More Fun with the Giant Pet Rat

Riding a Giant Rodent to Peer Group Notoriety:

While we were on the pet rat topic, our younger son observed: “if the rat was big enough for me to ride to school, and then it climbed up the building...I would be the talk of the school!” Indeed he would.

The rat here is climbing up the facade of the building that houses summer camp. I think they might be more flexible about that sort of thing than would his regular school.

Optimal Pet Rat

We still remain petless despite our younger son’s sincere and persistent requests for a dog.

As I am sure I have already mentioned, I suggested to the kids that a rat would be a smaller, easier, pet...and maybe something that would not aggravate their father’s allergies.

Unsurprisingly, no one wants a pet rat.

Maybe we see too many of the non pet variety on the subway....and in our yard and garbage cans.

During one of our pet rat conversations, our younger son said, “we can get a pet rat, as long as it is larger than my brother and can teach me Kung Fu!”

Then there was some bickering about whether the hypothetical rat should be named Splinter or Ratatouille. 

If only there were a giant rat that could cook and provide educational exercise for the kids...

More likely the large rodent would be sitting on the couch eating cookies and watching YouTube just like the kids.

Skull Island Style MegaPuppy for National Puppy Day

Were you aware that today is National Puppy Day?

And if one consults the National Day Registry website, one can discover the life-improving information that March 23rd is also National Chip and Dip Day, and National Near Miss Day (something to do with an asteroid that passed within 500,000 miles of the earth in a previous year)

And my personal favorite: it is National Melba Toast Day.

I seriously considered drawing a puppy sitting on an asteroid, dipping a piece of Melba Toast into a bowl of dip. But instead, I took the easy way out and copied a Skull Island movie poster, replacing King Kong with a rather creepy young Chihuahua.

Because a puppy, or at least the lack of a puppy for our younger son, is a monstrously large topic at our house.

For the record, our son is very much against Chihuahuas, and no doubt particularly against ugly Chihuahuas like the one I have incompetently drawn here. Perhaps I felt the perverse need to enlarge a very small dog.

....and if by some bizarre twist of fate, we are ever able to acquire a dog, I am afraid it would have to be "a punter" as I can't imagine that we could handle a large, furry one. Thus I always feel the need to lobby for small dog acceptance.

P.S. That says "PUPPY" up there instead of "KONG" if that needs to be pointed out.

Large Small Dog

Boy with Appropriately Sized Small Dog:
(Could it be "Small Dog Syndrome"?)

My younger son desperately wants a dog. I might have mentioned this a few dozen times before. I do feel myself weakening on this issue, but his slightly dog-allergic father is firm.

But our son and I discuss the hypothetical dog that we might have if Dad relents....well...pretty much every time we pass a dog on the street.

And since we live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where there might be at least two dogs for every human, that means dog discussion is a constant.

My catchphrase for dog criteria is basically "small, quiet and washable." My son is not very convinced that smallness and washability are desirable characteristics. Mostly what he wants is something big and furry...Or a Pug.

Every time we pass a dog, he asks me to assess that particular dog's viability...Is it too large? Too hairy? Too poorly behaved?

The fact that I might have just told him that a beagle we recently passed was too large will not stop him from asking me about a much larger, furrier Husky one block later.
I'll admit that I often feel myself running out of patience for this hypothetical dog conversation, particularly as he is always lobbying for more size and more fur on this animal that we can't have anyway.

I suppose I should be grateful that the tone of the conversation is mostly civil. He and his brother have been fighting loudly and bitterly about a hypothetical PlayStation for months. Who will get to play what game and when on this device that we don't own...

And Dad might prove to be allergic to the PlayStation also....

(The dog on the napkin is a "Chug" a combination of a Pug and a Chihuahua...a dog that might be small enough...but still be a pug, sort of.)

Giant Pet Ant

The kids' takeaway from seeing the "Ant Man" movie over the weekend was that they need a giant ant for a house pet.

As their father and I pointed out, they are already doing a fine job of feeding many pet ants already. Our apartment has old wooden factory floors with deep gaps between the boards which serve as excellent ant highways. Thus the ants rarely have to reveal themselves on their frequent trips to retrieve the many morsels of food that our kids courteously leave for them on the floor.  But make no mistake, they are there in full force.

In one of our kids' favorite scenes in the movie, the hero's cute daughter feeds the accidentally-enlarged dog-sized ant scraps from her plate under the dinner table. Nothing would please our kids more than passing off some brussel sprouts or kale to a cool pet.....except maybe climbing over the couch while riding on an even bigger pet.

Couch climbing is technically forbidden in our apartment, but it would be hard to argue with an ant who is big enough to be a cast member of the movie "THEM!"

Relaxing at Home with a Pet Velociraptor

Watching TV with your pet raptor is fun...unless he won't shut up during your favorite show.

Sometimes I draw things that I know the kids are not going to like,  just because I can't help myself. My younger son is always unhappy when I draw a picture of him that looks even remotely like him.

His first reaction to the this one:
"Nooooo!"
His second reaction:
"Maybe I will take it to camp, if you give me a foot rub."

Pugbuster with Giant Pug

Iron Man's Hulkbuster Meets Battlepug:

As previously mentioned, Iron Man's super-sized anti-Hulk suit was one of my sons' favorite parts of the recent Avengers movie... And giant dogs are always good.

Over the weekend, our older son kept telling me I should draw this "Pugbuster."  The main appeal of the idea seemed to be the name. We were all unclear on whether "Pugbuster" meant that the Pug was wearing the armored suit, or whether the suit was designed to fight a Pug the size of of the Hulk (and the size of Battlepug, one of our web comic favorites)

I am indecisive, and I enjoy drawing Pug faces, so I said yes to both scenarios.

This morning, looking at the napkins, my older son told me that I blew it- that I should have made the giant Pug Hulk green. My younger son said that the suit should have had an armored Pug face on it. I explained to him that I had considered that, but after finishing cleaning up the kitchen at midnight, I chose the easier path of just drawing a dog's face.  Drawing the rest of the suit had been challenge enough. He said, "Oh it's not hard, you just draw an Iron Man helmet and make the yellow part look like a Pug's face.....

Maybe next time.

Giant Goldfish in Bathtub

A fish at least partially out of water is another giant house pet.

Ansel says he might consider taking the previous napkin with the large kitten on it when he goes back to school next week, but that this one is just too weird.

Watching TV with a Giant Kitten

Ansel is still languishing at home, mourning the loss of his tonsils and in constant need of doses of Tylenol, sympathy and foot massage. He's been mostly parked on the couch, watching TV, and he strongly prefers to have company while viewing dreadful Disney reruns. I've gotten to the point where another 22 minutes of "Jessie" might bring on a cerebral hemorrhage, so I've been fantasizing about a cooperative and soothing pet who would placidly sit on the couch with him while he convalesces.

It seemed like a good time to make another giant pet napkin (previously a Chihuahua and a Rat)

I was also thinking of the photos from 1971 of Tippi Hedren and her family living with Neil the lion that have been circulating recently. Ansel looked at those pictures and said, "I want to live with a lion too."

I somehow managed to make the large kitten look at least as threatening as the lion. Perhaps this somehow reflects my state of mind after spending a week incarcerated in the apartment with my sons.

Giant Pet Rat

Unsafe At Any Speed:  Biking and Giant Pets

Biking is always a sore subject in New York, and recent tragic events in Central Park have not made people who don't bike feel any better about bikes and the people who ride them.

Not only am I a person who endangers myself and the general public by cycling a couple of hours every day, I am particularly culpable because I put underage children at risk by schlepping my sons back and forth to school in a cargo bike.  I find that motherhood generally offers unending opportunities for both self inflicted guilt and public judgement. Something about the combination of biking and motherhood, however, stirs hostility and disapproval like almost nothing else. People are so concerned about my kids' safety that they feel compelled to scream profanities at me as we pass.

So what could possibly be worse than biking one's kids around the city?....Perhaps doing so with them seated in the lap of a giant rodent? (Visibility would definitely be obscured, but at least they are wearing their bike helmets)

My younger son is terribly pet deprived. Since there are some dog allergy issues in the family, during the quest for a furry pet, the idea of a rat came up. Earlier this week, he and I had discussed whether a small well trained pet like a dog....or a rat....might be able to ride with along in the bike on the way to school....And since there was a giant pet dog on the napkin yesterday, why not a giant pet rat today?

So there you have my excuse for this drawing. Ansel was not convinced.

You can see several napkins related to biking in the 24 hour comic series
The kids in the actual bike, without any pets:

Giant Chihuahua

A Boy Has Fed His Dog Too Much:

Because he is intensely dyslexic, Ansel's comprehension far outpaces his decoding abilities (as they say in the teaching business).  In other words, he would like to be reading books written for young adults, particularly graphic novels full of exciting violence, horror and sex, but his reading skills are not yet up to it.

I've debated mentioning the dyslexia issue here, because it is my son's story more than mine. But lets be honest, nearly everything I write here is an overshare of a sort and at least a slight invasion of my kids' privacy.  I do always try to be mindful about not divulging anything that is too personal or beyond the usual ridiculousness of parenting and childhood in general.

I think dyslexia is a different issue however. Discussing it is unlike revealing that my kids wipe snot in the crevices of the couch (not that either one would do that, EVER)  Dyslexia is just part of who he is, and the more that he and the rest of us remove the stigma from the term, the better.  Of course dyslexia is not the same for everyone, nor is it a perfect description for anyone's situation.

In Ansel's case, it is not just a diagnosis of a learning delay, although it definitely does mean that learning to read has been a horrible pain in the neck for him.  He is a good example of the dyslexic as a person with a different style of brain.  Ansel is very bright (I know... so says his mother) probably both because his brain is different from the norm, and because he has been doing a huge amount work to learn the stuff that comes easily to most people.

At any rate, as a result of his reading challenges, I have force him to read a "baby book" out loud every night in addition to my readings of more mature stuff that he actually wants to read. Despite a library of kids books that threatens to swamp our apartment, it is still a challenge to pick out a book that he will actually enjoy slogging his way through.

Last night we reread a "A Fish Out of Water" (By Helen Palmer and P.D. Eastman) and I think it is one of the exceptions where the language  is simple enough, but the spare plot and humor is classic enough to not be babyish.  A boy feeds his pet fish too much, despite having been warned not to do so, and disaster ensues.  He ends up calling the police and the fire department to deal with his rapidly swelling pet.  All the adults repeatedly exclaim, "A boy has fed his fish too much!"

Yesterday as usual, Ansel and I had been discussing the possibility of getting a pet dog someday, and I had observed that given the family allergies, it would have to be something like a Chihuahua,  very small and washable. Ansel told me in no uncertain terms that he did not like Chihuahuas.

In perhaps a moment of parental perversity last night, I drew a boy standing in the lobby of the our kids' school with a giant dog.  "A boy has fed his dog too much" doesn't have quite the alliterative quality as "A boy has fed his fish too much."  "A  boy has dished his dog too much" isn't quite as good either....

And the perspective in the drawing is a mess, but the dog is kind of cute. Ansel found it amusing enough this morning.