Costuming and kitty litter

The large boy wanted to be Doctor Who, until we said he could make his own sonic screwdriver instead of buying one. The small boy wants to be Michelangelo the ninja turtle, because of nunchucks. He is narrowing his eyes at me when I offer to make them out of toilet paper tubes, but still has enough belief in my magical craft skills that he imagines I'll pull off a real pair of them somehow. "It isn't about getting toys!" I howl. "It's about getting candy. Focus, children." 

So this morning I asked again, "what do you want to be for Halloween?" 

And the boy said, "A ghost! And Zenny is a cherry, and dad is Pacman."

"Oh! Ok. Maybe a banana, because cherries have connotations I don't think are - *cough* - hey, so what am I?"

"A dot."

Great.

So that's where we are with that. Nowhere.

Disaster litter

Our philosophy with allowances is that everyone does normal chores just for being part a household, and kids get paid extra for (competently) doing things we really, really don't want to do. The small boy can't do anything competently yet, and has almost broken all our necks while learning to spray oil on the wood furniture. The large boy gets to do kitty litter for a dollar a day, because it's gross and we don't want to do it. We have litter upstairs for the old arthritic cats, and litter downstairs for the assholes who would rather pee on the stove than walk upstairs. Twice a week, the garbage goes out, and the boy has to add bathroom trash to the litter bag. So on garbage day, I yelled up, "Don't forget the dirty diapers!" and he obligingly dumped them on top of the dirty litter, then he came downstairs swinging the heavy bag. Leif was playing Legos in the livingroom, and looked up just in time for Gavin to turn the corner, the bag sailing out gracefully in an arc to smack him square in the face like - well, a sack full of poop. The boy walked over his stunned brother. While I helped Leif up, my mother praised Gavin for his dutiful garbage collection, and he hoisted the bag and beamed, "It even has Leif's face imprinted on it!" Brothers, I tell you.

On the next garbage day, we asked him to empty the litter pans and refill them with clean stuff. "Dump the litter into a garbage bag," we said. Surprisingly soon, he was finished, and came in with his brow furrowed.

"Wow, done already?"

"Um, yeah."

"Great, do you need help taking the garbage bag outside?" 

"Um, no." 

"Really? That must have been heavy." 

"Well, the pan was heavy."

"But you put the litter in the garbage, right?"

"... Most of it?"

"Wut."

As it turns out, he had decided that a plastic grocery bag was easier to reach than the roll of garbage bags, and took the pan of litter outside, in case some spilled. Which it did. Because he was dumping a big pan of litter into a little plastic grocery bag. So there was a big pile of dirty clay litter on the grass behind the house. And it was raining. It turns out that raking clay sludge out of grass is harder than it sounds. The boy cried in embarrassment while we tried to clean it up, and then we all hid from the yard men when they came to collect the garbage bags from the outdoor bin. There was a WHOOP and someone sailed past the window. We hosed off the evidence afterward and pretended to know nothing. 

It's a learning curve. I consoled the boy by telling about how I had discovered as a child that if it was too cold to take out the cat litter, I could open the door and hurl the turds outside, and feral dogs would come sailing out of nowhere to snap them out of the air and hork them down like bacon treats. The downside of this, besides being revolting, was that when I did go out to put the litter bags in the trash, I had to do it at a sprint, chased by hungry dogs. I did not always make it. 

A learning curve, I say.