Godzilla

Our 4 year old, Eric, has developed a fascination with Godzilla. You know the one--big robotic monster on the fake movie set with the frightened "bilingual" Japanese people trying miserably to form some kind of a believable plot around this horrific creature. These movies are so bad, I swear you can actually see the zipper on the back of the Godzilla costume. I'm really not sure when or where this obsession began. Eric has always loved dinosaurs, lizards, frogs...anything reptilian (we're not sure where that came from either--Ryan has never been into dinosaurs and well, Mike and I are hardly paleantologists). But somewhere along the way Eric learned of Godzilla.

Whenever we are in the car, he'll ask if we can go to the video store and rent a Godzilla movie. He seriouly asks this every day. And once in a while I actually will treat him. The looks I get from the video store employee when I ask the whereabouts of Godzilla--and when we find the Godzilla section Eric will start jumping up and down, announcing to everyone "There's Godzilla!!! There's the three-headed monster!!! I want that one!!! I want that one!!!!"

This weekend we borrowed a 5 disk DVD set of Godzilla movies from some friends. All week long I have been drawing pictures of the DVD covers, to Eric's specifications, for him to color. Every day he begs to watch one of them. And the humans mean nothing to him. I have to fast forward to the monster parts and then he will just sit there, eyes glued to the tv, calling me over to see the "really cool" parts (I don't actually know what the really cool parts are. I think the really cool parts are actually in an unrelated movie...).

Eric is our "all boy" kid. We weren't really prepared for that. Frankly, I wasn't prepared for boys at all, and Mike is not an "all boy" kind of guy. So Ryan was not really that much of a surprise to us--he loves to read, loves to draw, is into comic books, fantasy, that sort of thing. Sure, he does a lot of traditional "boy" things too, but he has never been in to cars, lizards, balls, construction trucks and all that. Eric owns all of that. He is fearless and was throwing himself down the slide in our backyard before he could walk. He is burlier than Ryan and is a true right-hander (where Ryan is extremely left-handed). He has mastered the art of entertainment through bodily functions at the age of 4. He loves gross, slimy, smelly, oozing things. He thinks volcanos bursting with hot molten lava are way cool. And when I say he loves dinosaurs, I don't mean cute little Little Foot from Land Before Time. He loves the T-Rex. He loves the pictures of the carnivores tearing the flesh from their prey. We actually have a "life sized" poster of a T-Rex mouth in our play room, blood and guts dripping from it's razor sharp teeth. Eric loves it.

Eric is a major reason cleaning my house is such a unrewarding experience. It's a good thing he's so darn cute!

On the knitting front--day 2 of unsatsifactory knitting time. I started to knit something last night and ripped the whole thing out. I knit about an inch of a duck-foot slipper today. However, I did order a very hard to find book that contains just about the most adorable thing I have ever seen. It's a topsy-turvy Cinderella pattern by Jean Greenhowe. Now, this woman is very talented, but frankly, if I saw her books in a store, I would move to a completely different section, as far away from the weird-old-lady-this-would-look-cute-as-a-toilet-paper-cover-section as I could get. For instance, she has an entire book devoted to knitting clowns. She is from England and her things are very very British. The scary kind of British.

But during my "knitting research" yesterday I came across a blogger's flicker pictures of her completed knitting projects and saw Cinderella. Now you tell me, how can I not try to make this??

















I don't know what it is about this thing and I don't know what I will do with it, but it must be made.