Mompers

It's open! Oh at last! It's open! Let's go!

"Where to?" you might well ask. Let's go to . . .

Yep, the girls have been at it again. We had two opening celebrations this week (complete with refreshments) for the two newly opened Dinosaur Museums, one in each non-parental bedroom (we have a fairly fluid assignment of sleeping spaces, so no one really has an assigned room). When they found out I had purchased 5000 sheets of paper at Costco, they lost no time in trying to burn through the supply.

Which bring us to this: the Wooly Mammoth Wall (these are known as "mompers" [monsters] by this little guy)
Here's a sample of the artwork:

Everything's carefully labeled in case you aren't sure what's what:
(Those little triangular things are the plates of a stegasaurus)

We have a few (ahem) non-traditional dinosaurs:

Another wall:

I'd call this the main gallery:
One of my personal favorites, the singing dinosaurs:

The toothpicks are prizes awarded for excellence in drawing. (Note the fish-catching going on, and the little waves splashing up.)

A colorful fellow:

Momper of the Deep:

Wet Momper:

Flying Momper:

T-Rex and child:

And of course no museum is complete without a museum shop. This one sells bracelets fashioned out of pipe cleaners in various sizes:

Pennies go here:

Come visit soon!

His Eye is on the Sparrow (or Junco)

E came to me in a dither yesterday after playing outside for a little while to report that she thought she had found a dead bird. She had indeed. It was most certainly dead. Thoroughly dead. A little Junco from the back yard. Her mind immediately went to the Cedar Waxwing we found on campus last year that apparently was part of a mass kill-off, probably from ingesting ice-melt. So she posited that it had eaten "poison" from a neighbor's yard (neighbors who are notorious for spraying and sprinkling noxious substances on their lawns, sometimes with a down-wind effect on our yard/family/flowers).

Here's the (late) bird:

We wondered briefly what to do with it. They knew not to play with it, since I had told them the story of my bringing home a dead bird as a child and being scolded for bringing a yucky, dead, stiff, no doubt pestilential bird into the house. We decided to bury it in the garden (the circle of life and all that). They wanted to use a push broom. I opted for a spade.

Then the girls wanted to memorialize the poor bird:

Then M's sign got more specific:
The final product:
Tooie decided today he wanted to dig the bird up and "just take a look at it." Fortunately, I distracted him.

Oops.

The phone rang this morning. M brought it to me, and the voice on the other end said, "Is this Dr. So-and-so?"

"Why yes it is," I answered, not without some pleasure in finally, finally, getting my due.

Let's back up just a moment. I am not actually a Dr., but I am only about four chapters of a dissertation shy of being one. (OK, so that's pretty far shy of it, but I could have finished, barring a husband and some children, right? Oh yeah, and some serious writer's block and perhaps a dearth of original ideas.) Anyway, I am at least a bona fide professor, and really, that should count for something.

When I first started my university career, being (a) female and (b) someone who looks young for her age (sometimes by as much as ten years), my students felt they were justified in calling me by my first name . . . which they most assuredly were not (perhaps I don't deserve any respect, considering that dangling modifier I just bunged in there). But even though 32 was old enough to teach, it was not old enough to call them to repentance. There were other problems as well, but let's not dwell on the negative, shall we? Suffice it to say that I've been waiting for years (almost ten, to be exact) to get some respect, in and out of the classroom.

So is it not excusable to react with a blush of pleasure when someone calls me "Dr." of her own accord?

But my joy was short-lived. The woman on the line started talking hospital this and on-call that. I should have known that on New Year's Day, no one would have a literary emergency. I told her that unfortunately I was not that kind of doctor. "Oh," she asked, "are you a nurse practitioner?" I hated to disappoint her, but no, I am not. "I am a professor," I said.

I didn't tell her I'm not even a real doctor of anything. Sic transit gloria big-head.