Scarring your kids for life...sofa cushion DMZ...

I am starting to notice that the subtleties and nuances of Izzy's humour really come to the surface when we are watching television. We were watching a movie and one of the characters reveals himself to be a centaur and then refers to himself as a real horse's ass. This naturally brought fits of giggling but then she got quiet and I could see the wheels were turning.
Izzy-"How is he doing that?"
Daddy-"Doing what, what do you mean?"
Izzy-"Doing that with his legs, how did he get them in there?"
Daddy-"Get them in where, honey? What are you talking about?"
Izzy-"Well, my legs would never fit in a horse's ass and I'm just little. So how is HE doing that?"



Somebody told me once that you should never have more kids than you have windows in the back seat of your car but with the arrangement of some of today's mini vans, you could be looking at ten or twelve kids with face pressed up against windows as you scream down the road toward Disneyland or madness, whichever comes first. I think a better rule of thumb is no more children than there are cushions on the biggest piece of furniture in your living room. I remember an unnaturally large green thing in our living room with three cushions. One for each of us though I was the youngest and so was always plunked square in the middle. No arm rest meant resting your arm on a sibling which inevitably turned to the sort of confrontation that has become commonplace in our living room these days.
Our sofa is an average sized, brownish sort of couch that might be a tad overstuffed and is more comfortable than I thought possible for a sofa. It is also the most sought after piece of real estate we own. Neither of our children are currently over four feet tall but put them on the couch and they both suddenly need the entire nine feet of the sofa for themselves. There are two cushions...large cushions on this couch and the dividing line between the cushions is a sort of no man's land that belongs to neither child and neither is allowed to sit in (sitting between the cushions warps the ends of them, just ask my mother). More often than not the void between the two becomes a settee Siegfried line and all hell breaks loose in the living room. Shouts of "She's on my side," or "He's touching my cushion," descend into taunts and cruel atavistic games like throwing toys across the room and then stretching all the way out, which is one of my favourites because there is a little bit of psychological warfare in it.
"Well he/she got up." The truth is, the other person did get up...The one simple, immediate solution for this is for Dad to sit on the living room couch. Not because I have some great authority or power to soothe the savage breast but whenever I sit down on the living room sofa, the kids have a tendency to get up and go away. I'm not kidding. If I watch the tiny four and a half inch television in the other room, both kids will often come and sit with me and watch along. If I come into the living room with the big twenty two inch television and start to watch what the kids are watching, suddenly they both have other things to do.
We have recently begun to enforce the "On Child Per Cushion Act" of 2009 to keep the peace and there is a detente for the time being but it is tenuous at best and we expect noise on the western front any day now.

Izzy is tough. When she fell off the couch, I think I was more shaken up by it than she was. When she run full tilt into the rocking chair, both times, she let out one of those air raid siren, starting off slow and building until it is full on wailing, cries that warn of non-specific total system melt down but even that was over before she got into the car to go to the clinic. She frequently picks up bugs (including icky Japanese beetle grubs) and feeds them to birds in our backyard. She has tried to stick her hand in the cages of large predatory cats at zoos and wondered why the kitty won't come and play with her...tough little girl.
I was out cutting the grass and noticed a small toad, seriously no bigger than my thumbnail, so I picked it up and cupped my other hand over it. I thought my little nature loving, barefoot hillbilly girl would get a kick out of it...I have never in my life, apart from the movies, heard a scream like that come from another human being. If I had bought her a pony and then sacrificed it to the Devil in front of her, right after telling her that we were going to Canada's Wonderland without her, she wouldn't have screamed like that...to this day if I mention that I have seen toads on the grass, she gets sweaty and a look of uneasiness crosses her face. But she has had her revenge on dear old Dad. One of Izzy's favourite books, indeed many a parent and child's favourite book, is a little gem called "Love you Forever" and Izzy insists that I read it to her at least once a week. I am going to become very unpopular shortly but this is one of the creepiest most disturbing tomes I have yet read. It makes some of the Grimm brothers works look like happy rainbow fun time stories. I now have visions of my mother climbing the trellis and knocking on our bedroom window at three or four in the morning, because she thinks I need a good rocking to sleep...at four in the morning, sneaking in the window, it's not a mother's love anymore and an unbreakable bond with her child. It's a mother's separation anxiety and breaking and entering...