JustJessie

A Genius and a Guinea Pig

The Genius:  Grayson is very into inventing right now.  We're forever helping him find duct tape, paper clips, clothes pins, and various other items necessary for inventing.  Yesterday he introduced his latest contraption, the "Memory Screen Imager."  When wearing the "imager" electricity comes down from the sky, through the knife er, antenna and a happy memory is displayed on the inside of the goggles, and it makes it seem as if you were living it all over again.

The Guinea Pig:  Frequently Grayson uses his little brother to test his experiments, and this one was no exception.  He rigged it up on Grant last night while I was rounding up the bedtime crew (Kasey the Koala, Danny the Dinosaur, Bears the Blanket, and Puppers the Dog).  The memory Grant saw was the day he made Puppers, and when Grayson asked if he could really see it, Grant exclaimed, "Yeah!  I wunner how it works like dat, Bubba?!  Dat so cool!"

His name is...

.............GLADIATOR..............

Can't you see the resemblance?

And before you judge me, he's never seen this movie.  His dad has been telling him all about the Gladiators in Rome, and this afternoon he popped out of the playroom in this costume he put together himself.  As I type he's hunting gladiator gear for his brother.

Daydream Believer

This probably puts me in the mean mommy hall of fame, but I just have to tell you about Grayson's drama last night.  He had been in bed all of five minutes when I started to hear whimpering noises coming from his room.  Being the attentive mother that I am, I glanced up from the computer screen and asked Jeff to please go see what his problem was.  He went, and tried to take care of the issue, but I kept hearing the word "Mommy" in between sniffles and wails. 

So, I went back and snuggled up next to him, and asked him what was wrong.  For the next five minutes I struggled to keep a straight face as his story of woe unwound...

"Just now, I was lying here, and I wasn't asleep yet, but my eyes were closed, and I was daydreaming.  I dreamed that you and Katie's mom and me and Katie met someplace to play together, and you said 'Grayson you and Katie go play, so we Mommies can talk.'  So me and Katie were playing, but then she got a really mean look on her face and pushed me out of the window and I was falling and falling, and when I finally hit the ground it was concrete, and I fell so hard I fell right through the concrete, and it hurt so bad.  Then when I was laying in the hole, hurting to bad to move, a poisonous spider climbed in and bit me and it was killing me, and no one even noticed me lying there!  Then you finished talking and you got in the car and you just left me there dying!"  At this point he dissolved into a puddle of tears, sniffs, hiccups, and snorts. 

I am proud to tell you that with a straight face, I looked him in the eye and said, "Grayson, Mommy could never leave you behind.  You have my heart, and if I ever left you I couldn't live, because my heart would be left behind too."  A couple of hugs and kisses later, he was just fine and ready to settle down to sleep.

Imaginations Gone Wild!

For the past few weeks, Grayson and I have been reading the Spiderwick Chronicles for his bedtime stories.  He LOVES them so much!  The hero of the series is Jared Grace who has a twin brother named Simon.  If you don't know, these books are chocked full of all things faerie: good creatures like sprites and brownies, bad creatures like goblins and ogres.  We just started book four of five, and Grayson's imagination has been set on fire! 

He and Grant call each other Jared and Simon about 60% of the time now, and they spend all their outdoor play time fighting goblins and meeting with elves and sprites.  Grayson has made his own Field Guide of fantastical creatures with wonderful illustrations. 

I have never seen a child as enthralled with a story as Grayson is with this one.  I love how his imagination is so vivid that in his mind he is Jared Grace, and there really are fantastical creatures all around us.  I wish so much for him to stay this way as long as possible.  I know he has to grow up one day, but not yet...

Santa Claus is Comin' to Town

My word well is dry, so we'll just call this Wordless Thursday.

Karl the Elf

We get kinda tired of the storybooks we have at home, and those darn library fines can get pretty outrageous (really, they ought to name a wing of that place in our honor).  So sometimes Jeff and I make up stories for our boys.  There's a running saga about Sir Grayson the Brave of Heart and Sir Grant the Gallant and True.  They've saved innumerable townships and imaginary princesses.  Their names are celebrated among kings and sultans.  But wait, that's a story for another post!  After we put up our Christmas tree this year, I snuggled in with Grayson on the couch and told him a new story about Karl the Elf.

Karl is an elf hatched (yes, hatched) by a fairy in the woods.  His first story was about the adventures that led him to the North Pole where all the other elves live.  He travels the world looking for someone like him, and in the end, he not only finds Santa's workshop, but a love interest as well.

I was worried Grayson would think the story too juvenile or silly, but he absolutely loved it.  He spent the entire next day dressed in "elf clothes" with some ears he made and attached to his Santa hat. 

I did not intend for Karl to become such a fixture in our home, but sometimes if a thing works, you just run with it!  And anyway, who could resist an elf this handsome?

Karl has had many adventures to date, and may (after the Christmas craziness) make his way into storybook form for Christmas future.

I'm not the Jedi I should be...

A candid interview, a unique look into the inner mind of Lord Vader...

Stormtrooping Grayson style

Grayson, like all good American boys, has a healthy love for Star Wars.  It's cool cause his daddy liked it when he was a kid; it's cool cause they have guns and lightsabers (though thankfully they never bleed); it's cool cause there are robots and aliens involved.  So ever since playing with his cousins yesterday, all I have heard about is how Grayson really needs  a stormtrooper gun, but he doesn't have one.  One of the many things that I love about Grayson is that he doesn't always expect us to run out and buy him new toys all the time.  He is much more likely to ask us to make  him a new toy rather than buy him one.  On this one I started to just blow him off, ya' know?  Make a stormtrooper gun?  Get serious.  But, being Grayson, he couldn't let it drop, and I started trying to remember the last time I made something with him that took a little thought and effort on my part, and I couldn't remember.  So I started scrounging around in cabinets and closets, hoping inspiration would hit me, and guess what?  It did!  Here's what we came up with:

We covered a spaghetti box with white craft foam, then rolled up some cardboard for a handle, which we attached through slots on the bottom of the box.  We covered the handle in black tape, added some black tape to the sides to make it more authentic, and voila!  Stormtrooper gun a'la Grayson.

Dynamic Duo

  Introducing, the amazing RUBBER-BAND MAN! and his trusty sidekick, BAND BOY!

Whence came these fabulous super-hero names, you ask?  You see, these super-heroes have MANY powers, but their most prized power is stretchability.  Yes, they can stretch to abnormal lengths, just like a rubber band. They can shoot through the air with lightning speed, just like a rubber band shot from a finger gun.  And last but not least, they can jump like the world's bouciest rubberband ball.  Evil paper clip villains of the world beware!!

Here's Lookin' at You, Kid.

Grayson has come up with yet another persona to play-act.  He's now a detective who tracks down robbers, gives them over to the police, and sells the story to the newspaper.  When I first saw the combo of the cowboy hat, bathrobe, and badge I thought  I wonder where he saw Walker Texas Ranger on tv?  It wasn't until he asked for a notebook and pen that I saw it through his imagination, and suddenly realized it was a young Humphrey Bogart I was looking at, not Chuck Norris after all.  You know, Bogey, Casablanca style - trench-coat, fedora, and all that. 

So he was looking at me across the table from under those looong lashes with sort of a snarl on his lips, scribbling away on his notebook.  And at first that's all he was doing, scribbling.  But then!  HE WROTE A SENTENCE!!  ALL BY HIMSELF!!  Unfortunately in his imagination I was a bad guy who had robbed a bank with a knife, so his first EVER sentence went like this: "BAD MOM haD a NiiFE"  That's one for the books right there!  Stinks he couldn't write his first sentence on a day he was imagining I was a princess or something.  But still, you can't beat imaginary play and learning all rolled into one!