Lizards and Teenagers....

This morning began with lizards on the dining room window, and this afternoon ended with our two favorite teenagers making collages at our dining room table.

The windows of our dining room have a sun-shielding film on them, being that those windows get too much sunlight in the afternoon. As a result, you can see out of the dining room windows when you're inside the house, but if you're outside those windows and looking in during the daytime, you can't really see much at all.

For the past couple of weeks, small lizards have been hunting for their breakfast on my three dining room windows. I don't know if they eat ants or spiders or flies, but it seems that our dining room windows have become the breakfast-buffet location for the lizards in and around our yards. At any given time during the morning, there's at least two or three lizards crawling on those windows. Mickey Kitty is thrilled with this lizard activity, and he can usually be found sitting either below those windows or perched on the widowsills, waiting till his paws can reach the point where the lizards are.

Mickey Kitty definitely has an advantage...... he can see out, but the lizards can't see in. As Mickey Kitty taps his paws on the dining room windows, the lizards' heads will spin around towards the noise, but they can't see the source of the noise. I don't know who ends up being more frustrated--- the lizards or Mickey Kitty.


This afternoon, right after I got back from my piano lesson, our young friend C called me on her cell phone to ask if she and her friend L could walk over to our house. The girls were at C's house, but locked out because her mom was still at work and she had forgotten her key. Not only did she forget the key that she always keeps in her back-pack, but she forgot to re-hide the secret key that she keeps outside of her house. "I know right where both of my house keys are, but they're both inside the house," is what she told me.

I told the girls to walk on over......... I couldn't go pick them up because my car is a two-seater, and I wasn't going to take a chance by letting them both squeeze into the one passenger seat. They probably could've both fit, being that they're both such tiny girls. But they walked on over, with their back-packs, for goodness sakes. I suggested to the girls that the walk across the park would've been easier if they had just left their back-packs in C's yard, and both girls looked at one another and burst out laughing. Neither one had thought of that. But I'll bet they'll think of it next time.

The girls both drank two large glasses of pink lemonade to cool them off after the hot walk, then settled down at my dining room table to make collages. Neither of them had homework today, so C had asked if she could take out some things from the supplies of arts-and-crafts stuff that I always have in the house. C has been making collages here since she was a little girl. Simple project... I always have art paper in the house, and glue-sticks and colored art pencils. And I've always done what my Aunt Dolly did for years--- before tossing out magazines, I go through them and cut out interesting or cute pictures and just slip them all into a shoebox. I use the pictures for decorating the favor-bags and/or gift-tags for our parties, and C has always used the collection of magazine cut-outs for her collages.

C showed L the box of cut-outs, and both girls picked through the pictures to find the ones they wanted to use. C found a cut-out with the words "Born to be wild!" on it, and true to her adventurous self, she chose that as her theme. The girls got as far as placing their pictures on the art paper, but didn't have time to glue them down because C's mom came by to pick them up. They would've gotten farther along with the project, but they took a good long while to carefully look at every single cut-out in that box.

I told the girls that we'd just finish up the collages the next time they came by. We carefully closed the sketch-pads so the design of their cut-outs wouldn't be disturbed, and they can glue the pictures down the next time they're here.

C was such a little girl when she made her first collage here...... so young that I wouldn't let her use the scissors because I didn't have one with rounded edges and I was afraid she'd cut herself. Now here she is at 15, and using the large-size scissors with careful agility. Time sure does fly on by.