Webkins' Worlds

Friday, August 10, 2007

Dad, after another year to complete his masters, was going for the big one – the PhD. Everyone decided, however, that if he was going to become a professor, (especially at Washington University), he absolutely had to grow a goatee. It would be mandatory. Dad still, three years after his first goatee (which only lasted several weeks), did not appreciate the idea.

Collette and Carrie were approaching the half-way mark in transcribing Carrie’s old journal.

And after Carrie left for work and potentially to see “Les Miserables” at The Muny with friends that night, Puck napped, Joe and Francis were at Six Flags with the youth, Rose was off to pay for classes and purchase textbooks, and Linnea and her neighbor friend were transforming the living room into a Webkins’ paradise.

Every part of the room had been set up with World Book Encyclopedias, china doll teapots, cherry pies and bread loaves (not real, of course), bags and bags of mancala-sized stones, and many other knick-knacks of all shapes and sizes. This world also included a dance floor:

“See?” Linnea picked up a squishy frog with googly eyeballs. “These are the lights for the dance floor.”

They had hung the frog upside down on Mom’s decorative stand so that his eyeballs (which produced colored lights when hit), shown off and on, on the dance floor. The dance floor was a wooden green and brown Hungarian chessboard.

When Trooper wasn’t invading the premises, the girls happily talked out their worlds to each other.

And while Mom looked up her old Jane Austen books (instead finding a three-part documentary on VHS of the world during Jane A.’s time), Collette prepared bacon sandwiches on rolls for the girls, cold pink lemonade, and a small cup of ice cream apiece.

“Bacon, bacon, bacon!” The girls cheered, forgetting that Puck was asleep in the next room.

Before Collette and Puck left for the day, Collette and Linnea had a few rounds of mancala while Puck had his buster-sized bottle.

That evening, Puck giggled with his dad as OLeif made him dance on his desk.

Then OLeif pushed Hercules hooks into the walls and began hanging the beginning of the armada of black and white photographs on the walls. In time, all the walls would most likely be covered.

That night, Collette dreamed about Mercy’s wedding – unconventional as expected.