Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Some kids get normal stuffed animals...

Last night, my wife sat down with a set of reading flash cards and started going through them with Firstborn. Since I'm trying to encourage him to read, I told him that if he could get all of them right, I had a prize for him: a stuffed-animal monster who would be a buddy for Ithaqua.

He missed three of the cards on the first pass. Each time, we explained to him how to work out those words, and then shuffled them back in. Each time, when he came to them again, he sounded them out and got them right. Which was way, way better than I'd expected.

So I went and fetched his prize, and he opened it up and put it on his bed with the other stuffed animal monsters. (He has some stuffed animals that aren't monsters - a couple of wombats, a monkey, a koala, and a pirate's parrot - but they're distinctly outnumbered by the monsters.) So now, in addition to Cthulhu, Ithaqua, Nyarlathotep, a facehugger, and a giant scorpion, we now have Gug:
(Or, really, a gug, but since gugs don't actually talk, we're just calling this one "Gug.")

Ithaqua was happy to find another buddy who was about his size, so the two of them spent the night hanging from the underside of the top bunk. Firstborn, who spent most of the day at the science museum with his grandparents, slept soundly underneath them.

6 comments:

  1. So, who likes Gug more, Firstborn or dad? :)

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  2. Hard to say. Daddy is distinctly responsible for seeking out the collection of disturbing stuffed animals, but Firstborn certainly enjoys them. (They've been known to come to his rescue by leaping on Daddy when Daddy is trying to turn out the light.)

    And Secondborn will be getting a small stuffed Godzilla for Christmas, thus continuing the great cycle of Geek Life.

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  3. So... Firstborn is likely to make friends with the monsters under the bed?

    I had to make a minor edit to the Wikipedia article you linked. I mean really, "turrets syndrome"? I think they meant "Tourette's."

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  4. Yeah, Firstborn is fairly confident that the monsters are all on our side.

    And thanks for making that correction - I noticed that, but I've never gotten around to setting up any sort of editing capability for Wikipedia.

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  5. I don't understand.

    What's not normal about those stuffed animals?

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  6. I just caught myself looking for a "Like" button.

    All I know is that the Kindergarten teacher didn't bat an eye when Firstborn started bringing in Cthulhu to keep him company during Rest Time. The other kids had obviously never seen anything like it, though...

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