Dog Heads on Elephant Bodies

Oh my stinking word!  I am so excited right now!

No, I'm not engaged.  Or dating.  Nor have I found out a guy has interest in me.  And, no, the Doctor still has not come to take me on wild adventures throughout all of time and space.  Neither has Sherlock texted me saying to come if convenient, and if inconvenient, come anyway.  And, sadly, I'm still waiting for Jack Sparrow to ask me to help him commandeer a ship.  I've been waiting even longer for my closet to lead to Narnia and even longer than that to crawl into a hedge and land on top of a Totoro.

But there's one thing I have waited for even longer than any of the above.  The day I can publicly prove that I WAS RIGHT at Noah's Ark Preschool, and everyone who wouldn't play with me was WRONG!

Okay, so three-year-olds at first glance look like these cute little cuddly bundles of joy, right?  I mean, they're so happy all the time, playing their little games without a care in the world.  Oh let me tell you, even at that age, they have perceived notions of the world, and if one little girl dares to mess with that perceived notion, she will not get to play with the cool kids or go in the cool places.

Off to my first day of school, age 3

Lalalala, first day of school...age three!  Woo hoo, so exciting!  I'm going to make new friends and have fun!  YAY!  Oh, what's this?  Toy animals you can put together?  Yes, please!  I love animals!

Imagine a basket full of these things

Everybody sing (to the tune of "Dry Bones"):  "The red dog head goes on the...red legs...the red legs go on the...blue body...the blue body goes on the...red legs...the red legs go on the...yellow tail."  Oh yes, little Katrina has built something awesome.

See the back one?  That's exactly what I'd built.

Well, guess who couldn't be happier with what she built?  That's right, little three-year-old me!  The dog was promptly named Genevieve from the Madeline books (huge Madeline fan as a kid--the books, the movies, the doll, everything).

This is what awesome looks like.

And I built her every single day I was at preschool.  First thing.  Important things first, you know, take off coat and stuff, and then immediately run to the basket of animal parts and put together Genevieve because every day at the end of playtime, someone would take her apart.  I wouldn't take her apart.  I'd put her away whole.  Don't ask how quickly the other kids picked up on this.  It was pretty stinking quickly.  And they would show me Genevieve and say, "I'm taking Genevieve apart now!" which would emotionally distress me.

Actually, the whole Genevieve thing was a big of an emotional distress.  Like I said, some kids just aren't accepting of those of us who are unique and different.  See, that awesome blue middle...was an elephant middle.  And you CANNOT HAVE A DOG WITH AN ELEPHANT MIDDLE!  Don't you get it, Katrina?  YOU CAN'T DO THAT!  And until you put a dog middle on your dog, you can't play with us.  You can't sit in the clubhouse under the slide.  You're stuck putting together puzzles and playing with the kids who actually don't mind.  Thank you forever to kids like Jeremy, Peter, Ricky, Todd, Willem, and others who were never too cool for me...even if Jeremy did make a big deal over taking apart Genevieve.  He loses points for that.  And, yes, everyone in that list was boys.  Most of the "This is the way it is" kids were girls.  One day, they even stole Willem away from me to make me put my dog the right way.  Oddly enough, taking my best friend into their group but not me wasn't even big enough motivation.

Me and my best friend Willem; we had to stop eating in order to have our picture taken; I don't have chubby cheeks...that's a mouth full of wafer

Yeah, talk about a weird child.  Take my best friend from me, and I still wouldn't conform to some societal norm.  Kind of like college.  I mean, a societal norm would have been to remove my key chain collection from my backpack after about the sixteenth person was like, "Clank, clank, clank."  Yeah, being able to put up with that began back at Noah's Ark Preschool.

But then you know what I found out today?  Okay, so that's not my own picture of Genevieve up there.  You see, the year I was at Noah's Ark was it's last year, so I got to take Genevieve home with me.  Two years later, Mom and Dad sold her at our garage sale, even though I tried to take her back and hide her so she'd never get sold.  But if that's not my picture of Genevieve...

SOMEONE ELSE OUT THERE THINKS LIKE ME!
 

I'm not alone in this world!  Someone else out there--who OWNS AN ELEPHANT HEAD--that means they could have the elephant body with the right head--PUTS THE ELEPHANT BODY ON THE DOG!  Let's look at that picture one more time, shall we?

Elephant body on a dog--random person on Internet, you are winning at life

AH, the sweet satisfaction after nineteen long years that YOU are not the only one in this world who puts elephant bodies on dogs.  This makes me happier than a tornado in a trailer park.  I could just burst out singing.

"The hills are alive, with the sound of AWESOME!"

And, if perchance, you are reading this, and you attended Noah's Ark Preschool in Racine, Wisconsin, during the 1993-1994 school year...NOTHING WAS WRONG WITH ME!