Yay For The Haisley Manatees!
Or how about the Haisley Tigers? Mouse’s first grade class situation would take a whole ‘nother entry, probably best filed under “rants,” and I can’t think of any reason for going in that direction today. But I remember one day when there was some sort of vote about naming the class. Or maybe it was just Mouse’s table being named. I don’t really remember the details but Mouse came home disappointed because her idea, “The Haisley Manatees,” was voted down by a majority of students who favored “The Haisley Tigers.”
Not that there’s anything wrong with tigers. I don’t think Mouse has ever met an aminal she didn’t like, with the possible exception of the “bad aminal” that used to frequently glue her into her bed back in the day. But I’m gonna guess that manatees are cuter and more interesting than tigers and Mouse has actually *met* a manatee. His name is Snooty and it turns out he is still alive! He lives in an aquarium in the South Florida Museum in Bradenton, Florida, and we met him when we were down there visiting Grandpa Garth and Grandma Sally a long time ago. I think I enjoyed the South Florida Museum a lot more than Disney World, where I got sick. I recovered quickly and y’all do *not* wanna know!
For quite a while after that trip to Florida, everything was manatee around here. Well maybe that’s not *quite* accurate. There were still mice and frogs and ostriches and cockroaches and venus fly traps and, well, I could go on forever. But manatees became a favorite. One time the GG made aminal faces on some easter eggs and one of them somehow got named “Snooty,” which I could never quite understand because it didn’t look any more like a manatee to me than any of the other easter egg faces. But boy was he in trouble when he accidentally gave the egg away. “You gave Snooty away!” I hope nobody ate that egg. It had sat on a shelf in the back room for a couple months (or years?). Sometimes I can’t even believe some of the stuff that happens around here. 🙄
What brought up that little bit of nostalgia was this story about Marvin the manatee, who managed to swim all the way up the Atlantic coast to Cape Cod. I hope he makes it home.
And while I’m off on tangents, Haisley School itself is now home to The Haisley Huskies. It used to be the home of The Haisley Hawks but that was squelched by a former principal, in spite of the fact that the school was home to an extensive collection of stuffed hawks and owls and things. Birds of prey don’t make appropriate mascots for our young students, you know, even though those stuffed birds of prey were collected by an even earlier principal. I guess that was kind of recursive, I know some of y’all are scratching your heads, “Whaaaaa?” Sayonara!