Luchroom Larfs- September 11, 2013

My daughter came home from school today and said she, "was not doing good at Grade One." I suppressed the urge to explain that it might be due to her atrocious grammar and asked why. One of the changes in Grade One is that there is no longer a teacher yelling at you to say it's time to come in from outside. Instead there is a bell that is easily ignored by a daydreaming five-year-old. She said that she got in trouble because she didn't hear the bell. I asked what she was doing. She told me that she was, "singing to the bees to invite them to land on her shoulder."

We of course sent her to bed with no dinner.

Luchroom Larfs- September 10, 2013

I was totally out of ideas for today's note in my daughter's lunch, so I drew this:

That panda looks both sad and happy all at once. The flamingo is an apathetic dick.

Lunchroom Larfs- September 9, 2013

The night before I drew this one, we had some neighbors over with their kids for Smores. Do you know what is a bright idea? Feeding children a diet of chocolate, marshmallow and graham crackers right before bed. They were like Whirling Dervishes in the bed. An even better idea is to give into the screaming two-year-old demanding that she hold her own marshmallow roasting stick. Though "A Flaming Marshmallow" sounds like and excellent name for a band, it is not an excellent salve when applied directly from fire to skin.

 

Lunchroom Larfs- September 6, 2013

We went a good three days before losing the lunchbox. Yesterday when I picked my daughter up at school the lunchbox was nowhere to be found. We looked in her room, the lost and found and tried to check the lunchroom, but like the gulage I assumed it to be, it was locked up tight. My daughter was quite upset over this because the lunchbox was new "AND IT HAD PEACE SIGNS AND HEARTS ON IT. MY FAVORITE".

Today with head hung low and her ham sandwich in a liquor store bag she went to school. I tried to cheer her up with this happy thought of her lunchbox.

Like how the dog you had as a kid went to the "farm".

Because I am a genius, and put my phone number in the box, I got a call from someone saying they had the lunchbox, so I said, "I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter's lunchbox go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you"

Or he just said that he left it by the main entrance of the school. I can't really remember to be honest.

I went to school today and there was the lunchbox, with all it's innards strewn around it like a pack of hyenas got at it and tore it apart. 

Lunchroom Larfs- September 5, 2013

We lay the seed of keeping boys away regularly at our house by giving my daughter a large amount of Cliff Claven like trivia to sprout off ad nauseam. Our hope is that this keen interest will work for us when she is a teenager and she'll go out with a nice nerdy boy. This is really plan two, plan one is to somehow raise her lesbian. Anyway, my wife found this video of a Noodle Squid, which I feel would make a really trippy lamp, and showed it to her. She flipped out and that lead to a Wiki Wormhole of watching videos on many weird squid in the ocean deep and delaying bedtime by about an hour.

This combines her two greatest loves. Macaroni and squid. Which I'm sure we could order in China Town.

Lunchroom Larfs- September 4, 2013

Another water themed note for my daughter's lunchbox. That worm obviously has Stockholm syndrome.

Note that we are too cheap to get my daughter flippers, only a mask and snorkel for her.

Lunchbox Larfs- September 3, 2013

In lieu of writing actual blog posts I thought I would share a new hobby with you. Isn't it interesting that it's a hobby if it is vaguely productive, but an obsession if it's vaguely criminal? Building model trains is a hobby, building trains out of models is an obsession. Jefferey Dahmer would be known as merely a hobbyist if we could all just stop labeling people. 

But as always I digress. My eldest daughter started Grade One this year (or First Grade for you American readers), which meant a lot of changes for her. She would have to go full day (8:45 - 3:15). Man, I wish when I was in an office that was considered a full day. She has to to more learning through structured learning rather than play. And she has to remember her lunch box. This of course is the apex of difficultly for any five-year-old.

She was quite worried about being in the busy lunchroom with all the big kids and who she would sit with, if anyone. Her worries made it sound like there may be a separate dungeon-like room for introverts where they take away the ham sandwich you brought and replace it was a tasty gruel, then immediately be pummeled by the Grade Sevens.

One of the things that she and I love to do together is draw. I don't claim to be a great drawer, (that's the technical title right?) but I do enjoy it. Always have. At the age of ten I asked for a drafting table for Christmas, making my free spirited young parents quite worried that they were in fact raising "The Man". Thankfully I don't have the drive nor energy to be a powerful person, I just wanted to draw silly pictures.

So in order to help her through the terror that would be lunch time I drew a silly cartoon and stuffed it in her lunchbox, hoping that would make her feel a little more at ease.

Being that this was my first attempt at a note to make my daughter feel good on the first day it's not incredibly funny, so much as it's something she can relate too. 

My daughter has an amazing interest in giant squids. We have read many books, watched a number of documentaries and even communicated with one of the world's foremost experts on giant squids, Dr. Clyde Roper. All this has cumulated in a planned visit to the Smithsonian to view the display there and hopefully meet Dr. Roper. Hopefully I'll have an amusing post about that when it happens.