Before I Forget...

Today, I was playing with Mal at a McDonald's Play Place (even though it was a gorgeous day and we'd just been at the park, where there were many homeschool children, but Mal wanted to go to Walmart instead, and then we ended up at McD's where he groused that there weren't any "friends" to play with) and he was using our "superhero" names that he made up. He's had them for almost a year, and in case I hadn't written them down, I wanted to.

Mal's superhero alter-ego is Save-an-Alligator. Kids have told him that's not a good name, because alligators are bad and you don't want to save them. Fortunately, my children are largely undaunted by the criticism of others. So Save-an-Alligator it is. The villain in Malcolm's superhero world is Ken Trash. I think he got this name somewhere, but I'm not sure where. And then my sidekick name is Asheroni. (I was just Googling these, and Trash-Can Ken was a Garbage Pail Kid. Interesting.)

-- It's the next day. Wednesday. We walked to the library this morning for story time, then played at the lake a bit. Mal didn't want to do story time first, but I talked him into it. He made it clear to the librarian that he wasn't going to listen to either story, and then he left without doing the craft. Sigh. Sometimes when you let a kid be master of his own destiny, he asserts his power a little too aggressively. Same when we left the park yesterday half an hour after arriving, even though, because of construction, it had taken us longer than that to get there.

Both of the stories the librarian read today were Thanksgiving stories. The one about the first Thanksgiving was full of pilgrims with literally one single "Indian" in a few of the pictures. Like, it was the same male Native American on every page. They acknowledged that the Native American taught the pilgrims how to grow things in North America, so that's something, I guess. It was super white-washed, though. We talked about it on our walk down to the park... about how, often, things that happened are told incompletely, and from only one point of view.

We didn't even get to talking about the initial book, which was about a squirrel family wherein the siblings weren't thankful for each other, then their rotten cousins came over, and after the visitors left, the original family realized how grateful they were for each other because they weren't as terrible as the extended family. Sweet. Praise Jesus, all.

Anyhoo, I guess that's it for now. I feel like I had a lot to write, then... parenting, wifing, eating, trying to sleep... life. More later!