We are having all kinds of mice problems around our house. The actual kind - yes, opening up the closet door early in the morning and seeing a silent flash of brown-grey shooting across the sweaters - as well as the pretend. The four year old's best friend these days is a very subversive, power-hungry imaginary mouse. Mousie encourages all kinds of bad behavior and tries several times a day (unsuccessfully, thank goodness!) to put me in time-out for doing motherly things like prohibiting evil plots against the elder brother or the baby, asking the four year old to clean up her work, brush teeth, etc. Mousie generally disapproves of all authority beyond his own, and as the four year old reports, he is VERY powerful. But I shouldn't blame poor Mousie, solely. He has had a very, very, very sad and tragic life, as ALL of his friends/family back in Mouseland have met horrible and painful deaths which the four year old describes in detail. Often. To us and strangers alike. Should we be contacting a therapist, or is Mouseland a natural compartmentalization of all of the scary things she's trying to process as her little realm of exposure to the world increases? There are a lot of dangers we warn the kids about - I didn't realize until I heard them translated back to me through the mouse-death filter how these warnings were affecting her: mice getting into the medicine, mice getting hit by cars, mice getting carried away by black eagles (well, we don't talk about that last danger very much). I didn't think we were that negative! So, ANYWAY, for better or for worse we've decided to embrace Mousie, bad attitude, sordid past and all, along with the whole extended family of the imaginary mice-world. Here are two of my favorite rodents, the Country Mouse and the City Mouse, painted during a lengthy discussion about which mouse had it better - the sophisticated opera-going City Mouse or the whole-grain, wholesomely fed and entertained Country friend. What do you think? Now that I'm somewhat of a Country Mouse myself I wish for a little more glamour in my day-to-day existence, you know, maybe just a little bite of fancy cheese now and again, and a strain of Offenbach...
Sugar Box #2 (Sugar Box #1 can be seen here): perfect for the five-year old's woodland day dreams. I'm contemplating a few more, perhaps a bit more animated Red Riding Hood vignettes: perhaps Wolfie dressed as Grandmother in a grand--and a bit gaudy--Victorian walnut bed, lazily drinking some nettle tea and nibbling on lemony crumpets; or the woodsman with his wolf-killing armament: a scythe, an awl, and large shiny ax.
