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Week 255: Ceiling Cat, Ninjas, and Numbers December 16, 2008

It's funny how lies to your children can spin out of control. Most often for me it stems from making some kind of joke that I thought was funny, and when Sam ends up believing I just can't seem to stop. For example, I now have Sam solidly convinced that there is a cat who lives in our ceilings and watches over her constantly through little trap doors and knows when she's misbehaving. But he's quick and would disappear before you could see him if you glanced up looking for him. Ceiling Cat travels between houses and around the world through a series of "ceiling tubes" and reports back to both Santa AND Jesus on Sam's (mis)behavior. Now, whenever I see her glancing up at the ceiling I know to put my hands on my hips and start demanding to know what she's done.

This was born, of course, out of a popular Internet meme. Here's a picture:

I can only hope that nobody EVER holds this against me, and that it just makes me a fun-loving parent. That's going to be my excuse, anyway.

Mandy continues to speed along her road to development like a runaway truck with its brake lines cut. She has recently been perfecting her toddler ninja disappearing act, as we discovered when we took her to a chaotic "Breakfast with Santa" event at church the other day. Geralyn went to wait in line for tickets while I took Sam and Mandy into the crowded festivities. I had barely set Mandy down on the ground when she just literally disappeared right before my eyes. I'm not kidding. She could have made the illusion more complete only by throwing down a smoke bomb and dropping some caltrops. After some frantic searching I eventually found her standing over by Santa Clause and giving him a highly skeptical look. Perhaps she was contemplating putting a shuriken between his glue-on eyebrows, but I distracted her with a donut with red and green sprinkles. It's the traditional way to combat a ninja.

Sam is also developing along nicely. She wants to know all about letters and words, plus she's been counting and doing some basic addition and subtraction (though if she claims that three plus one is five, she will stick to her beliefs, NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO so just give up). Ger says that the other day Sam asked her what the biggest number was. Predictably, the answer of "there is none" failed to satisfy Sam, who practically became beligerent in her demands to know the digit in question. Is it a thousand? A million? A bajillion? JUST TELL ME, MOMMY!

The funny thing is that I remember having this same exact conversation with MY mom when I was a kid. She told me that there are an infinite number of numbers, and that you could just keep counting forever. I remember thinking that if that was so that there MUST have been a point where people in white lab coats had dropped dead of exhaustion in their efforts to name all the numbers, and I wanted to know THAT point so that I could come up with the next number so that I would be famous and maybe they'd put me in the encyclopedia. Unfortunately the concept of scientific notation was beyond my ken, and not fully understanding my question (thanks in no small part to my inability to ask it clearly), my mom eventually just gave up and told me to go play with my Legos.

So in a way, it's kind of sweet that Sam gets to repeat my own, bitter disappointments and pin them on the ignorance of adults rather than her own limited understanding. Makes you all fuzzy inside, doesn't it?

And, finally, here's a picture that I think is kind of cool: