Make Believe

In the world of make believe anything goes, right?

Except, maybe it doesn’t.

Even in make believe we, or perhaps just I, am only willing to suspend so much reality. Of course you can have magic, but it must have rules. Yes, butterflies can fly in snow, but they better still have six legs because they are still insects. And, as per a recent conversation on the book we are working on now, yes, you can have a snowman ride in a bike basket driven by a bee through the autumn woods without him melting… but that bee better be able to reach the pedals. Otherwise it’s just ridiculous.

Tooks (my illustrator), thinks perhaps I’m crazy (in a laughing, loving way.) She’s probably right – but I still think that there is a line to walk. If you are going to create a world with magic, it should have rules and magical realism needs to preserve a sense of “realism” or it devolves into utter nonsensical silliness. On the flip side you have to have some goofy silliness to make the magic work. Like I said, walking the line, though I’m willing to concede that my “line” is crooked and random as we create another book of “what if’s” and magic and we decide what is fun and what doesn’t make sense!

P.S. Visit booksforthebees.com and sign up for our newsletter for very occasional updates on our progress including tomorrow’s newsletter that will contain our whole ridiculous biking bee with a snowman conversation!

Lost

A picture from the day that I discovered that not only am I the mother in charge of finding lost shoes, lip gloss, jackets, knives, snacks, pets, blankets, pillows, slime, homework, pencils, LEGOS, doll clothes and golf balls but that I’m also in charge of lost people.

Not to worry, we were really more slightly misdirected. And I, mother and finder of all lost things, was on the job. I noticed, monitored, studied and corrected the situation before anyone’s legs actually fell off as they were, apparently, threatening to.

As much as I am asked to find the things, and as often as I know how to find the things, I usually make my kids find the things themselves. Possibly with a few helpful hints, if I’m feeling magnanimous.

And what I learned on this last trip is that it’s time to break out the maps, because map reading is not a skill any of them have. (And bless my husband, heaven knows he needs it, he tries really hard but I fear he’d have been lost right along with them.)

How are you with a map? Directional sense? If you have kids do they know how to read a map?  

Invisible

We started with a quart mason jar, even before Pintrest filled them with everything.

We added a little gravel straight from the pet shop and a tiny plastic plant.  Filled it with water, dropped in Penelope and our dorm room suddenly had one more occupant.

Guests noticed our mason jar aquarium, because things in mason jars were interesting even before Pintrest proclaimed it so.

“She’s tiny and shy” we’d tell them. “She might be down in the gravel, or hiding in the plant.”

So little, she was nigh on invisible our Penelope.

Friends would look and look for her and, occasionally, one would spy her.

An impressive feat, considering she was never actually there.

 

 

Flowery

I was in town Sunday night when I got a call that Jane’s alarm clock had broken and that she would like to talk to me.

Jane then very politely requested that I go to the Dollar Store in town and buy her a new alarm clock, “But not one of those plain black ones with all the buttons like yours. A unicorn one.”

When I explain that the Dollar Store was unlikely to be open, (think small town Sunday night, the grocery store was closing in ten minutes and the gas station only had another hour) and that even if it was, it was highly unlikely that I would find a unicorn alarm clock at the Dollar Store (that being a weirdly specific request that I’ve never even seen before, much less at our, nice but relatively small local Dollar Store).

Jane heaved a sigh out of her little seven year old body that rivaled that of the most put-upon mother and said. “Can you just make sure it’s girly then.”

Up a creek I would have been, except that I was at a friend’s house who happened to have an old unused alarm clock as well as a resourceful high schooler. Her daughter kindly went to work printing out pictures and created the most flowery, girly unicorn alarm clock that has ever come out of our little town after dark on a Sunday.

While I was sure it wasn’t quite what Jane had envisioned, it was pretty impressive, except for one thing, it only beeped.

And so, despite the fact that Jane has only used radios as alarms in the past ,when I arrived home, well past her bedtime, (girly, unicorn alarms take a bit of time to create) I set it up anyway.  This morning when my own radio alarm sounded I headed upstairs to see how Jane’s “surprise” alarm clock worked out for her.

“Mom, it looks really pretty but it makes a bad noise. When I woke up this morning I was screaming.”

I feel it needs to be explained here that Jane wakes up earlier than her sisters or me because it takes her 57 times longer than us to get ready. I give her an extra 30 minutes.  Sometimes it helps. And sometimes, like this morning, John is up getting himself ready.

Thankfully he was able to turn off her alarm clock, show her the girly pictures and calm her down.  Now despite the fact that she disparaged her wonderful creation as being “an alarm clock that Granny would use” (for reference Granny is her Great Grandma, so I think she got that spot on) she happily set it tonight before bed and double checked that she knew how to turn it OFF when it makes that bad noise again in the morning.

I can only conclude from this alarm clock fiasco that unicorns are indeed magical beings. How else would Jane have accepted a machine that makes a noise so irrefutably terrible that it woke her up screaming as her new alarm clock?