Dylan is doing well in preschool, much to our surprise. He’s learning lots of new things, but there appears to be a giant hole in the curriculum. He decided to address this gap the other night by questioning Mommy about it.
“Mommy, I have a question for you!”
“What is it, Dylan?” She was expecting something like “Could I have a cookie?” or “Could I watch TV?”
“Mommy, do penguins fart?”
Mommy found that she also had a gaping hole in her education. This is something that had never been addressed in any of her classes. Isn’t the internet wonderful? She googled it, and told him that yes, indeed, penguins do fart. Then she picked up the phone and called us.
“Do you know if penguins fart?”
“What?”
“That’s what Dylan asked me, and he was perfectly serious. He was curious about whether penguins farted!”
“Uh, let me check with your dad….SwampMan, Dylan wants to know whether penguins fart!” SwampMan was too busy roaring with laughter to actually look it up for himself at the time, but there are several high school classes that now know that penguins fart, whether they were curious about that fact or not.
Mommy also told us that little Zoe now has teeth (but still not much in the way of hair!), is crawling everywhere, and snatching anything small enough to fit in her mouth off the floor and chewing on it with those new teeth (and had a couple near choking incidents). Since they’ll be visiting this weekend, I’ll have to make sure that any (okay, all) magazines, newspapers, wool bits, dropped coupons, kleenexes, dehydrated frogs, dead bugs, pens, tracked in dirt, etc. are vaccumed up, tossed in the trash, or shampooed off the carpet. A few weeks ago when we saw her last, she was just starting to pick up finger foods, had no teeth, and was somewhat immobile, moving around by half rolling and wriggling to get where she wanted, a slow process.
Dylan and Jacob were eager to question Papa SwampMan about whether their shelves were ready yet. Papa is building them some new shelves for their room so that each can have more treasure-storing space. “Awwwwwwww”, you may say. “I bet they want to put their favorite toy trucks on those shelves!” Well, not exactly. Dylan wants to display his hog skull complete with tusks. Jacob wants to display an alligator skull. Papa assured them that the shelves were ready.
A1A South 
kae said,
September 16, 2011 @ 2:09 am
OMG!
I thought that dehydrated/desiccated frogs were only found at my place!
swampie said,
September 16, 2011 @ 6:06 am
Nope. Those pesky lil’ frogs (and lizards) make their way into the house unnoticed and, overnight, come out to dehydrate themselves to death on the carpet where their lil’ bodies lie in a mummified j’accuse position until I find them and dispose of them. Little tiny eyes close to the carpet may be more effective than mine, however.
kcduffy said,
September 16, 2011 @ 6:28 am
I have a degrading cow skull in my front flower bed. It’s from a cow that died on my parents’ property in Montana…about 22 years ago! Florida sun makes short work of such things, that is a superheated zone for most of the year.
And if I know kids at all, skulls will almost always be more of a treasure than most any toy. Gotta love ’em!
swampie said,
September 17, 2011 @ 5:55 am
The sheep skulls and bones degrade pretty quickly.
Deborah Leigh said,
September 18, 2011 @ 1:06 pm
Aren’t dehydrated frogs and lizards really a form of jeky? You might have a delicacy there. You could open up a roadside jerky stand. If not the Chinese herbal doctors might buy ’em. This could pay towards the kid’s education…or a new teething ring.
Deborah Leigh
swampie said,
September 20, 2011 @ 5:08 pm
Heh. Good idea!
We could bypass the customer, though, and just let the kid teethe on the dehydrated frogs and lizards.
kcduffy said,
September 21, 2011 @ 6:10 am
Sweeping under the rug in front of the door yesterday, I found the dehydrated remains of what in Hawai’i we called geckos but here are evidently just lizards. Has to have been there awhile, the cats who went outdoors have been gone awhile.
Jerky, maybe not…but Chinese medicine…y’know, that does have the ring of possibility!