one teacher? No! Too scary! Now she’s loving it. Turns out only little kids have one teacher. Who knew?)

Fifth graders get JOBS. Really cool jobs like the news team or being on the marshals, which entails working in the office and running school errands. Being a marshal is huge, like getting on the Supreme Court. Which makes me think the principal is channeling Tom Sawyer.

Then there are the Stars. Kids earn stars for three things: grades, behavior, and perfect attendance. Ah, the ever elusive “perfect attendance.”

It’s why Sierra never, ever wants to miss school. This is a marked change from last year’s weekly feigning-illness, clinging-to-door frame approach to school attendance. I thought it was just genetic in our family. Being a sickly child I never had perfect attendance, and Dad… well, let’s just say he considered a great deal of school to be optional.

Sure, I’m glad she’s shooting for the goal, but we have to be realistic around here. First of all there’s the swine flu.

The swine flu protocols at schools these days are such that if your child shows up at the nurses’ office with one of the four symptoms, like “a headache,” they hose them down with disinfectant, wrap them in plastic, sterilize their desks, and call you from a secure line to pick them up in a vacuum chamber.

Okay, it’s not that bad. Probably they skip the sterilization and just wipe down the desk.

And given that my daughters merely have to hear someone sneeze over the phone to become feverish, Sierra’s chances for perfect attendance are nil.

Add to that we foolishly planned a family trip during the school year for various complex reasons.

Little did I know, no one needs a break from fifth grade.

Nobody. Nadien. Niemand.

Why bulletin board marketing is not a good idea...

Yea. People. Check your flyers often.

Halloween - where is thy theme?

The preparations for Halloween are progressing at a breakneck pace around here. Usually we work a family wide costume theme.

Last year was sort of a Green Meets Halloween. Mireya, who is not big on the scary side of Halloween, was a bat.

A FRUIT bat.

She demonstrated her fruit bat tendencies by having me dress as a bowl of fruit. Then she’d periodically nip at a grape. Sierra went as Mother Nature, which consisted of a green dress, wild headdress and a fake fur collar. Even the dog went as a flower.

Dad went as our escort, declining to dress up. Nothing has quite equaled his year when he was a box of tomatoes.

Now THAT was a costume. If you’ve never walked around Sattler in a modified refrigerator box with the word “tomato” written all over it, you haven’t experienced a true Prosapio Halloween.

A few years before that, the girls were Dalmatians and I was Cruella de Ville. My hair was half white for the rest of the week at work, which goes to show just how far we’ll take a theme.

Then there was the year Mireya was born and she was a pile of leaves in a stroller. We called her Russell.

I’d like to point out that with the exception of the pile of leaves (a onsie with leaves hot glued all over it) I’ve had little to do with the theme every year. Even the box of tomatoes was Sierra’s idea.

But this year relying on the creativity of my daughters is not working out too well. Whether it’s a sign of the times, a result of the tweenager in the house, or just a year ending in an “e”, we are not working a theme.

Sierra and her best friend Cami are going as bananas. Mireya is going as a snow leopard, in honor of her favorite stuffed animal for the last three years. Short of going as the Internet, I can’t figure out how to tie those things together in a theme.

(And how would you dress as the Internet anyway? Several hundred of post it notes with web addresses pinned to your shirt? Dress as a giant computer mouse?)

Fortunately, I’ve got a few weeks. And there’s always the possibility that Mireya will change her mind and want to be a grocery bag.

Now THAT costume I can handle (pun intended).

Goodbye Cricket

Well, I’m sad to report that Cricket, our green anole, has gone to the big terrarium in the sky.

In case you’ve missed the Cricket saga, this was the lizard who jumped on the hood of our truck and who inexplicably refused to hop in the grass when I offered escape. Instead he took one look in our truck two years ago and leaped inside to the delight of the kids.

I was, of course, horrified that now we had a pet that required live bugs for dinner.

Cricket survived the demise of not one, but TWO pet stores in the area (so now I had to drive 20 miles for BUGS). He also survived the best efforts of our cat at assassination, and at least two accidental falls.

He was often carted off to the bathroom for tub time and every now and then I’d hear a scream and know that he had almost jumped out – or onto Mireya. Sierra, our oldest, taught him to jump through a pony tail holder, Mireya slowly got to the point where he could crawl on her arm without a total meltdown.

This was a green anole that loved to be petted, he’d close his eyes if you rubbed his head. And although we toyed with the idea of releasing him many times, he never seemed interested in leaving. We worried about him being too much of a target in a world that wouldn’t really appreciate his poetic nature.

But when he stopped hunting crickets last week and stopped ducking from the water droplets, we knew the time was coming. We tried to make him comfortable in the sun. We petted him and he lifted his head to the touch, closing his eyes like always.

We got back from a brief trip and he was gone, his body half brown as if he was just in the middle of a final color change.

We found a box and filled it with cotton balls and tissue. We stood around a small hole where we set him and remembered all the funny stories. The time he jumped from my arm to my shirt and I shouted “He’s jumped! Where did he go?” and everybody was laughing, pointing at my shoulder where he hung on for dear life while I whirled around looking for him. Then there was the time he got tangled in Daddy’s hair. The time we snuck him into a restaurant because we wanted him to have an adventure.

What an adventure he was. Rest in Peace, Cricket.