How To Handle Grinches

This Christmas past wasn't the easiest ever, but I flat refused to let its uncertain, unexpected circumstances dampen my spirit. The biggest game-changer was that the nasty green Grinch of sickness invaded Whoville and delayed our big family dinner and present-opening extravaganza until New Year's Eve--which meant we were singing "Here Comes Santa Claus" one minute and "Auld Lang Syne" the next.

But it wasn't all bad either, affording a little breather between the flurry of all the pre-Christmas madness and the actual celebration. I didn't have to come right home from playing a Christmas Eve church service to thawing out chickens and breaking up bread for dressing. I got to cover the tree with candy canes that I bought at 75% off.

No, as I relegate Christmas 2018 to the family history books, I do so with thoughts of its uniqueness among all the others and of those things that make me smile. Not the least of those is this great shot of the six kids posing in front of the tree with me snapping the shutter just before Zoomie let loose the sneeze that surely shook the entire Midwest.

 
And, I certainly can't forget 2018 as the Christmas I got to attend my first-ever official Grinch Party, a first-grade celebration of sweetness, slime, sparkles, and general green delight. It was an event I loved being able to share with Beenie, although it turned out to be quite different from what I expected.

What do you expect, anyway, when invited to a Grinch Party? Well, I thought there might be games, a snack to share, a little program maybe, some stories. But no--not quite. As soon as I arrived at the Grinch Party, it became clear that I had come to work.

The classroom, I quickly saw, was divided into five Grinch-themed activity stations for 20 or so first-graders to visit, four at once, for 15-minute increments of time. Upon arriving, I was thanked profusely for "volunteering" and invited to man the table where Grinch ornaments would be mass-produced.

Other stations enabled children to smear green icing and stick candy on an upside-down waffle cone (and eat it), construct a Grinch mask, make green "slime," mix (and, again, eat) Who pudding, and design a Grinch face mask. Let your imagination go a minute to fathom the effect of 20 excited six-year-olds on sugar highs rotating through these activities for 75 minutes. It was chaotic. It was intense. It was loud!

And it was wonderful. The grand finale consisted of the whole class returning to their seats to whip up individual baggies of Grinch dust (ingredients: sugar, green glitter, and green food coloring).

Here, at center, you can see Beenie with his hand up, worried that he had poked enough of a tiny hole in his baggie for some Grinch dust to escape before its assigned duty on Christmas Eve. (He and I were able to repair it with a piece of tape before anyone else found out about it. To this day, it remains our secret.)

There are two lessons I take to heart as I close the book on Christmas 2018. One is to stay flexible in case the Grinch of sickness tries to foil your family celebration. And, if you unexpectedly find yourself at the helm of a Grinch Party activity, just do what I did: roll up your sleeves, tuck your hair behind your ears, breathe deeply and often--and pretend you are a six-year-old in a storybook world during the year's most blessed season.

The Best Kind of Goodbye

This year I have not been anxious to let go of autumn.

There have been wonderful, soul-soothing days of sunshine and 60-degree weather that I have clung to like a dog playing tug-of-war on the other end of a big, juicy bone. In spite of sub-freezing nights and two early snows, I have been determined to keep five pots of begonias alive and thriving for Thanksgiving weekend.

I did, and they did. As they hung off my deck yesterday in all their bright pink splendor, I made sure everyone noticed them one last time. They afforded us a splash of color amid the fallen leaves, now brown and drying and spread like a crunchy blanket over the yard.

This was the setting for our final Thanksgiving hurrah, an afternoon outside around the fire pit, roasting sticks in hand and a last, guilt-free chance to indulge in abundant, delightful food that has been absent from our South Beach Diet menu of the past six weeks.

Long about mid-afternoon, our cell phones began buzzing with warnings of near-blizzard conditions predicted for our area today, but I ignored them. It was fall, I insisted to myself and the others. And then my daughter-in-law took the picture.

It is one of those photos that short-circuits the eyes and lands right in the heart. In it, Beenie, Bootsie, Heero, and Zoomie are tossing up handfuls of leaves, which then rain down on them all in a shower of pure joy. You see this in their faces.

For me, the picture works as a metaphor. In it, I see that this is the way I need to release autumn--in a dramatic, exhilarating gesture of delight and gratitude. There is no reason why I shouldn't do that, considering all that autumn--and these past several days in particular--have given me.

On Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, we celebrated my mom's 94th birthday. Happy and well, she was able to go with us to the yearly gathering of our extended family, which now numbers five generations of the descendants of my grandparents. This year, there were seventy-something of us present. Then came two great days with our own kids and grandkids here at the lake. Humbly and gratefully, I acknowledge that autumn owes me nothing. It has given me everything, and I graciously let it go.

The snow and wind began mid-afternoon today. I let them have the begonias. I restocked my depleted fridge with healthy food. I put up the Christmas tree. This is the best kind of goodbye--one that brings, along in its wake, a kind of hello.

Hello, winter. Hello, Christmas season. I am ready to shop and decorate and play Christmas music. I am ready to turn over a new calendar page--and, I guess you might say, a new leaf. 

Changing Times

"Goog?"

It was the quietest little whisper tiptoeing across the darkness of the kids' bunk room at 4:30 this morning. Heero and his brother Beenie were spending the night, and our world had just "fallen back" from daylight savings time a couple hours earlier.

"What do you need?" I whispered back. It is Heero that often calls me "Goog."

"I lost my pillow."

I felt myself smile. Heero was sleeping on a trundle bed we had scooted out from under the daybed where Beenie was still asleep. I knew the pillow had to be on the floor only inches from his head, but I got up, went to him, and conducted a proper search anyway.

"Here it is," I said, straightening his blanket. "Can you sleep just a little more until it's time to get up?"

"Yeah."

Heero went right back to sleep, but I lay awake for just a bit, contemplating the significance of what had just happened. My youngest grandchild had gone to bed as a four-year-old and, only several hours later, shared his first conversation as a five-year-old with me. Before drifting back to sleep myself, I decided that was a pretty special thing.

Although Heero's birthday is officially today, Pa-pa and I enjoyed a big party his mama and daddy hosted for him and others of his extended family yesterday at lunch time. The Superhero party featured all the appropriate accoutrements--including the present of his dreams (a huge Hot Wheels garage from Mom and Dad), Superhero masks, balloons, and a big plate of cupcakes adorned with a "5" candle that he extinguished quite efficiently.

Happy birthday today, little Heero. It was great to celebrate with you yesterday and to have you at my house for a quick overnight. I will remember it as the night we did backwards somersaults, ate pizza and candy corn, played pirate, drew bedtime pictures, read Toot and Puddle books, and tried out your new "phlat ball."

And I will remember it as the night you "lost" your pillow. You have to watch those things, or they can get away from you.

Five years ago today, I became "Googie" (or in your case, "Goog") to my sixth grandchild in as many years. It is bittersweet to realize that, quite suddenly, I don't have any babies anymore.

That is what makes those 4:30 a.m. conversations so special.   

If You Build It . . . .

Ever since Pa-pa and I moved to a lake neighborhood nearly fifteen months ago, I have been hearing voices--the kind Kevin Costner heard nearly thirty years ago as the star of the classic movie Field of Dreams. There, Costner repeatedly hears a cryptic voice whisper, "If you build it, he will come." To summarize, Costner takes a leap of faith, builds a ball diamond in his corn field, and in so doing conjures up the Chicago White Sox team of 1919.

For a year now I have scrutinized my new back yard, trying to envision what I could build there that the grandkids could call their own--a place offering unlimited play potential and plenty of growing room. A one-of-a-kind place where siblings and cousins and friends could gather to role-play or read, to "camp out" or just dream. A sort of clubhouse for Googie's kids.

I didn't want a structure from a kit. I didn't want swings, slides, and other apparatuses that would make it sprawl across the yard. I scoured the internet for pictures and took vacation photos of play sets as far away as Minnesota and even Switzerland. Finally, I took my ideas to a talented builder who converted them to actual plans on paper. The building process spanned several weeks of October, and this past weekend the kids came together to initiate their new play space.

Here you see all six of them--Zoomie, Beenie, Pooh, Heero, Bootsie, and Sooby--lined up across the front of the second level, a 10-foot square with a banister railing. Both this and the first floor have five-foot ceilings. Following is a guided tour of the rest of the building.

This front view shows all three levels. The second and third stories are accessed by indoor ladders, with a rock-climbing wall also leading from first to second on the opposite wall. The top level, fully enclosed, features a window that opens inward and a floor large enough for several sleeping bags. The "front door" on the left opens inward and closes with a gate latch. The lap siding on the first floor is cedar, and all other wood is treated to withstand Missouri weather. The structure rests on concrete blocks at the corners, making it movable with a skid loader.

This photo shows the open front door and one of the two movable wooden boxes. This one on the first floor stores outdoor play equipment, while the one upstairs holds wood scraps of all shapes I salvaged from the construction for use as building blocks. When closed, both boxes double as seats that I will equip with cushions next spring.

This inside shot of the first floor shows the rock climbing wall at the back left and, in the foreground, a drop-down table for snacks, games, or whatever. The two wooden stools were donated from son Teebo, and I will have them cut down to better fit the height of the table.

This view of the second floor shows where the rock wall comes up from below and the ladder to the third floor, or loft.

This picture shows the loft as viewed from the top of the ladder coming up and looking toward the front of the clubhouse. I plan to put a square indoor-outdoor carpet remnant up there next spring to enhance the coziness of this neat spot. On the weekend just past, we put a "Halloween Party" CD on the player, opened the window, and let the likes of "Ghostbusters" and "Monster Mash" lend a spooky-fun atmosphere to our family wiener roast on a glorious fall day.

Back down two ladders and we are on the ground again, looking at the clubhouse from the back. And that completes your tour of the house that Googie built.

If I built it, will they come? I surely hope so. I look forward to many days when this little house of mine will be filled with laughter, imagination, and love. But what will I do if a baseball team shows up? I will just have to hope there is enough room along the other side to accommodate a dugout.

Yellow

In my college theatre classes, we used to play a metaphor game called "Essence." In that game, designed to encourage us to extract the "essence" of character, the person whose turn it was would choose a well known real-life person--perhaps a celebrity--and the rest of us would ask questions in an attempt to guess the identity of that person.

The questions asked had to be designed in the following format:

• If this person were a car, what would he/she be?
• If this person were a dance, what would he/she be?
• If this person were one of the crayons in a Crayola 8-pack, what would he/she be? 

And so on. If the answers to these questions were Corvette, rock and roll, and black, those doing the guessing might gradually narrow their thoughts toward Elvis Presley. If the initial guesses were incorrect, then more questions would be asked until the "essence" of the person in question was finally made clear by the metaphors. 

If it were my turn to answer these same questions about my granddaughter Bootsie, I would say Volkswagen Beetle, ballet, and yellow. With those clues, you would be well on the way to extracting the "essence" of this beautiful little girl whose eighth birthday we celebrated three days ago.

Of the metaphors above, the one that best describes Bootsie is yellow. From her buttery yellow braid to the delicious three-layer lemon cake her mama baked for her birthday, Bootsie exudes yellow. In our lives she is like a bright ray of sunshine that bounces around a room and warms us all.

Pa-pa and I were glad to get to spend the night at Bootsie's house this year on Oct. 3 just like we did on that same date in 2010. It was in the wee hours of the morning of Oct. 4 that year that Bootsie's mama rapped on the guest bedroom door with the words, "Mom, we're going now." And just a few hours later, that little trip to the hospital made our world the cheerful yellow place it has been ever since.

Happy birthday to you, Bootsie. You are butter and sunshine and lemon cake--and sometimes a little bit bananas . . . .

But we love you that way and never want you to change. We love the special shade of yellow that is the essence of you. Pa-pa and I are sure you will brighten your second-grade classroom all year long and leave a trail of shiny sunbeams wherever you go. 

More About the Harvest

The kids' book is just days away now. Yesterday I received notification that it had been shipped. It won't be long until I can start watching out the front window for the mail truck.

Harvest the Stars has been good for me. Most importantly, it has motivated me to gather the kids' poems stashed in the various corners of my life and give them some kind of logical platform that allows them to work together. The collection's goal is to take readers on a playful, imaginative romp through the wonders kids find in a typical day.

I can't say enough about the way Billy Jack Boatman enhances the poems with his illustrations, drawn and colored to imitate the pages of a child's coloring book. His style complements the words perfectly, with most of his drawings featuring animals and/or the little boy character on the cover.

Sandy Selby, an accomplished free-lance writer and editor whose work I respect greatly, says,  "Noland's clever poetry dares to challenge and expand a child's vocabulary and ignite his or her imagination. There's wisdom within that adults will appreciate, too." Sandy's comments target exactly what I wanted to do: build a collection with appeal for a wide range of readers and listeners.

Again, Harvest the Stars will be available for $10 from me in person or $13 by mail. If you have let me know you want a copy (and I thank you profusely for that!), your name is on my list and I will contact you before long regarding distribution. Please add a comment to this post or send me a personal message if you would like me to add your name to that list.

The book's back cover calls it a "rhythmical, rhyming world where stars are available for the gathering and nothing is impossible." This affirms my belief that anything can happen in a child's imagination--and yours too if you let it.

Harvest the Stars

When Beenie came to spend the night with me several years ago, he latched onto a plastic dinosaur in my toy box. He played with it all evening, slept with it, and "fed" it Froot Loops for breakfast the next morning. At some point, he named the dinosaur "Darryl."

Darryl ended up going home with Beenie later that day and hasn't been seen around here since. But shortly after that visit, I composed "A Dinosaur Named Darryl," a poem written from the viewpoint of a little boy with a toy tyrannosaurus. At the time, I published it here in "Googie's Attic," and you can read it in my post for March 6, 2015.

But wait. Maybe you would rather read it later this month when it comes out in my new book Harvest the Stars, a collection of fifteen poems for kids. Creatively illustrated by my friend (and pastor) Bill Boatman, this project has been a couple years in the making, but 100 paperback copies should arrive within the next couple weeks. Needless to say, we are excited.

Initially, Harvest the Stars will be available from me in person for $10 a copy or for $3 more by mail. I think it works nicely as a read-aloud book for preschool and the early grades, while older elementary children may like reading it on their own. Measuring 6 x 9 inches, the book makes a good Christmas gift or stocking stuffer.

As I wait for the books to arrive, I will be doing a series of blog and Facebook posts providing more information about the project. And, I have already tried out a proof version on Beenie, as you can see here:

I hope you will watch the blog and social media as this latest writing adventure unfolds. I look forward to sharing more of the backstories explaining how these poems came to be and some of the nice review comments we have received.