February 1 SUNNY!

Thursday:  From the title of this post, you might assume I am referring to MR SUN up there in the sky shining down on us ... but we haven't seen very much of him in the last weeks. Rumor has it that he will shine for part of the day tomorrow--anticipating that very much.

But ... no, no, no! This SUNNY is our (my) brand new puppet! "HOW ON EARTH", you might ask!!! I did not NEED another puppet around my little house! I have 2 pigs ("Paco" and his identical cousin, "RRRRRamone"), one alligator ("Alfredo", that eats stuff), a rubbery T-Rex ("Rocky"), another rubbery kind of puppet shark ("Sweetie Pie"), a cute cat ("Cocoa"), a little owl ("Hootie"), an otter ("Oscar"), a large marionette bird puppet ("Charlie"), and a very weird-looking marionette dog puppet that reminds me of a RAT (we named him "Rat" for a reason), and three other puppets that don't get played with very often around here (Whinnie the Pooh, Tigger, and a squirrel puppet from Great Wolf Lodge). PLUS, I have probably 100 finger puppets of every size and shape!

So WHY Sunny?

Here's the story: Kaity and I drove out to Aunt Candie's Toy Company yesterday to purchase a small gift for Brendan's birthday party on Saturday. Kaity is invited and has no gift for him--so we needed to remedy that situation! 

Note to self--use caution when taking Kaity to this particular toy store! We always come out with stuff we never planned on buying!!!!

ANYWAY, we walked past the puppets and I naturally saw a wolf puppet that looked pretty cool (but it ended up NOT being as good as it looked. The mouth doesn't move, and it makes very Unauthentic wolf howls that are difficult to turn off! Kaity picked up a few and rejected those as well for very good reasons. She is quite an expert at puppets. SHE is the one who picked out OSCAR and we bought it for no other reason than we just could NOT leave him at the store! I was looking around for an appropriate game or brain teaser located in the same area as the puppets, when suddenly Kaity came behind me holding the BEST and craziest looking bird puppet we have ever seen, combined with the fact that he is SUPER soft and hilarious; but ... not really appropriate for Brendan, who is turning TWELVE (not 2) on Saturday. Yikes. I seriously tried to put the puppet back where he belonged and just walk away . . .

. . . but we JUST COULDN'T DO IT! We got a different gift for Brendan, but "Sunny" (Kaity named him in the store because I asked her what we should name this puppet--was it a boy? was it a girl?) came home with us to the Beach House! Here he is!

I've decided to tell the other kiddos that SUNNY is a juvenile Floogle bird. One of our favorite children's authors is Adam Rubin (with Daniel Salmieri illustrations). He has a 3-book series: "Those Darn Squirrels." In his books, we find out that Old Man Fookwire loves birds, but hates squirrels. Fookwire is an artist who finds great joy painting pictures of all of his bird friends who hang out in his yard. The illustrations are hilarious and the story line is super funny. Some of our favorite bird names from these books are: whirly birds, bonga birds, baba birds, yaba birds, AND floogle (very rare) birds. 

Why is Sunny a JUVENILE floogle bird? Well ... because Sunny doesn't really match any of the illustrated birds in our books; BUT "Floogle" is our favorite named bird in these books--PLUS, "Floogle" birds have ATTITUDE, and Sunny definitely has that! So I'm going to try to convince the kids that when Sunny grows up, his neck will grow longer and he will then be an ADULT and look like the pictures in our books.

We cracked up playing with Sunny for the little bit of time we were here ... before we drove over to Altitude!

I think Sunny will be a favorite of all my little grandchildren very soon!