The Santa lists this year were really great: not a single video game or licensed toy between the two of them. Instead, they asked for fun and pretty old fashioned items like roller skates, art projects, pirate ships, “everything LEGO”, The Dangerous Book for Boys (for Ella), “Everything a Spy Needs”, more unit blocks, scooters, a mini skee ball machine, make your own doll….etc.  It was a pleasure delivering these to Santa.

Then, I found this memo in the daughter’s journal, and it appears we have entered the era of the Christmas Essay.  On the one hand, I’m proud of the fact that she has apparently mastered the basic building block of the nefarious 5 paragraph essay.  On the other hand, it’s clear my resistance will be eroded even more swiftly than I anticipated.

What I Want for Christmas

What I want for Christmas is a sheepdog. I think everyone should have a dog. I want a dog so I can play with and so I can walk it.  That is what I want for Christmas.

Finn has received, for his birthday a total of no fewer than 5 new LEGO sets.  After the first 3 days, I got a note on my nightstand from Ella which read, “Mom, Finn has been playing with his LEGO for 2 days straight. He doesn’t want to do anything else and it’s not that fun.”

We decided that Finn is in a LEGO Phase.

Until this morning when he climbed into bed with me and the giant box containing the LEGO City Helicopter transporter. We cuddled and studied the box for at least 20 minutes.  Then he announced that the didn’t want to eat breakfast.  He just wanted to build his new LEGO City Motorcyle.   I reversed that order. Breakfast. Then LEGO. He built the motorcycle and started in on the helicopter.

But on the way home from school, when I asked him what he wanted for lunch, he said he didn’t want lunch. “Why not?” Iasked.

“I just want to build my LEGO Helichopper.”   I agreed he could build until we had to pick up his sister at 12:50, then he could eat lunch and build more…

But then…when I asked him what he did in school he started to reply, “LE–…I just don’t remember.”

Which I reminded him is not an acceptable answer in our house.

“I just have only LEGO on my brain,” he said, and I had no doubt that his little synapses were exploding with little bricks of color and possibility.

And he emphasized, “I only want to think about LEGO.”

And so I am no longer sure that this LEGO thing is just a phase.

Finn:  Baby, Kid, Grown-up, Grandparent….um, um—

Ella: No!  Baby, Kid, Teen-ager, Adult, Grown-up, Grandparent–

Me: What’s the difference between Adult and Grown-up?

Ella:  When you’re an adult you can buy a house, and have a job, and make money, and live on your own. When you’re a grown-up, you have kids.

Which is pretty much what I’ve felt over the last 7 years.

Yesterday, on the way home from work, I got a phone call from home. It was Ella, screaming and laughing, “Mom, mom, mom! There’s a mouse in our house! Missy brought a mouse in the house and it ALMOST GAVE ME A HEART ATTACK!”

Indeed, our cat has brought us things before, but the sitter and my children inadvertently let the cat-with-the-mouse-in-her-mouth in the house before realizing.  The mouse was alive. The mouse, apparently, was running frantically away from the cat.

When I got home, 45 minutes later, the mouse was still in the house, giving no lie to the old nursery rhyme about mice and clocks because, in fact, the mouse had climbed up our fireplace and was clinging to the brick wall right up there next to the ceiling.  It had been there for 45 minutes. The sitter had a bucket and a broom. Finn  was gleefully jumping on the couch and Ella…well, Ella was curled in a chair reporting on it all in her Reporter’s Notebook (an item not to be confused with her Diary or her Spy Notebook or her Notebook for stories or her Sketchbook). Her account follows. Note the shift mid-story from the literary, let-me-tell-you-a-story new journalism model, to the real-time reported action strategy. Because you know, in the future, as my friend, the brilliant investigative reporter has (cynically) pointed out, she just might have to be journalist who only uses Twitter.

The Mouse in the House

By Isabella Heinzen

It was a Regular day. And then my cat brought in an alive mouse. That’s how it got started.  It was black with a two inch tail. Me and Finn and Tiffany helped each other get it down. I called mom.  She said to put blankets under the cracks and I did. And my Dad did not know what to do.  It climbed up the wall so we put cheese on the mantle. We put a pail on the block bin and we used a broom. It moves a bit. My brother is scared and my mom does not want to touch it.  So she is getting my Dad’s work gloves. She is trying to trap it. She is afraid. It is starting to come down. Now I think it is really 100 percent scared. We do not know what to do. Every time we make noise it goes back up . It was looking at the cheese.  We looked up how to get a mouse out of a house:

1. Get a box. Cut a mouse size hole in the box.
2. Put cereal in the box. Attach string.
3. The  mouse goes in.
4. Take mouse outside.

I got a berry box and put honey nut O’s and tied a string around it.  It is coming down shortly. It went on a brick ledge.  Missie brought us another mouse.  She hurt it.

The mouse is going into my mom’s trap which is a box with peanut butter on the bottom. So my mom thinks there is a mouse nest next to our Pink Roses.  The mouse is half in half out.  It is on my mom’s vase. It is coming down!!!!! I am going to give it garlic (bread?). I can not finish. It went out. YIPPEE

This how it got out: It climbed across our mantel, went down our mantel and across our window sill and went out our door.

And because she has not yet decided if she will be a journalist of the print or broadcast species, and it is likely that both skills will be necessary in the new media future, she made sure to record live-action movies of the event, unfolding in real time.

And the stealth version, done because shes “likes the sound effects” of whispering:

In fact, the happy escape of this mouse, which scampered out the door and into the garden, was eclipsed by the fact that our cat proceeded to bring us no less than 7 mice last night.  The lawn was littered with bodies.  And while we suspect they are coming from our neighbors’ yard, where 3 very large trees have just been chopped down, I have called in the experts.

THE MINDFUL WRITER:
A WORKSHOP IN CULTIVATING YOUR FEARLESS VOICE

In this workshop, we’ll explore using mindfulness—full attention to the present moment—to discover our deep stories. We’ll write from personal experience, using exercises to generate and hone topics, address “writing blocks,” respond to others’ work, and craft finished products. We’ll talk about essential elements of essays and memoir: structure, scene-making, narrative arc, setting, and dialogue. Students will receive individualized feedback from peers and the teacher, and revise and share at least one piece. Suitable for experienced and beginning writers alike, this workshop provides a safe, inspiring place to confidently coax forth one’s inner writer.

SUMMER SESSIONS:

I: Tuesdays, May 26 — July 28 (no class June 16).
II: Thursdays, May 28 — July 30 (no class June 18).
Times: 7:00 – 9:30 p.m. Location: North Berkeley
Cost:  $250.00 for 9-week session

Each section limited to eight students!

For more information about this or future classes:
510-559-9076 or cwmalcomb@hotmail.com

ABOUT THE TEACHER:

Chris Malcomb has practiced mindfulness meditation for six years. He has been a middle and high school teacher, and led private classes and workshops for CAIS, BATTI, and the Prison University Project at San Quentin. His essays have appeared in San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, Common Ground, Teachers & Writers, the anthology The Social Cause Diet, and KQED Perspectives. He is currently finishing his MFA in Creative Writing at the University of San Francisco.

The house the family built last year, complete with note & leprechaun bait:

“Please do not turn Missy our cat green and Finn’s hair. P.S. We do not have any traps. Love 5-12-12-1 (her name in code).

and the reverse side:

The celestial activity in our backyard has been very busy lately.  This weekend:

Ella, who wants to be a spy, and who concived and executed 35 valentines in code, then made and distributed 35 spy puzzles to her classmates; who requests to do her homework in code (said request denied); who gets a coded note in her lunch; who carries her casebook everywhere in order to take notes on…well, if I told you I’d have to kill you…decided this video was worthy of a special convening of the 1st grade spy club.  She has examined it frame by frame about 100 times, and sent it to her colleagues.  She has built a scale model from tin foil and a plastic bottle top; drawn a graphical map of ship/purple light/moment of disappearance; collected clues, including an asparagus-like branch; sketched a possible alien life form; written a list of clues; and surmised a theory, “They might come back, who knows? The asparagis might have been  from the ship cause the ship runs on food?  And it fell from the light.”

The case remains open.

Finn, the shaman-astronaut responded more simply.  At breakfast the following day, he announced that he had a dream in which “a lot, a lot of alien spaceships came into our backyard and they landed right in our BACKYARD!”

“How many were there,” I asked.

“A MILLION!” he said, his eyes flying saucer-wide.

“What did they look like?”

“They alien spaceships were all different colors. And they landed in our backyard, all of them, and the  aliens came out!”

“What did the aliens look like?”

“Oh. Mom.  They were same colors as the spaceships, and then they came out and they were REALLY NICE.  They gave us presents!”

In case you were wondering, they brought us all got rocket ships.

My piece about how we sometimes fail to raise our kids right is now up on Offsprung, a terrific site for parents.

This morning, over our house, for about 20 minutes…

Ella & Finn didn’t even miss the fact that there were no ponies in sight.