Crackerdog and flop-bott

My hairdresser's son "collects malti-poos and doesn't want to have kids", she tells me.  Scary Hair Tammi doesn't know it has been a multi-poop week in the preschool class, and I'm unsure why anyone has kids at this point.  I keep a straight face.  She is just informing me the little girl asleep in the lobby is not her grandchild.

My art students have been creating dog art since the beginning of the fall semester.  Our grand collaboration on a Go, Dog. Go! mural was the culmination timed for Thursday's Open House Night.  I encouraged students to bring photos of their dogs to create a border around the mural. We were just starting the border in this photo, but soon memorial photos started coming in faster than photos of stoic pets dressed in doll clothes and Mardi Gras beads.

When we started the mural I didn't know my dad would be trying to climb the ladder to a big dog party in his states of considerable agitation all week.    I didn't know a blogger friend would be letting go of her family pet.  Adding to the emotion, a preschooler's dog died last weekend.

I just wanted us to find good links between quality picture books, making art, and talking about art.  Interest, integration, imagination, invention... all those great i words for connecting art and stories. Now we were also processing early encounters with mortality, using art to record and commemorate.  Where did those dogs go?  Why were they going fast in those cars?  Why does P. D. Eastman's book help me in this time of stress and sadness as much as James Herriot's All Things Great and Small?

We had a lively discussion about George Rodrique's "Blue Dog" paintings in all the groups.  One of the questions is always, "How do you think Blue Dog is feeling?"  Blue Dog is often stressed but immobile, anxious and stuck.

In James Herriot's dog stories, the young vet is often torn about lecturing Mrs. Pumphrey on the hazards of overfeeding her Pekingese dog. Tricki Woo has a condition called "flop- bott", also known as impacted bowels, and experiences episodes of "crackerdog", zooming around like to a preschooler on a Coco-Puffs rush.




In the workplace stress department, we had a big flop-bott over whether to serve little paper cups of crackers and green grapes at Open House. Those dogs are not going to get cracker-grapes.

 © 2011 Nancy L. Ruder