My Kids Are Awesome

When we moved into this house last summer, there was an overabundance of cats running around the place so we had to, um, take care of some of them. At first, I didn't want Mike and Noel to watch Morgan shoot, I mean, take care of the cats because they're pretty tender-hearted when it comes to animals. It turned out that they had kind of a morbid fascination with watching the animals get shot and then subsequently die. There was one in particular that didn't die quickly. It flopped around for a bit before Morgan had to finish it off.

Noel once complained that Morgan took Mike cat hunting but she didn't get to go, so he said that he thought that she liked cats and wouldn't like to watch them get shot.

She replied that she liked tame cats, not wild cats. When he asked how she could tell the difference between tame cats and wild cats, she replied, "When you shoot wild cats, they flop all over, like this" and demonstrated full-body flopping.

Now we like to joke that if you need to figure out if an animal is wild or tame, you just shoot it.

We left a few cats alive for mouse control. One of the cats was a cute little Siamese. Her leg had been shot and eventually fell off, so we call her Lucky or Stumpy. The irony of the whole situation is that now, a year later, Stumpy is the only surviving cat. The rest have been picked off by various predators.

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Mike has been shooting random objects around our yard lately with the BB gun. A couple of days ago he told me about a wasp nest that he shot. As an afterthought, he added that it was next to a window in the garage and that he had accidentally shot the window and broken some of the glass. When he saw the look on my face he asked, "Is shooting glass bad?"

In his defense, the window was already broken and I think that he assumed that since it was already broken there was no harm in breaking it more. This prompted me to review with him what is okay to shoot and what he should avoid shooting. Since we rent a house on a cattle feed lot, there are a lot of things that are no-nos. Don't shoot windows, buildings or tractors. Don't shoot near windows, buildings or tractors. Don't shoot the cows. Don't shoot any piece of farm equipment.

This led to questions of "What can I shoot?"

I finally ended the talk with a cautionary "Just don't shoot anything that belongs to Joe or Kerry."

After a moment of silence, Mike said "Well, who does Stumpy belong to?"

What a goober. He wasn't planning on shooting the cat, he assured me. He just wondered who she belonged to.

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In the vein of shooting things, I was inside the other day when I heard a shriek of "dragonflies!" from outside. Mike came in and asked me to come outside with him. Sure enough, there were dragonflies everywhere, and they were huge.

Mike's reaction?

"You could shoot those with a BB gun!"

He is such a boy's boy.

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I generally do not buy snack cakes because I think that they are garbage. My mom bought some Ding Dongs and sent them home with me because, and I quote, if she kept them she would be "as big as a cow."

I brought them home and put them on the counter. Some time later, Noel came out of her room to ask her dad if she could have a doofus.

"A what?"

"You know, a doofus."

It took him a few minutes to understand that she meant a Ding Dong. She knew it was one of those term-of-endearment words that I am always calling my kids.