So yesterday was my day to get things done. Except that should be in all caps. GET THINGS DONE.
Because it dawned on me that I’m leaving for the Amazon in two weeks and may need things like proper rainforest footwear and a hat. Although I have yet to find a hat that doesn’t make me want to sing the theme song to Go Diego Go.
“Deep inside the jungle where nature’s running wild
coming to the rescue is a very special child
talking to the animals and swinging from a vine
this rough and tough adventurer is working all the time”
Which is interesting since I don’t even think Diego wears a hat. His cousin Dora has a hat she dons every now and then for an adventure, but Diego just has his rescue pack. AL RESCATE!
The most disturbing thing is that my mind has chosen to remember this kind of trivial information instead of more important things like where I put the spare key to my car or the ability to do long division in my head.
I believe it has something to do with how many times I watched Dora and Diego while sleep deprived. It’s like the way they wear spies down during an interrogation, repeating mindless songs over and over again until they crack. Or at least that’s how they did it on an episode of Alias I watched one time.
But even more pressing than proper clothing and malaria medication for the Ecuador trip is the literary pumpkin patch. We received a note home on Friday about it, but I was in a medicinal fog and chose to ignore it hoping it might go away.
No such luck.
Naturally, it is not a requirement. Just a fun opportunity. Which is the librarian’s nice way of saying that you don’t have to do it if you can live with the guilt of your child not having a literary pumpkin.
And I think we all know that I can’t take the chance that Caroline will one day tell her therapist, “It all started with the literary pumpkin patch in third grade…” Plus, and I say this in a hushed, ashamed whisper, sometimes I kind of enjoy the craft challenge.
After much debate between a character from Harry Potter or Chronicles Of Narnia, Caroline decided she wanted to make an Aslan pumpkin. So I ran to Michael’s yesterday while she was at school because experience has taught me it’s smarter to shop for the basic supplies by myself. Once she gets involved we tend to end up with glitter and a bedazzler gun and then I wake up passed out in the back of Michael’s with a red cart full of things for which there are no explanation.
I stuck to the basics. Yarn for a mane. Some little puffy things to make cheeks. Googly eyeballs. Yellow paint. Oh, and I got Gulley to buy me a pumpkin because we went to lunch and when I dropped her off we were right by the local pumpkin patch and she had cash and I didn’t. True friends buy each other pumpkins. I believe that’s in Proverbs.
I picked up Caroline from school, told her about the supplies I bought and said we could go home and get to work. She informed me that Aslan is a serious lion and would NEVER have googly eyeballs. So I tried to downplay the googly aspect.
And so we spent the afternoon painting a pumpkin a nice harvest gold color. After she declared it to be dry, which was debatable, we began work on the mane by hot-gluing yarn all over the top. I was at least ten minutes into this process when I realized she’d left the room and gone in her playroom to play.
“Get back in here and help me make Aslan.”
She walked back in the room, glanced at the pumpkin and then at her poor mother with hot-glue burned fingers and said, “That really doesn’t look like much of a lion.”
“Well, that’s because it’s a PUMPKIN. It’s not easy to make a lion out of a PUMPKIN.”
Which is a sentence I always imagined I’d say one day.
And kind of makes me wonder if Diego carries anything in his rescue pack that could help a person turn a lion into a pumpkin.