electric boogaloo

Our newest theme in randomville is The Titanic. It started at the Fourth of July festival thingie. They had bounce houses for kids, including one shaped like the sinking Titanic. Someone waited too long to place their bounce house order I’m guessing, because all of the ones they had were a bit of a stretch on the patriotic theme: The Titanic, Noah’s Ark, A giant child-eating dragon, and Lightening McQueen.

So while kids squealed and slid joyfully into the big puffy funthing, Nicolaus wanted to know what that big boat was and why was it all crooked like that. Ah! Well, see, a long time ago there was this huge ship that was amazing and everyone wanted to ride it and then it hit an iceberg and then it sank but there weren’t enough lifeboats and like 1700 people died and you know now that we think about it, that is a really fucked up thing to make a kiddie bounce house out of.

I’m paraphrasing. But we went to eat at the local pizza place, and that’s basically all we were able to talk about through lunch. He positioned his chair so that he could see the HMS Inflatable Titanic (They said it could never be deflated!) through the window. Instead of eating, he pressed us for details about what happened. We figured he was just avoiding eating because he really doesn’t like pizza that much, or any food other than black olives really. But no, he wasn’t messing around. He’s eaten several times since the fourth of July, but hasn’t stopped talking about the dang Titanic.

Like all of his assorted interests, this one led to a Netflix documentary rental. He and Kevin watched it this morning, and Kevin said that he was almost in tears through all the parts about people dying. Nicolaus was almost in tears I mean, even though it IS tragic enough to upset a grownup, and Kevin is pretty much a crybaby.

So anyway. They watched it this morning, making my afternoon alone with the boys really bizarre. Ship-wrecky.

It’s exactly like most rainy summer afternoons, with the battling baby snot and the getting them drinks and snacks and the diaper changing (my living LORD what does Kevin feed this kid in the mornings??). Like most afternoons, there have been several ridiculous fights and only one of my kids is still wearing pants, maybe as a result of one of the fights but probably just as a result of me changing him and him running away before I could put his pants back on and me deciding that I was sort of fine with that.

But today we’ve also been on many tragically sinking ships, clutching our plastic apples with our names on them that would ensure us a spot on one of the lifeboats. Don’t ask me what the deal was with the apples because I swear I don’t know. I was handed an apple with a tag taped to it that said TIN, which is code for Tiffany, and by God if that means I get a lifeboat seat well then, rock and roll.

We’ve also spent a lot of time safely aboard submarines that were looking for wreckage. And about once every ten minutes! We guess what?? FIND THE TITANIC!

Just like you’d think, it is an incredible discovery every time.

He was going to write a book about the Titanic, but figuring out how to spell the words “Chapter 1″ made him too tired and pissed off at the world. So he switched to pictures. I need to scan these pictures tomorrow.

Like a lot of his drawings, the Titanic ones are from a bird’s eye view. He even drew most of the people from above, as concentric blobby circles. Head. Body. Cool.

There are six drawings.
1. The Titanic.
2. The Titanic hitting an iceberg.
3. The Titanic sinking with water everywhere and a smiling person who died.
4. The map we are going to use to find the Titanic.
5. The submarine used to locate the wreckage.
6. The wrecked Titanic under the sea.

I’ll try and scan them after the boys go to bed, but no promises. This sitting on the couch pretending we are hunting for a sunken ship has been hard work, and I’m awfully tired already.