Bee Stalker

This kid is kinda scary sometimes.

First day of really nice weather we got here on the East Coast, I opened all the windows and screen doors. I'm sitting in my office working, when I hear a shout from outside--Charlie's voice.

Away to the window I flew like a flash, tore open the shutters and threw up the sash....only to find my son on a guerilla mission.

Charlie had commandeered Rick's super-soaker (think squirt gun, bazooka-sized), and was patrolling the grounds around the house, stalking BEES.

This child was waiting until a bee or wasp would land on the porch or the bushes or the wishing well, then squirting it with the super-soaker until it fell on the ground, and then yelling and stomping it out of existence.

He's going to make a great sniper someday, I just know it.

Of Mice and Men (or squirrels and boys)

Charlie has picked up quickly that squirrels are not my favorite creatures. I have a number of bird feeders hanging off my deck, and I spent a considerable amount of time and energy trying to keep squirrels out of the bird food. I think a squirrel can eat something like 283 times his own body weight, or something like that. Anyway, Rick told Charlie the story about the day I was home with the flu, and the squirrel was looking me in the eye while he hung from the top of the bird feeder, digging seed out of the hole with his greedy little paws. Since I was feverish to start with, I was probably hallucinating the glee I saw on his face as he started cleaning it out, but it ticked me off so bad that I flew out the door onto the snow-covered deck, barefoot and in my bathrobe, scooping up snow by the handful and throwing snowballs and screaming at the squirrel, which is frantically jumping from bird feeder to deck railing to tree branch, trying to escape this maniacal, obviously sick woman.

Charlie was laughing hysterically while Rick told him this story, so it comes as no great surprise that Charlie is now plotting how to defeat the squirrels and do a better job of it than mom did.

The picture above is what I found when I came home from work tonight. Charlie spent the day devising a squirrel trap. So in the picture above, we see a box of sunflower seeds to attract the squirrel, an overturned wire flower basket to act as a cage, propped up on a candle with a string around it. The string extends to the kitchen, where Charlie has been sitting all evening, waiting for the squirrel to show up, so he can pull the candle out and make the basket fall on the squirrel, trapping him under the basket.

I haven't seen the kid sit this still since he got here. He can be incredibly focused when he wants to be.

I would say there's no way in hades he's gonna catch a squirrel with this thing, but this is Charlie we're talking about. I guess if he does catch one, we'll have to get pictures and post them here in an update, 'cause no one will believe me without proof when I say my 13-year-old from China caught a squirrel without a gun, using only a flower pot, a candle, and a string.

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Gotta Be a Better Way

Shortly after I started my study of Chinese cooking, I discovered that one of Charlie's favorite dishes in the world is Jiaozi, a Chinese dumpling that is filled with pork, napa cabbage, chives, and various spices. I also discovered that Jiaozi is very time-intensive to make. Making the dough and rolling out those thin dumpling skins takes forever! Jiaozi ended up being a half-day project, and by the time we were done, I had pretty much decided that this was going to be a special occasion treat, not an everyday dish. I was afraid to try to make the stuffing ahead and freeze it, because the cabbage would get all slimy, but I was wondering if I could make a mountain of those dumpling skins and freeze them so I didn't have to go through all that very often.

Fast forward a week or two, and Charlie and I are shopping for fruit and veggies in the local SuperFresh store. I'm looking at the napa cabbages, and Charlie starts "talking." He doesn't use his voice in public much unless he is really, really excited about something, so I hurried over to where he was looking, and he is pointing at a package of round, thin, slices of dough. Dumpling skins. Ready-made.

It says you can freeze them. I bought 5 packages of them--there's 100 in each package. I figure that's going to keep us going for a while.

We had dumplings again tonight, and it took less than an hour. Goes so much faster when you don't have to start from flour and water.

Is that cheating? Don't know, don't care.

Cast Away

Charlie's cast came off this afternoon, and not a minute too soon. He was doing great with it for the past 3 weeks or thereabouts, never complained. Then on Sunday, we were sitting in Sunday school gabbing with some other folks before the leader started the lesson, and a lady whom we'll call Cindy ('cause it's her real name!) asked him if it itched. He signed back, "Just a little bit." She leans forward like she's about to tell him a secret, and signed, "You know why it itches, right? That's because there's little bugs in there crawling around...."

His eyes got big, but only for a second. He KNEW she was puttin' him on. Nonetheless, the power of suggestion had taken hold. That cast started driving him nuts. Poor kid was miserable for the next 3 days, and he was so happy when Wednesday rolled around. They took that cast off and he immediately started rubbing his arm. Of course, this raised little bits of skin, so he gets his face down there real close to inspect, then looks up at me, signs "BUGS!" with his good hand, and flies outta the room to a deep sink he saw in the hallway where he can wash off his arm, leaving the doc sitting there with his jaw on the floor.