Report Card, etc.

I know, my post titles are so exciting.

One thing that is actually pretty exciting is the report card we just received. Gaz aced everything that's been introduced except shoe tying, but with some direction she's already showing she *can* do it. It's more an issue of how attentive she is at any given shoe-tying attempt. I filled out the authorization form for gifted testing (which isn't mandatory, but since our school has a gifted program we don't have to strain ourselves to get Gaz tested), and so that will take place at some time in the near future. Mrs. K. says she thinks Agatha will do well with that, and I know we will soon reach the stage where she needs more challenge at school. Now that she's got a better handle on the social and time challenges that full-day school pose, she's probably going to be chronically bored by the end of the year. Mrs. K. also gave us a tip on a young author's contest that either the school or CPS overall does, so we'll see if she might want to do that. She tells some killer stories.

Another bit of excitement has been with some local friends, Lis and Todd, who were expecting their son Gabriel in early December. He decided to beat the holiday rush and made his grand appearance this week, and is now enjoying the full-service care of their local NICU. I got to see him on Thursday and he is tiny, pink, but he nurses like a champ. His only problem is that every time he has his paci, he stops breathing and forgets to start up again. While he's really not as sick as many babies I've known, this is still quite the problem. If you're in the habit of thinking good thoughts for the health of babies, they would not go unappreciated.

Gaz, of course, is totally stoked to get to hold Gabe as soon as humanly possible, not to mention cousin Grady, and the impending Rizen girl (whose name, I am relatively certain, will not be Charlie, much to Papaw's chagrin).

I am daily amazed by what my girl can do, and what she chooses to do. She picked out one of her animal cards to give to Gabe (a strawberry poison dart frog, which Lis noted Gabe somewhat resembles right now), and lent him a book (the board book version of "The Monster at the End of This Book") so he can hear stories while he's in the hospital. She already has plans to teach all the babies about her favorite dinosaurs and impressive words. She's definitely a helper. Maybe not so great at helping at home, but at least she's an able assistant for just about everyone else.

Perhaps I should make her a "Minion" shirt. That would make a pretty good hand-me-down for when she's old enough to graduate to "Mad Scientist."

I know I am way, way, WAY behind on uploading pictures. Part of the problem is that I have misplaced the cable for my camera. When I do find a bit of time to do stuff like that, I have ended up spending it searching for that damn cable. One of these days, I will find it and I will then have to spend a year sorting and tagging everything. But I'm running out of places the cable could be hiding, so it will probably surface soonish. I hope.

Remember the Tooth!

I've been quoting the Dune movie a lot lately because Gaz lost her first tooth! It was very very wiggly on, I think it was Tuesday, and then we were brushing our teeth and she spit out foam and sait it was pinker because there was blood from her tooth, but I noticed a little something in the sink wash, and after splashing some water to rinse it off, it was, in fact the tooth!

Gaz wasn't in pain, she didn't freak out, she thought it was actually really cool. Now she has a little gap in her lower smile, but she'll soon have brand new adult teeth making their appearance.

First she teethed early, now she's losing her baby teeth early... I shudder to think about her wisdom teeth!

Toys!

Gaz has been collecting ZuzuPets, those toy hamsters. Beastly things, but she adores them and the little toy environments they come with.

She's got a new exercise wheel, so we have the whole habitat out in the living room, and Gaz has been bringing in all her other toys. The My Little Ponies are all in the kitchen area of the habitat.

George just walked in, saying "Oh, my goodness! It looks like a pony party in the hamster house!"

I think that could be a euphemism for something, but I'm not sure what.

Rainbow Metal Girls!

Tonight I brought up the idea of whether Gaz might like to act. She's been watching Justice League Unlimited on DVD from Netflix, and she loves it, and frequently she likes to get up and act out Wonder Woman's parts. So asking her about whether she'd like to get into acting seemed a natural choice.

She got very excited about the idea, but she had very specific conceptions about the roles she wanted to do. I told her that all sorts of roles weren't always out there; she normally had to do what people had available. But, I said, if you really want to be a superhero girl, you could always do your own movie.

So we've spent the past few minutes talking about what sort of video she might like to make. We've mostly talked the basics, and she seems to want to shoot it all right now, but I told her, if you want to do it right, we have to plan out what the story is, what we're going to shoot, who we're going to shoot it with, what we're going to say, etc.

We've determined that she wants to be a Rainbow Metal Girl, that there's more than one of them, but she wants to be Red Metal Girl (on the ROY G BIV rainbow scale), because that costume can have some pink in it. We've decided that the Rainbow Metal Girls should have powers based on metals (iron strength, lead density/toughness, mercury quickness, etc.), and that they should be seen eating dinner in the video. The main action, according to Gaz, should take place against invisible zombies that only the Rainbow Metal Girls can see (though we may have to make a special effect so that the audience can see them sometimes). Beyond that, it's still in development.

I am reminded of Axe Cop, which is a webcomic written by a hyperactive five-year-old, now six, as told to his nearly-30-year-old artist brother. I fully intend to put Gaz down as co-writer as well as lead actress. I hope we can recruit some of her friends as actresses, but that is a fair distance away; we haven't even designed the superhero costumes yet.

Ideas and suggestions are welcomed, by myself and my co-writer, who has approved this message.

Library Card!

So Gaz has her first library card, and in fact her whole class took a walk to the local library, where the kids heard a story while the parents had a library tour, and then everybody got to check out books.

We got the usual suspects: a couple of Mo Willems books, a book on sharks, a book on rollercoasters, one or two things I'm forgetting, and the prize of the collection: two books starring CAPTAIN RAPTOR!

Captain Raptor! Hero of a thousand missions for the planet Jurassica! With trusty blastopack on his back and webcaster pistol strapped to his hip, he protects the spaceways for dinosaurs everywhere!

Yes, it's pulp sci-fi kiddie stories with high-tech dinosaurs! And I gotta say, there's something just glorious about an allosaurus jetting through the air via rocket backpack! And it gets Gaz, in her own words, "all geeked up!"