Here is yet another Christmas post, because, really, what would Christmas be without everyone’s favorite clown?  I was all set to do a Boppo Christmas special because last year I already wrote about the first Christmas.  You know, when Joseph and Mary had a baby in a manger (a white baby) because they had no health insurance and then Santa arrived with a diaper genie for Jesus, hallelujah, the end.  What?  You missed that one?  LINK DROP!  Happy holidays I mean zomg MERRY CHRISTMAS. (Click to enlarge pictures – if you dare!)

It’s an awesome story, check it out!

Anyways, I was going to do a Boppo post when I realized that I had killed Boppo a little too well last time, and every time I opened the game, he promptly died no matter what.  So what could I do?  I could have recreated him, but work, and so I did the next best thing.  I made another character that could resurrect him by calling Death on a special death phone.  But what character would be fitting to go with a clown and a dog named Wee Wee?

Who wants to be Boppo’s friend?

Then I had it.  Since this was a Christmas post, clearly we needed Fox News, so I created Foxy News, a Fox News reporter.  You’ll notice she looks exactly like every female Fox News host.  She’s blond, blue-eyed, and extremely ticked off most of the time (I gave her no nice points).  Perfection!

Welcome, Foxy!

Poor Foxy, she’s not used to living in such conditions!  But a reporter must report the news, even if it’s in a stinky place that is owned by a clown who is probably on welfare.  Oh, but first she has to bring him back to life by making that all important phone call.  When you call up Death, you have to offer him money.  This might be a problem for Foxy.

This is ridiculous!  I bet Obama is behind this!

Sensing that this payment for resurrection was surely part of that nasty Obamacare, she decides to pay as little as possible.  This turns out to not be such a good idea. Turns out if you pay for lousy insurance, you get lousy care!

Oh, oh.

So Death brings Boppo back, but only kind of sort of.  Boppo the clown is now Boppo the zombie clown!  Zomg!  Now THIS is a story, Foxy!

Question: What is worse than a clown? Answer: Zombie clown.

But Foxy really doesn’t want to deal with this.  This is like, creepy, and yuck, and she wants back in her nice clean studio where there are no zombies, no clowns, and no icky bugs!

Ew! Only poor people have bugs!

Sorry, Foxy, gonna have to see this one through.  I mean, look how far into this post we’ve gotten, and Boppo is still very much alive!  Well, okay, so he’s partially alive and dropping parts of himself all over the house, but he’s still moving, and that has to be stopped.  What kind of Christmas special would this be if there were no dead zombie clowns?  Not a very good one, I say.

So it’s time for Boppo to say “bye-bye” once again.  But how?

Cue Jeopardy theme . . .

The Things and I debated on this, and after crashing a sattelite into him, and one time somehow making him completely vanish from the game, we settled on electrocution.  It seemed the most festive, considering how often this happens with Christmas tree lights and whatnot.

You have to be careful of those frayed wires when decorating, silly Boppo!

Foxy is there to film everything.  She manages to hide her sorrow quite well, even pointing and winking at Death as she walks by (really, she does this.)  So now it’s just Foxy, all alone in the house of clown, and none of her reporter friends ready to get her.  But what to do?  What would be the most likely way to go for anybody on Fox News, the network that is fair and balanced?

Ah, Foxy, they warned you if you lied enough what would happen.

What do you know?  God IS with us!  Merry Christmas, Happy Chaka Kahn, all those other holidays, etc etc.

Love,

Alice

C4C is back – and this time run by a dinosaur – Rara! Find out more by following the link.

Thing One has always been an individual.  She saw no need to bother following baby books, nor did she see a need to stay on some arbitrary growth chart.  Mom and doctors freaking out were really just a bonus.  At around six months she sat up, but then didn’t do what to do.  She couldn’t get back down again, so she just sat there, arms held out, like a little doll.  At nine months, she crawled, but it was an army crawl, dragging herself across the floor.  And this was only if she was really desperate for something, since usually stuff came to her if she waited long enough.

She was so tiny she stayed in her car seat, rear facing, until at a year I asked the doctor if I could turn her around.  She was only 16 pounds, but so long that her feet were up by her ears.  But she was content in her car seat.  In fact, if you didn’t get her belted in securely enough, she would scream until you stopped the car, panicked, and looked back to see her staring at you like “You moron, look at this unlocked belt.  I’m calling the cops.”

Seriously, what is WRONG with you, Mother?

She didn’t walk at a year old.  A couple of months later, she would walk just fine holding on to your finger, but if you let go, she’d drop onto her diapered butt.  She finally decided to walk at 16 months.  She didn’t get a single tooth until she was 15 months, and the doctor was ready to call the dentist.  With expressions like hers, she didn’t really need to speak much, so she didn’t.  One of her first popular phrases was “Daddy, toe!” I’m not sure what the thing was with her toe, but it was very important to her.

We liked having a quiet child.  She played quietly by herself in the play pen and in her crib.  In church, she sat perfectly on our laps.  It was like we were awesome parents or something.  Well, until I fetched her from Sunday School when she was three, and the teacher informed me that she should be speaking in complete sentences by now and we should have her tested.  Huh.  Go figure.  She was our first child, and I’d thrown out Parents magazine long ago, so like we knew anything was up.

So I took her to be tested at the local elementary school, because it’s never to early to start giving your children idiotic tests.  The lady who was supposedly some sort of expert at this stuff, started merrily trying to get Thing One to do what she asked.   She handed her a pair of scissors.  Thing One looked at them like “Wft is this?”  She had good reason to, as I had never given her scissors.  Mark one against Thing One.  Seriously, though, who the hell gives their three-year-old scissors?

Reason 365 not to give a child scissors.

She tossed them aside, and went back to playing with the various educational toys strewn around.  Not that she did anything with them she was supposed to, like say stack the blocks.  She just examined them, found them lacking, and dropped them again.  The lady tried to get her to color.  She handed her crayons and asked her to color a picture.  Thing One was now starting to get annoyed with this strange woman.  She took the crayon and made one slash across the paper.  Done!  Mark two against Thing One.  Thing One could not have cared less.

She tried to focus Thing One’s attention on her, but Thing One was done with all that.  She laughed and said “It’s like she’s saying ‘Talk to the hand!'”  No, lady, it wasn’t like she was saying that, she actually was conveying this with every bit of body language she possessed.  To this day I really don’t know what it was that Thing One really couldn’t do and what things she just didn’t feel like doing.  The  lady said my daughter was on a one-year-old level, and was going to need to go to something called PPCD for kids with disabilites due to her verbal and motor delays.  People at the school used to call them the “Pee Pee” kids, because they didn’t have to be toilet trained in order to go to school.

And this was when they had me.  It is rather difficult to motivate someone to use the potty when you don’t really communicate with them well, and of course no one wanted to take a kid who was in diapers.  Insult or no, they were willing to take my kid who wasn’t potty-trained yet?  Hallelujah!  Thing One absolutely loved school, and she was for the next few years the shining star of PPCD, as many of the children had much more severe disabilities.  Also she happened to look like a little fairy, and when you’re tiny and cute, people like doing stuff for you.  She immediately accepted the kids with various disabilities, and to this day I think that was one of the most important things she took out of these classes.  She’d have learned to do the other stuff on her own eventually, but this class helped teach her empathy for others, which she still has today.

My wish is your command!

One of her best friends was a boy named Carlos with Cerebal Palsy.  They were the princess and the ninja, since everyday Thing One wore a princess costume and Carlos a tie wrapped around his head.  She also loved playing on her own, and her favorite thing to do was go hide in the cabinet.  She apparently did this every day.  At one point, they were concerned she might also have Autism, because she had many symptoms.  For instance, bandaids freaked her out more than shots, the guy giving the smiley face stickers at Wal-Mart was the devil, and don’t even TRY to get her to play with finger paint or shaving foam.  She literally tackled other kids to get away from it.

As it turned out, she wasn’t autistic, just weird.  And I love that about her, because she is delightfully weird and different and perfect.  And now, you’d never know she was ever behind, as she jumped up to 50th percentile on the growth chart and makes straight As.  One thing that hasn’t changed is that she is still every bit the individual, and if you don’t interest her, well – expect to talk to the hand.

What-ever!