Monsters of the Deep

Let me tell you, when G-man gets stuck on something, he really gets stuck on something. 

Yesterday after school, he came rushing through the front door, threw his backback down and gasped to my husband in one long breath, "There's a kid on the bus who says an eight year old girl was swimming in the ocean, and she got pulled down to the bottom by a huge, gigantic octopus, and she DIED.  Is that true?  Dad, hurry, look it up on the computer!"

His dear father instead redirected his focus to the backyard, where they played baseball for awhile, but G-man kept firing off questions off about this mysterious creature of the deep. 

I think my husband did a good job of deflecting his paranoia temporarily, but when I got home, I was instantly barraged with this story about a monster octopus and the demand that I get down to the bottom of it right away.

"Mom, are there really giant octopuses in the ocean?"

"Which ocean? The Pacific?"

"How many legs do they have?"

"If you're swimming in the ocean, how far out to you have to be to be near an octopus?"

"Is an octopus stronger than a person?"

"How long can you stay under before you die?"

"Do you want me to show you which boy told me?  Let me go get my yearbook, Mom, hold on.  I'll show you who he is."

Oh good grief.

I finally pulled out the laptop, and with G-man breathing heavily over my shoulder, searched "girl attacked by octopus."  Nothing came up news-wise except for a really old report.

"Well, it looks like there was a young girl attacked by an octopus in 1928."

My husband laughed out loud.

There was another link to some fictional movie clip that was on Youtube, but I won't let the kids browse Youtube due to its very uncensored nature, so I told him it was completely made up and NOT real.  Then we had a lengthy discussion about ocean creatures and their true nature versus how they are depicted in scary movies and fictional books, and how wild animals, while sometimes misunderstood, will always be unpredictable.  When he went to bed, he seemed fairly content with my animal kingdom knowledge.  Good thing I paid attention to the old Jacques Cousteau specials.

I thought the whole thing was behind us until I came home today, and he nearly knocked me over with excitement.

"MOM!  I found out that it was NOT an octopus that attacked the girl! It was a pilot whale!"

Now this I knew to be a true story, except it was a grown woman who had gotten too near a pod of pilot whales, and was pulled 45 feet under but then released.  It was shown on National Geographic not too long ago.

He harassed me until I googled the clip and let him watch it, and finally he was satisfied.

For now.

You've Been (Donald) Trumped

We don’t watch too many routine television shows around my house – invariably the set is tuned to ESPN, Fox Sports, CNN or occasionally (gritting teeth) Spongebob Squarepants.  We definitely never got into Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, and my boys have never watched it (to the best of my knowledge).

So you can imagine my surprise the other evening when my oldest son, upon deciding that my middle son was not playing Yahtzee correctly, grabbed the cup of dice and authoritatively announced, “You’ve been Donald Trumped!”

B-man and I both looked at him, and then I laughed.

“Where on Earth did you hear that?” I asked him.

“My teacher!” he said.

Well, that would have been about number ten on my list of top ten possible sources.  But then I remembered he landed a fun, quirky, cool teacher this year.

He went on to explain that she gives several of the kids an assigned duty, like passing out papers or cleaning up stations, and if you fall down on the job, well, you get “Donald Trumped.”  Or fired, to be more specific.

I told him he better stay on top of his assigned duty, which involves something at lunchtime in the cafeteria that didn’t make any sense to me, but he was too busy Donald Trumping his brother’s remote control abilities to explain it to me.

Oh modern television, what would we do without you?