Summertime and The Understanding Isn’t Easy!

Apparently today is the first day of summer, which confuses me a lot.  Back in May, May 12th to be exact, The Lady told me that she was officially on summer vacation.  To me that meant it must be summertime.  But if today is the first day of summer then obviously it was not summertime on May 12th.  Today, when The Lady was trying to explain all of this to me, she said that it was actually still spring back in May.  Oh!  So it was really spring vacation that started back in May.  She said, “No.  Not really.  Spring vacation was the week I had off in March.”  So I asked her when spring started.  She told me that the first day of spring was March 20th.  Hmm…looking back, she had her week off March 13-19.  That was before March 20th.  It wasn’t spring then; that was still winter.  Shouldn’t that have been called winter vacation?  Again she said, “No.  Winter vacation was in December and January, around Christmas.”  I was just getting more and more confused.  I had to ask The Lady when winter actually started.  She said that the first day of winter was December 21st.  I think that her first day of vacation was before then, but this is all too much for this little blue and orange furry monster to get straight.  Maybe from May 12th until today The Lady was just practicing for summer vacation.  All I really know is that everyone says that today is the first day of summer.  I am going to believe them.  You would think that as many falls, winters, springs, and summers that The Lady has seen and for as many years as she went to school, she would know exactly what season to call her vacations by now!  Apparently not.

The first day of summer is a special day because it is the day that we have the most sunlight and the least dark.  That means that there is more time today that people and little monsters can get sunburned.  The Lady has to be very careful that the sun doesn’t burn her skin.  If it does, she turns pink, or maybe red depending how long the sun cooks her.  I’ve never seen her turn pink or red, but she told me that it has happened before.  She doesn’t stay outside in the sun very long and when she is outside, she wears a hat and sunglasses and shirts with long sleeves.  Or sometimes, she puts this white icing stuff all over her.  She says that this is to keep the sun from baking her and turning her pink.  It seems strange that you would put icing on something someone before they are baked.  I will trust her on this, but not on the vacation names! 

Mr. Guy and The Lady got me a hat and sunglasses so that my monster head and eyes don’t get cooked by the sun.  I certainly don’t want my horns to get baked!  They might turn brown or black.  That’s what happens to stuff that The Lady bakes in the oven too long.  I don’t know if The Lady has any icing to keep my horns from turning icky colors.  I think I’d rather wear the hat.

My shirts have short sleeves.  The Lady said that she thought that all of my blue and orange fur would keep the sun from baking my arms.  I hope so because if the sun cooks me like it does The Lady, my fur will turn purple!  The Lady is white.  The sun makes her red.  Red and white mixed together make pink.  I’m blue (with some orange).  If the sun makes some of me red, blue and red mixed together make purple.  My orange would just turn a different color of orange, I think, maybe like the crayon color that is called red-orange.  I would become a furry little purple and red-orange monster.  I wouldn’t like that.  I like being blue!  I really don’t want to turn purple.  And I don’t want to use The Lady’s white icing stuff to keep me from turning purple.  Iced blue fur just sounds very yucky!  I think that I will just not go outside too much during the time when the sun might cook me.  That solves all of my problems, and The Lady’s too.

Oh…Mr. Guy used to teach Spanish and he teaches me how to speak Spanish because where I live here in Texas, lots of people speak Spanish.  I want to be able to talk with the people I meet.  I think it’s cool to be able to speak in two languages!  I like my new shirt that says hello in Spanish.  The Lady doesn’t speak Spanish very well (but she does know the word hola).  She speaks French pretty well, though; Mr. Guy and I don’t know French at all.  If I learn more Spanish with Mr. Guy, we can talk about all of the brown and black stuff that The Lady makes by cooking things too long in the oven and then tries to hide it with some kind of icing stuff.  Since she can’t understand Mr. Guy and me when we talk in Spanish, we won’t hurt her feelings when we say it doesn’t look or taste good.

Happy real first day of summer!

A Month of Me – Day 31

I did it!  I did it!  I did it!  

Back on the first of May I set a goal to write a post every day.  I wasn’t sure that I could do it, but The Lady told me that it was important to have goals.  She said that sometimes you achieve your goals and sometimes you don’t, but you can’t achieve them if you don’t have them.  I am a very lucky little monster because Mr. Guy and The Lady will do all that they can to help me.

We had lots of little adventures and lots of quiet time together at home.   It makes me happy to be able to go back and look at the stories I wrote and all of our pictures from A Month of Me so I can remember these times.  I don’t know that I can continue to write every single day, but having done so for a whole month makes me realize how much I enjoy sharing my life with all of you.

Lots of people are graduating from school right now.  They are celebrating years and years of studying and working hard to earn diplomas and degrees.  I am not graduating because I don’t go to school, but Mr. Guy and The Lady told me that they are just as proud of my writing accomplishments, that I worked hard for a whole month.  They said that we should take a special picture of me in honor of me reaching my goal.  I don’t have special rigamarole like The Lady and those people who are graduating from school,  but I did put on my fancy clothes!


I have a bow tie.  I like it better than Mr. Guy’s big fat red string that he wore around his neck!  And I have a vest, which is really just a shirt with no arms.  I wouldn’t want to wear these fancy clothes all the time, but I suppose they are OK when it is a special occasion.

Mr. Guy had one last surprise May surprise for me.  He has been full of surprises this month.  Most of them are good!  He found a hat for me, one that is just the right size for my head!


He said that it is a hat sort of like one that he has.  It’s not a yellow rain hat and it’s not a hat to keep my head warm in the winter.  It is a fancy hat to go with my fancy clothes.  This hat does not have holes for my horns so I wasn’t sure exactly how I should wear it.

Should I wear it over just one horn?


Or should I wear it over both of them?


I think that wearing it over both of my horns makes me look too serious and grown up. I am not a serious and grown up monster.  I am just a fun-loving happy-go-lucky little blue and orange furry monster who enjoys life!  

Which style do you prefer?

Thank you again for following me during the month of May.  June and July are going to be busy months for me and my family.  I am going on a trip this weekend to meet some of The Lady’s picture taking friends. Then it is Mr. Guy’s birthday, and my adoption day, and our trip to Pittsburgh, and our trip to England.  I am going to have a lot to tell you about!  I hope you will check back here every now and then and see what I am up to!

Farewell Month of Me!  I will miss you.

Welcome June!  Let’s have some fun!

A Month of Me – Day 14

Saturdays are usually chore day at our house because its the only day that Mr. Guy and The Lady have to clean and do laundry and buy groceries.  Today was different.  Since The Lady is all done with school, she can do all of those things on Monday.  So, today wasn’t chore day; it was adventure day!  That made me happy so I decided to wear my “happy” shirt.  And it is yellow!!!  In all of my wondering this week about how my blue and orange fur would look with the color yellow, I forgot that I already had something yellow!  I don’t think it crashes clashes.  Yellow is a happy color just like my shirt says.  It makes me happy and going on adventures with The Lady and Mr. Guy makes me happy!  Today I am a happy little monster!


Lots of times when we go on adventures that require flying on an airplane, we have to get up very early.  No airplanes today.  We weren’t going too far from our house so we went in the car and we didn’t have to get up until eight o’clock!  This little monster got lots of sleep last night!  We were going to a place called Heritage Homestead to meet some special friends of The Lady and Mr. Guy.  It took us about an hour and a half to drive there.  

The first thing we did was eat lunch.  The restaurant was super busy so we had to eat sort of quickly.  The Lady did not take time to take any pictures at lunch, but Mr. Guy and I did share a piece of orange cake.  I think it was made of carrots.  After lunch, we went to see all of the fun stuff.  Heritage Homestead is a craft village where people make all kinds of things.  
The first thing we saw was a blacksmith.

It was kind of scary watching the blacksmith.  He put pieces of metal into a big fire.  The metal got so hot that it turned bright orange.  That may be one kind of orange that I don’t like!  The blacksmith guy liked it though.  While the metal was orange, the blacksmith guy used his tools to twist and turn and fold the hot metal into hooks and all kinds of neat things.  I liked watching him, but I don’t think I would want to work with the metal and the fire.  I would be scared that my fur would catch on fire, and I don’t think it would turn more orange if it did.
Next we went to the gristmill.  I didn’t know anything about gristmills, but there were people working there who explained what a gristmill is.  They take grains and grind them to make flour.  
I liked this place because it was about making food.  I like food!  I like to make it and I like to eat it.
We bought some oats for our breakfasts.
The next place we went was to the fiber building.  That was a place where they had lots of sticks and string.  The people there twisted the sticks and string just like the blacksmith did except they did not use any fire.  The Lady knows how to twist string with sticks.  This place had string in lots of colors.  
Hey look!  They have string that has blue and orange and yellow all at the same time!  It matches me!
I have an idea!  The Lady can get some of this string and use her sticks to make me a hat!  I bet she can make a hat with some air holes for my horns!  I bet our friend Ms. Joni would like this place.  She is one of The Lady’s friends who likes to play with sticks and string.  I think you should come visit us in Texas, Ms. Joni.  Or, maybe we can find a string store when we see you this summer in Pittsburgh. If The Lady won’t make me a hat with air holes for my horns, will you?
I learned that some of the string comes from plants and some of it comes from animals like these.
I think that they should be called string monsters, but they are called sheep.  That doesn’t make any sense.  They were fuzzy, but they didn’t have any colorful sheep like make the string at the string shop.  I want to see a fuzzy rainbow sheep!
This place did have lots of flowers in all the colors of the rainbow.
Look!  More yellow with lots of orange!  I think that I am beginning to like yellow too!  Not as much as blue and orange, though.
And they had great big shade trees.
Since I don’t have a hat, I sat in the shade of the tree so that my head didn’t get baked.  Mr. Guy was wearing his hat so his head didn’t get baked.  That was OK because I don’t think that hat is the right hat for me. 
The last place we went was to a house where people take mud and make dishes with it.  They put it on a merry-go-round and instead of getting dizzy it becomes a bowl, or a vase, or a cup.  A cup!  They had made lots of cups.  Maybe the Dallas Stars should come here where they could each get their own cup since they didn’t win the big cup.  If they really, really, really, just want one great big cup, they can get one of those here too.
After we saw all of this neat stuff, it was time to say goodbye to our friends and head home.
I had a super fun adventure day!  I saw lots of things that I have never seen before.  I am looking forward to more adventures and more new people on our summer adventures!

A Month of Me – Day 12

Today was the last day of school for The Lady!  Yay!  She came home early to finish grading her last exams so that she would be completely done for ther semester. Mr Guy came home at the usual time; it is not his last day of school.  Just like last night,  they left right away.

The Lady was playing music for something called graduation.  I learned three things today! When someone goes to school for a while and finishes lots of classes, they graduate. That means there is a big ceremony for them. They give everyone who has finished a fancy piece of paper called diploma. It is a paper that says they are finished. And you can get more than one of these diplomas. All this school stuffl is too hard for this blue and orange monster to figure out. It seems to me that finished means done, all done, forever. The Lady explained that there are lots of levels of school. You can get a diploma for each level! 

Second, I learned that The Lady not only sings, but she plays a musical instrument called a clarinet. I knew she played the piano. I often spend my days in the office where the piano is and have heard her play. She doesn’t play her clarinet much at home. Last weekend I heard something funny.  I think she might have been playing it in our library. But I was not in there and did not see it so I wasn’t sure what those sounds were. I know now, but I still have not seen her clarinet.

The third thing I learned was that when you graduate, you get special clothes! They are not t-shirts.  I like my t-shirts. They are called rigamarole or something like that.  The Lady has a black robe with funny looking arms and something she called a hood.  This all sounds like something a nerdy superhero might wear. The Lady let me try on her hood. It did not seem like much of a hood to me. I could not put it on my head! It went on my shoulders. 


The Lady said that the color of the hood tells people what you took all those classes in while you were in school.   Hers is pink because she went to school to study music. Pink really clashes with my orange fur!   I don’t think I want to study music!  Mr Guy said his hood was lemon yellow because he studied to be a librarian. I asked what that meant. He said that a librarian is someone who works in a library and deals with lots of books. That sounds fun!  I like books. The other night, when I was thinking about getting a rain hat, I wondered how yellow would look with my fur.  Someday maybe I can go to school and learn how to be a librarian like Mr. Guy and I can get a yellow hood and have a yellow hat too!  Then I would definitely look like a nerdy superhero!

For now though, I guess I’ll just have to be a furry blue and orange monster with lots of t-shirts and no rigamarole.

A Month of Me – Day 10

This whole hat thing is getting to be serious business!  I told Mr. Guy that I want to wear hats like he does.  He told me that there are different kinds of hats for different occasions.  The other night he was telling me about sun hats.  Really I think they should be called no-sun hats.  He said that he wears different hats in the winter because he doesn’t have any fur to keep his head warm.  I don’t have that problem.  

Tonight I tried on one of his summer hats.  Mr. Guy wears this one to keep the sun from baking his head and turning it red.  I just wanted to try it on.  I like this one a little bit because it fits over my horns.  But, it is the wrong color blue for my fur, don’t you think?  The Lady said something like it crashes with my fur colors.  I don’t think that it looks so bad that people will think that I look like a crash, but I don’t think that I want a hat like this one.  Well, at least not in this color.  The Lady told me that it is going to be hard to find a hat that doesn’t crash and that fits over my horns.  She said that I might have to make some compromises.  Compromises?

Hmmm…The Lady tried to explain compromises to me.  I think it means something like I am probably not going to find the perfect hat I so I should learn to be happy with something close.  Maybe I can do that.  I just don’t want cramped horns or a hat that crashes.

Oh!!!  I just learned about another kind of hat.  Rain hats!  There is lots of rain and thunder and lightening at my house right now.  Mr. Guy went outside to check on stuff.  He told me to stay inside so I didn’t get wet.  If I had a  rain hat, it would keep my fur all nice and dry.  The Lady said that lots of times rain hats are yellow.  Do you think that a yellow hat would crash with my fur???