This Friday night at 7 pm, I'm going to be reading from THE OBVIOUS GAME with my former professor and mentor, Michael Pritchett, author of THE MELANCHOLY FATE OF CAPT. LEWIS. (Yes, it's THAT Capt. Lewis. The one who hung out with Clark.) I'm not sure if Michael will be reading from TMFoCL or his novel-in-progress, but I have heard him read from both, and his stage delivery is awesome. You'll be quite convinced he hates writing with the power of a thousand suns, but you know, in a good way. I find it existentially hilarious.

It has occurred to me that I should probably practice for this reading. I have never read from a novel before. I have also not had too much time to get nervous about it, because last week MAJOR CHRISTIAN RELIGIOUS HOLIDAY and also MOMMY TOTALLY UNDERDELIVERED ON THE EASTER BASKET and then THIS SATURDAY IS THE LITTLE ANGEL'S BIRTHDAY and then OUR CAT JUST DIED AND A BUNCH OF OTHER CRAZY SHIT WENT DOWN IN OUR PERSONAL LIVES and well, holy hell. It's Monday, I don't have a birthday card for my daughter yet (I do have the big gift, but she probably needs some other little things to open), I don't have a game plan for anything and I'm taking a SEWING CLASS on Thursday, the night before my parents and sister arrive to stay with us for said reading and birthday party and oh, holy hell, I hope I've scrubbed the smell of Buttonsworth's last accident out of the playroom carpet (hydrogen peroxide and baking soda).

If you want to attend the reading, all the details are on this Evite. The reading will be from 7-9 at The Writers Place in Kansas City. Both Michael and I will have some books for sale or to sign, and I'll bring some signed bookplates for anyone who wants one unless I run out. Thanks, as always, for all your support of my writing. It means so much.

Thanks so much, everyone, for all your kind words about Buttonsworth. I'm still in a period of mourning and distracting myself with work, so today I'm going to put up a how-to post on surviving road trips. Not that I have any experience or anything. 

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My husband, daughter and I live in Kansas City. Both sets of our parents live in Iowa. Which means: road trips. Lots of them. Like almost every month, and the drive is from three to five hours each way.

You'd think in the era of portable DVD players, iPads, iPhones and NOOKs that entertaining oneself in the car for a few hours would be cheesecake. This, unfortunately, is not the case. My daughter just started liking to play digital games in the last year. I may not win any mother-of-the-year awards for saying this, but there were days when I would beg her to just play a game so I didn't have to play one more round of I Spy while twisting myself around so uncomfortably in the front seat to look at her that I actually pulled a back muscle once. Here are some ways to pass the time we've developed for our now eight-year-old road-tripper.

Credit Image: Damian Gadal on Flickr

Stories

This is a broad category that includes everything from reading a story to writing a story to her writing a bit and then me writing a bit to her creating graphic novels. There are many websites that let you turn a story your child writes into a book. (Speaking of that, I have three sitting here on my desk to be scanned and converted!)

Word Games

Think of the game show that is least annoying to you and try to convert it to a car version. I personally like Wheel of Fortune, so we play Hangman a lot. Although -- hangman? Seriously? Who came up with this draconian way of losing? I'd like to say I've come up with a kinder, gentler version, but I haven't. I just try really hard not to lose.

Conversation

How many times do you actually make conversation -- like cocktail party conversation -- with your kid? I usually don't -- we talk about what happened that day or what we're having for dinner or how she really feels strongly she does not have enough pairs of leggings. On road trips, I've learned how her favorite color has changed from blue to purple, who her friends are, what she wants to be when she grows up and whether or not she thinks she'll have kids. Some of my favorite conversations have happened in the car.

So, there you have it. Trust me, I'm no saint -- these are the things I go to AFTER she has watched as many movies as she will watch and played as many games as she will play and read as many books as she will read. I hate riding in cars for long periods of time and prefer to spend my own time working on a novel or with my nose in a book. But if we must interact while trapped in a small box for hours, these are my favorite ways to do it.

How do you survive roadies?

Inches of snow that fell in my yard this weekend: 9

Inches of poop that came out of Buttonsworth after one enema at the emergency vet on Saturday: 6

Inches of poop remaining in Buttonsworth now: 6

Number of enemas the emergency vet wanted to give him: 5

Amount the emergency vet would charge for this service: $918

Amount I paid to get him one enema and subcutaneous fluids: $166

Number of times Buttonsworth would have died this weekend if he hadn't had an enema: 1

Number of enemas Buttonsworth has had in the past three weeks: 7 and counting

Amount of money we have spent on vets and medicine for Buttonsworth this month: $674.41 and counting

Number of months we have owned Buttonsworth: 4

Number of weeks we are giving him on a new medicine to see if we can get his colon to work: 2

Number of weeks he has been on insulin: 4

Number of hearts in this house that will be broken if the new medicine doesn't work: 3

Number of cats that will be left: 1

Number of cats my daughter desperately wants: 2

Chances of getting a second cat if Buttonsworth dies based on my husband's feelings: 0%

Number of vet trips in the past seven days: 3

Number of posts on Surrender, Dorothy in the past seven days: 2

Number of days I've wanted to crawl back in bed within twenty minutes of getting out of it: 7

The little angel ate too fast last night at dinner, and something went down the wrong tube. She kept hacking long after she should've been able to stop, to the point where it got humorous.

Me: "Well, it's stupid that humans eat and breath out of the same orifice, really. So much margin for error."

Her: "YACKACCCOUUUUGHG"

Me: "I mean, I think dolphins have two holes."

Her: "CGOAOGFAHSEASEAAASHLRG"

Him: "It could be worse. You could eat and poop out the same hole."

Her: (recovering) "Squids only have one hole."*

*I looked this up. It's actually sea anemone, but hey? SCIENCE!

"I feel anxious," she said, as I opened the book. Then her face turned red and she asked if Daddy could leave the room.

My heart dropped into my stomach.

She told me she'd been at a friend's house and they'd been watching music videos on YouTube. They came to the P!nk video for Perfect. She thought it would be okay because I've showed her P!nk videos before -- the lawnmower, the acrobats -- I don't blame them for thinking it would be fine.

This one was not fine.

In the video, the girl carves "Perfect" into her arm in the bathtub. Blood everywhere.

"I didn't know you could cut yourself on purpose," my girl sobbed. She couldn't stop crying, and she couldn't unsee the bathtub scene.

We prayed. I sang to her. She kept crying. I didn't know what to do.

"You know what? Sometimes you just need your daddy."

I went and got him. She was afraid he'd be mad she'd watched the video. He wasn't. We talked to her about not watching things on the Internet when we're not around, because the Internet is full of things that are very hard to unsee. Then he held her until she fell asleep.

I went downstairs, watched the video three times, called my sister.

In the morning, I told my girl I'd watched the video. I told her the storyline was actually about a girl who'd had a bad childhood but grew up to get married and have her own little girl and how she saved her own childhood bear for her little girl and in the end, everything was okay. The little angel smiled. "I think the bathtub scene was in the story to show just how bad things were before they got better," I said. "Writers do that. It's called 'conflict,' and it's a device. The video wasn't real -- it was a story to go with the song."

(Which is why it's easier for me to read fiction than nonfiction. I can always tell myself the conflict is just a writerly device.)

She went to school, and I spent the rest of the day trying not to think of all the other things she would see and not understand. All the things that would eventually chip away at her innocence until she would have to choose, as I have, to believe that 99% of people mean you no harm and the world is not a horrible, scary place unless you believe it is one.

Remember when you didn't know people could hurt themselves on purpose? I had forgotten there was ever a time like that.

I've been reading one of my very favorite books with my daughter this past week. THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE. I still remember going to get it at a book warehouse before there were big box bookstores, the boxed set, with my special blue group or whatever they called the gifted class in the mid-eighties. I kept that boxed set my entire life, because it was the only boxed set I owned in childhood (that I recall or that I kept track of), and it has sat on my bookshelf until now, when I finally was able to interest my daughter in hearing the story of Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy.

Initially, it didn't move fast enough for her, but by the time the Beavers appeared, she was hooked. Then when we got to the part in which Aslan gives the kids their weapons and tells the girls they were really just for back-up because girls shouldn't fight, my girl -- who had been lying down with her back to me, practically asleep -- actually rolled over and said, "When was this WRITTEN?"

And that, my friends, is how quickly culture changes.

Since we went through that unemployment thing this fall and winter, I haven't bought the little angel any new clothes since the beginning of the school year. She has a penchant for wearing the same thing over and over, and lately she's been looking like Little Orphan Annie with holes in her leggings. All this forced me to do what I loathe doing, which is digging through all her clothes figuring out what to donate, what to give away and what to toss before I go buy her some leggings that don't look like they belong to the cast of Les Misérables.

While she was in the shower the other night, I attacked her dresser and closet. She walked in just as I was putting a purple shirt in the paper grocery sack filled with hand-me-down play clothes for the littler neighbor girl.

And she burst into tears.

???

"You can't give away the purple shirt," she wailed.

"But why not?"

"It's what I was wearing the day Petunia died."

And then I felt tears spring to my eyes, too.

"Well, then, of course we can't give it away. But it doesn't fit. Hmm."

The little angel has been working hard on the Hoggin Craft dynasty. I thought I'd share some pictures of the piggy banks because they are so hilarious. Because the little angel kept three old Harry & David boxes full of every piece of crap plastic she's ever received, we have lots of junk to glue to pigs now.

This is the pig for the jeweler's granddaughter. Notice the accessories. I didn't do any of this except the hot glue.

The little girl's name starts with an "E."

This is the travel pic commissioned by my parents. It's a medium-sized pig. I ended up ordering 24 of the three-inch size from Oriental Trading Company, because it's more in line with both her attention span and people's wallets (not to mention the silent partner's investment). The itsy ones are going to be themed or custom designed and $5 each. I figure she'll get a bunch done by the garage sale and make a kid killing. (Or at least sell a few to people who aren't related to us.)

The artist at work. Tiny has moved down to do security.

The little angel got a book over the holiday break on money management. I thought it was going to be a book about budgeting and saving and all that good eight-year-old stuff, but no, it was a book on MAKING money.

The little angel whipped up a business plan. She was going to sell something. She was talking margins. I remembered the failed craft sales she and the neighbor girl had on our neighborhood's garage sale weekend in the past. The times they tried to sell complete strangers used ribbon for $1. I told her if she was going to sell something, it had to be something GOOD. Something useful. Something one might want to own even if it were not made with her hands. She suggested piggy banks.

And so Hoggin Crafts was born. Here is her logo. She made it herself on the Mac, not that you could tell!

I did offer to be her silent partner. I fronted her seven piggy banks, which I bought at Hobby Lobby. She is customizing them. We were at the jewelry store where I bought my replacement wedding ring getting it ionized or whatever it is you do to make white gold match platinum again (and if you did not know you could do this, it totally rocks, and if you ever buy white gold you should get them to throw this service in every six months for free) and the jeweler started telling us about her 16-month-old granddaughter who was enamored with ... you guessed it! PIGGY BANKS. The little angel got her business card and started designing the custom piggy bank that afternoon. Here is the plan.

The pig saying "oink" is  her trademark. It goes on the stoppers on the pigs' bellies. She's about 3/4 of the way done with the pig pictured above and has taken four more orders, all from extended family. I have no intention of starting an Etsy store, but if anyone wants a custom-designed pig, let me know. The 3-inch-ish size pigs are $8. I'm happy she's developing these entrepreneurial skills now, because by the time she goes to college, a gallon of gas will cost ten whiffle-wind credits, and that will be just chaos.