First Published March 28, 2006 ~~~current mood: giggly~~
There are several reasons why I had chosen not to let my ex-husband teach the children about the animal kingdom. This is the first of two blogs about Sgt. Snickerdoodle’s misconceptions on our furry friends.
One afternoon, when we were first dating, Sgt. Snickerdoodle and I were out running errands. We were in his truck and had pulled into a parking lot, where it had seemed a HUGE congregation of squirrels had convened. I mean there had to be at least fifty of them, scampering along the sidewalks, up trees, chasing each other through the grass.
I was laughing and telling Sgt. Snickerdoodle to watch what these crazy squirrels were doing. He looked me straight in the eye, as if speaking to a very slow child, said, “Missy, squirrels are not real.” I said, “Pardon me?” and he goes, “Oh never mind, my bad, squirrels are real. It’s chipmunks that are imaginary.”
It took me a few minutes to realize this man was being downright serious. I proceeded to ask him what he meant by saying chipmunks were not real. His explanation was quite simple actually. Chipmunks were cartoon characters, as were reindeer, since we all knew deer just didn’t fly.
I laughed until I had tears rolling down my face and he kept looking at me as if I had really lost my mind. I tried to explain to him that yes, while Alvin and his brothers were imaginary, chipmunks did in fact exist. This lesson was still lost on him. He then tells me that chipmunks were not real, that they were actually just cartoon squirrels.
As we were returning back home, I asked him to make a quick stop at the library, that I needed to show him something. At the library, I was on a mission to show this man that chipmunks, were in fact real, not a myth. I broke out the encyclopedia. He looked as if I had just shattered his belief in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny simultaneously. He was very quiet on the way home, but I still had a case of the giggles.
At my house, he was still very quiet and you could see his brain was still trying to process the information I had given him. I sat down by him and asked him if he was okay. He said, “You know this reminds me of when I realized dogs and cats, were two different animals. This sent me into another spasm of giggles. What the hell was he talking about? He said until he was about ten, he always thought that the kitty was the momma animal and the puppy was the daddy animal. I had to ask, “What made you realize that they weren’t?” He said he was walking to school one day and he saw two dogs “going at it.”
I totally adored this man and he was a fantastic dad, but when the kids had any animal questions, they were NOT to ask him!