Things I've Learned From Darcy's Obsessions

Most people probably don't know that Wilbur Wright didn't go to college because of a hockey accident that knocked out his front teeth. Or that Orville Wright almost died from typhoid after drinking contaminated water at his printing business. Or maybe you didn't even know that Orv and Wil even HAD a printing business. Or that Orv built his first printing press from parts that included a piece of their younger sister's baby buggy.


I know all these things because of Darcy's very first obsession, her eight-month love affair with the Wright Brothers.


Now, Darcy is obsessed with all things ocean, but most particularly with sharks:

So, just like with the Wright Brothers, I've been learning a lot about sharks. I thought I'd share some of the highlights. The largest shark is, of course, the beautiful whale shark, one of a few filter-feeding sharks. The smallest is the dwarf shark. 


One of my favorite (?) new-to-me sharks is the cookie cutter shark. We kept seeing it listed when authors were talking about sharks named after special features. What kind of feature could lead to the cookie cutter moniker? It required some Google research. It turns out that the cookie cutter shark eats "cookies" of flesh that it cuts out of sea mammals and large fish. Here's its jaw, with many rows of bottom teeth just waiting their turn:

The cookie cutter is small -- only a couple feet long -- but it has suction-y lips that hold onto the victim while the shark twists itself around like a drill, neatly cutting out a perfect circle of said victim for its dining pleasure:

It's unclear to me if these are generally fatal. I've seen some pictures of large (seal, dolphin) critters with healed-over cookie cutter bites. It's a bit gruesome, but also extremely fascinating that such a creature exists. Those teeth are just crazy.


I'm also fond of the wobbegong shark, partly just because the name is cute. The shark is also cute and sometimes called a carpet shark. They are bottom dwellers who blend in with the sea floor due to their flatness, coloring, and fringe around the front:

Darcy is sitting next to me as I write this and I asked her what picture she would like you all to see. We've been very impressed by the "flying" great white sharks, mostly off the coast of South Africa. They breach, flip, and fly through the air when trying to catch poor, unsuspecting sea lions. Here's an example, although watching video of them is much more impressive than a still image:

And there you are: a Memorial Day Weekend lesson in the joys of shark obsessions. Hope you enjoyed this shark moment! We try very hard to continue to enjoy our shark months and months. We're running out of shark books at the library, but I don't think that gets us off the hook any time soon.

Rain: You Knew It Would Come

It is that time of year again. The weather forecasts now show much more rain than sunshine or even just plain old clouds and today was no exception. We woke up to rain, played out our day through showers and rain, and now it's raining hard. 

I'm not sure what our plan for the rain will be this year. Our first winter here, we lived in a very small rental, so finding entertainment inside was very difficult. Last winter, our house was a constant construction zone. This year, the house is a little closer to complete, although Michael has some designs on our bathroom that will involve us not being able to use it for a long stretch of time. But other than that, we have space to be inside and less pressure to be painting, installing trim, etc. Darcy is fond of board games now and played hangman successfully for the first time in the car today, so there are more options of indoor activities this winter.

The real joy is that Darcy can read books by herself now. I'm waiting for her to be able to spend hours reading novels so *I* can spend hours reading novels. She's not quite there yet, but it will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that one of the first books she sat down and read by herself, cover to cover, was one of her Wright Brothers books.

The Wright Brothers Return!

My wonderful sister Ev made a family calendar recently and we received our copy a couple days ago. I haven't actually told Ev that because life has been crazier than normal what with ending my VISTA service on Friday. Included in the calendar are pictures of Darcy sitting next to Orville Wright on a replica of the 1903 Flyer. Those of you who are long-time readers of this blog will remember stories of the Wright Brothers past, like here, here, and here.

Well....they're ba-aaack!

Yes, thanks to the memories revived by the calendar, we have had a 24 hour shift in priorities from fairies to the Wright Brothers. This morning, Darcy knocked on the bathroom door as I was drying off from my shower and I opened the door to find her wearing a pair of wings. Not an uncommon practice. However, when I said, "Hello, fairy!", she told me, "I'm not a fairy. I'm trying to find a way to fly, but I need to change my wings so they'll work right."

Tonight, she kept saying, "I'm cold. Are you cold?" She put on her slippers and then announced that she needed to find her favorite hat. She came back from the laundry room/entry wearing Michael's gray knit hat (sticking four or five inches up above the top of her head). She crawled into bed with the slippers and hat still on because Orville and Wilbur, according to one of the many Wright Brothers books we've read, sometimes had to sleep in their "coats, hats, and shoes" to stay warm while living in their tent at Kitty Hawk.

I read our two Wright Brothers books for bed last night and tonight, and she's watched the park film from the National Monument at Dayton, OH, both days as well. The Wright Brothers are alive and well in Crescent City. Stay tuned for more exploits!

The World Of Fish

Yes, I'm aware that this is a bird's egg, not a fish egg, but in Darcy's world these days, it's all about fish, so I felt I could include another picture of the murrelet egg that shows it's beautiful color better.

Darcy briefly returned to her obsession with the Wright brothers last month, but then quickly moved on to fish and all thing ocean. Finding Nemo was part of the inspiration, but I think the bigger culprit is Crescent City's aquarium, Ocean World. We've been three times now and, as an adult I can tell you that it is exciting three times only for a small child. It is a very small aquarium.

Yesterday, we drove south to hit a sporting goods store for Michael, who has joined a men's softball team for the county's organized league. He had his first practice late in the day and hasn't owned cleats for a decade. We also went to Arcata's art festival, which was a bit of a bust. Darcy insisted that we go back to the phenomenal ice cream shop as we walked past it to get to the car. I had a half-scoop of the almond rose vanilla that was outstanding. Last time, I had lemon poppyseed. Also a revelation in a bowl.

The point of this is that we were in the car heading south and Darcy asked if we were going to Fish Town. For her, the only answer is yes. After deciding that Eureka is Fish Town, she then dubbed Arcata, Octopus Town. So we asked what Crescent City is, and she informed us that it's Shark City.

There was a short pause and then she started naming other places she's lived or visited a lot. "And Las Vegas is, um, um, um, um.....Sea Urchin Town!" Even Primm -- PRIMM -- got renamed as Sea Anemone Town. What I loved best was the um-um-um in between naming the town and deciding on its new moniker.

A mere two and a half weeks ago, I was stopping tears about the thought of moving by promising airplanes on the walls of her new room. Now, we're planning an undersea fantasy.

But we're not stupid. The walls will be a nice neutral blue and we will be using wall stickers for the fantasy. I'm sure we'll be replacing them with the next obsession in a few months.

OUR HOUSE!! (Part Three)

So this part was delayed a little by a promised trip to Ocean World to (not) pet the sharks. Darcy loves her sea creatures, although we've been living back in Wright Brothers land for the past couple weeks. This round of photos is of the area around the house, which includes a "fairy ring" of redwoods. Michael's already planning a little tree house for Darcy in the middle of it.

Our ring of redwoods! The building behind them is our garage.

Here's a view up the side yard to the house-and-garden area.

The proper front door of the house faces this lawn and garden area, but it doesn't face the driveway, parking, or garage, so like Cima house, it's sort of backwards on the lot.

This is what ends up being the main entrance to the house. Again, like Cima house, it means that you enter through the laundry room. Unlike Cima house, this laundry room is huge and has a built-in desk area along with a ton of cabinets. The cabinets are sort of cream and lime green. Original, of course, but these I actually like.

Darcy Does Good Works!

Yesterday was a good day for the Glore household. I was watching over the first of a series of gardening classes I helped arrange with the local community college. We had 41 people show up on a sunny Saturday morning! And the farmer who taught it went half an hour over the two hours allotted for the class -- and only three people left before he was done! It was pretty incredible. I'm probably going to teach the next one in May because having been turned down by said farmer to teach it, I don't really have enough time to find someone else by tomorrow's deadline for the course listing.

As some of you know, I was in LA last week for training. In the Volunteer Development class, our table group had to create a poster representing our collective volunteer experience, including how many generations of our family had done volunteer work of some kind, and at what age we first volunteered. If Darcy is ever in that same position, she'll have some good tales to tell. While I was at the college yesterday morning, Darcy and Michael helped restore the Mill Creek drainage by planting redwood seedlings. Darcy was very proud:

And very protective and happy:

She and Michael made a great team on those steep slopes:

Right now, thanks to her trip on the pirate ship (ok, just a wooden sailing vessel, really), she's in bed singing the "heave away, haul away" lines from Bound for South Australia. Pirates didn't grab her fancy in the same way as the Wright Brothers, who have been making a small comeback recently. It's sad, but one of the best entertainments we have is listening to the things that come out of her mouth as she's supposed to be falling asleep. Tonight, she's in rare form with the sea shanties.

The Dinosaurs

Many of you may remember this picture of the Wright Family, taken last fall at the height of Darcy's Wright Brothers obsession. All animals and toys were available to play a part in Darcy's fantasy of the 21st century Cima branch of the Wright clan. The Wright Brothers have waned as play objects these days, although the blue baby and Mickey Mouse are still Orv and Wil about 50% of the time. You might be tempted to think that all the animals could now go back to being themselves, but you would be wrong.

Instead, they have been drafted into Darcy's current dinosaur enthusiasm. Almost every night after dinner, she asks if we can all go up to play with her "dinosaurs". She does own about a dozen solid plastic/rubber/whatever dinosaur figures and they occasionally get to play dinosaur with her. Tonight, they did not. They stayed put in the toy storage bin. The teddy bears (mostly giganotosaurus), dogs and cats (triceratops[ies]), octopi and monkeys (oryctodromeus), and assorted other dinosaur stand-ins do most of the heavy lifting. It's a little disconcerting, but then it's also disconcerting to watch Darcy page through a book about dinosaurs, get to a particularly fierce T. rex and hear her coo, "Oh! A T-rex! Isn't he so cute?"

Those of you who play Facebook have already heard this story, but for those of you who don't, Darcy was recently at a playground next to our community garden. I was working in the dirt while she and Michael went to play. A little boy was playing there too and he took out a dinosaur and showed it to Darcy saying, "Look -- a dinosaur!" And Darcy looked at it and said, "Oh what a cute parasaurolophus!" And she was right! When I asked her about it tonight, she told me that he had a hadrosaur. That's also correct, because parasaurolophus was a type of hadrosaur.

I figure that we have about two months left of the total fascination with dinosaurs before she moves onto something new. The Wrights stuck around for almost exactly six months and we're now on month four of dinosaur everything. It will be very interesting to see what gets her interest next.

Drinks, Fungus, And Actual News

The pictures don't have much to do with the post, but I know everyone likes pictures! So here's a series of Darcy trying to drink from an outside water fountain. She had seen some other kids playing at it earlier and I think that and the big puddle of water at its base (from the playing) made her view this differently than every other water fountain she's used in the past. Michael first had to demonstrate the technique.

Then there was a serious attempt.

And then there were just giggles.

And about twenty minutes later, there were teeny-tiny mushrooms growing in the debris on a downed redwood log. The range of fungus types up here (and mosses and lichens, too) is incredible.

In actual news, Darcy has moved on from her obsession (my mom says I should call them "enthusiasms", but I've already got an obsessions label for this blog) with the Wright Brothers! Other than a very occasional slip-up, I am no longer Will. And Michael is no longer Orv. We are infrequently mommy and daddy, much to Michael's delight. (His delight is that it happens at all, not that it happens infrequently.) More often, we are reflections of her new obsession.

After six months of living and breathing the Wright Brothers, we now live in a dinosaur nest. When we've been running errands (a lot) this week, Darcy has asked several times, "Is it time to go back to our nest?" In keeping with the new theme, Michael and I are Mr. and Mrs. Pteranodon. In case you're not up with your Cretaceous Era critters, here's a tutorial on pteranodons. Pteranodons were fish-eaters, so all treats (candy, Christmas presents, cakes) are fish now. Darcy is a T. rex. Buddy the T. rex, to be exact, the orange beastie seen in the birthday summary post.

My small T. rex is waking up now. I expect to hear, "Good morning, Mrs. Pteranodon!!!" at any moment, so I'd better wrap this up.

For those of you who haven't already heard, I got a job offer on Friday and will start working full-time in February. The hunt for day care prospects has begun in earnest and at some point when I don't have a dinosaur waking up from her nap, I'll even provide more details.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas to you all and for those of you who sent the packages under our tree, thanks for all the fish!

"I Don't Want The Candy To Go Away!!"

Despite being alive through three Halloweens now, this was Darcy's first real experience with all that goes with Halloween. Her first one was spent in King Salmon and we sort of trick-or-treated to two of our neighbors. Last year, we were in Cima and we did take her into Las Vegas to a Halloween event, but she didn't actually go trick-or-treating and, of course, nobody came to us to trick-or-treat. She's been very excited about the whole concept and was thrilled when the first trick-or-treaters knocked on our door while she was still getting into her costume. She helped put candy in their bags and then was even more motivated about finishing getting dressed herself.

Darcy inspects our candy stash before going trick-or-treating.

A couple months ago, she had decided she wanted to be a box kite for Halloween. It's the Wright Brothers' influence, of course, because they made (and sold) box kites when they were kids and some of their first model gliders were nothing but oversized box kites. She has cloth boxes for toy organization and she's fond of putting one over her head, running around, and yelling, "I'm a box kite! I'm a box kite!" But as the great day grew closer, she announced that she wanted to be a bat. Still not entirely sure why, but she was firm in her choice and so she was a bat. She also firmly decided that I was not to make bat ears for her, but that she would wear a headband with a bat on it. And so she did.

That was pretty much ok with me. I had already had my costume-making adventures with the wings. I'm not much of a seamstress. I like the idea of being a good seamstress. I have hopes of being a seamstress. But the sad reality is that I have owned a very nice sewing machine for five or six years now (a Christmas gift at my request) and yesterday when I took it out of its box (which I've done before), it still had it's test bobbin and test-sewing strip in it. Just sad. But I managed to thread it, change the bobbin, and sew the wings. I figure that puts me well on the way to master seamstress status, right?

So off went our little bat for some early-evening trick-or-treating with Michael/Orv/Daddy while I stayed home to give out the early rounds of the TEN POUNDS of candy we gave away last night. We had been warned that we'd get lots of kids and it was true. I had the best parental intentions of getting Darcy well-snacked before she left, but she was chomping at the bit, so no snack. We paid for that when they got back with a bag full of treats and a bat full of the hunger-grouchies. While I scrambled to get dinner finished and in her belly, she cried about giving out candy to the trick-or-treaters. At one point, she sobbed in the hallway near the kitchen, saying, "I don't want the candy to go away!" A big plateful of mac and cheese (with our local award-winning aged jack in the mix of cheeses) later and all that was forgotten. I took her out for another short round of trick-or-treating, stopping the first time she asked to ride rather than walk.

When we got home, we gave her a bowl for her candy and she was content for a very long time to just move the candy from bag to bowl to other bowl back to bag in an endless loop. Just like at Easter, the candy is just as much a toy to her as something to eat. She was whining for her candy this morning and stopped when Michael took the more securely packaged and unbreakable candies from hiding and put them in her basket. She added some of her wooden cookies to the mix and then made her dinosaurs play the role of trick-or-treaters.

All in all, a very successful Halloween!

The Wright Family Portrait

The Wright family (in real life) consisted of one father (Milton Wright), one mother (Susan Wright), four brothers (in descending order of age: Reuchlin, Lorin, Wilbur, and Orville Wright), and one sister (Katherine Wright). In Darcy's world, however, there are four Miltons (at left, the shaggy dog, the large blue octopus, the large white teddy bear, and the green plastic bug with pink wings), three Susans (at right, the blue elephant, the multi-colored dog, and the blue and green medium-sized octopus), no Reuchlin or Lorin, two Wilburs (Mickey Mouse and the turquoise nightshirt hanging behind the Wright Brothers -- please, just don't ask), one Orville (the blue doll with hat sitting next to Mickey/Wilbur), and an almost endless number of Miss Katherines (the rest of the dolls/animals in the picture).

These roles are pretty much fixed and unvariable, although sometimes the Miss Katherines are pulled into other story-lines. One is missing from the picture because she is busy acting the part of the dinosaur-conductor on the Dinosaur Train.

This is our life.

Wright Brothers vs. Disney?

Darcy is becoming a great rock climber, as she demonstrated a few days.

You know how people (by which I mean middle school and high school boys, really) like to pose the question, "Who would win a fight, Batman or Spiderman?" The question I pose in this post is, "Who would win a fight, the Wright Brothers or Disney characters?"

Darcy hasn't had a lot of exposure to Disney movies or characters before our trip to Disneyland. She's had a Mickey Mouse doll for a long time (courtesy, I think, of Dan and Betty) that she ignored until two days ago. Yesterday, she slept with Mickey (she refers to him as "the Disneyland mouse", or she did before yesterday anyway) at nap and at night. Both times, she fell right asleep with no fussing, no songs, no second visits by Michael or me to her room. That NEVER happens and I do mean never. I don't believe I have ever gotten her to sleep for her nap without songs before.

Given all that, I had some hope that the Disneyland trip might finally be the new thing that loosens the hold the Wright Brothers have on our girl's imagination. The answer to the inspirational question for this post seemed to be that Disney characters would win.

But those pesky Wright Brothers! Persistence is always mentioned as one of the character traits that made them successful, so I shouldn't have been so quick to count them out. Yesterday afternoon, I started noticing that Mickey was being called Will an awful lot and by bedtime, he WAS Will. Today, we went to town to drop Michael at the airport and Darcy insisted that both Wilbur and Orville had to go -- and she wasn't talking about Michael and me (although we are both still Orv and Will). Mickey/Will and Orv (represented by a blue-clothed doll) play acted the most important scenes of the Wright Brothers story over and over in the car. They crashed. They played out the whole typhoid scenario. And on the ride home, I kept hearing Mickey/Will say, "I love scrapping with you, Orv. You're such a good scrapper!" This quotation (usually, "I love scrapping with Orv. He's such a good scrapper!") shows up in a lot of biographies when talking about how the Wright Brothers argued about things all the time.

Darcy has taken the most-recognized mascot of Disneyland and turned him into a Wright Brother. My conclusion: The Wright Brothers win. My other conclusion? We're going to be living with Will and Orv for quite a while longer.

I'm going to give them their very own tag. Sigh.