The night was winding down. Dishes were washed, showers were taken, lunches were made (we shower and pack lunches the night before), and homework was checked. I walked back through the house, ready to return to working in my office, and I did my nightly perimeter check, shutting off lights and checking doors. A bunch of Lego and string cheese wrappers greeted me in the living room.

“Nigel,” I said as I walked by his room, “why haven’t you picked up your stuff in the living room yet?”

His response: “Can’t you see I’m making a Chimera?”

Some of you may recall about two months ago when Nigel removed the stuffing of several of his stuffed animals and collected the stuffing in a bag with the plan of making something else at a later date. I figured that this bag of stuffing, like many of his well-intentioned projects, would sit around forever and nothing would actually ever come of it. Over Winter Break, while he was at his dad’s house, I considered getting rid of it before he spread it all over the floor. His room is messy enough already. But for some reason I didn’t throw out the bag of stuffing.

And as I entered his room that night to try to ascertain what the hell he was doing, I saw the bag of stuffing on the floor, and the stuffing was profusely billowing out of it. Nigel was on his bed with one of his stuffed animal carcasses in one hand and a threaded needle in the other. He was sewing.

Nigel has done some sewing before, since a few years ago I taught him how to sew his Boy Scout patches onto his uniform. He has also sewn “bear hands” (gloves made from a previously stuffed bear) of his own design, and a few other minor projects. But his Chimera was quite an undertaking. He combined the body of a lion with a wolf’s head coming out of the back and an eagle’s head coming out of the chest, sewed them together, and then restuffed the body. A close look at the finished creature:

 And the proud creator:

Maddy, I’m sending him your way.