I thought I'd start out with a word of caution about babies that are teething. Tori is 7 months old now and has two of her bottom front teeth and is about to get the two top teeth as well. We've learned through painful experience that although she may be tiny, she is still a human, and humans are still meat eaters, and getting bit by one is not fun.
Several times while I've been feeding her she has ever-so-adorably grabbed my finger, stuffed it in her mouth, and bitten it. Hard. At first I thought I'd be clever and put my finger in with the nail pointing towards her teeth, thereby protecting the fleshy pad of my finger. My plan was promptly foiled as Tori slid her teeth down the low-friction surface of my fingernail and buried them in the cuticle, which it turns out is a lot more sensitive than the pad of the fingertip.
Faced with this display of cunning, ruthlessness, and hunger, I realized with creeping horror that my daughter is, in fact, a sharp tooth.
Like my last post, the topic of today's post was chosen by one of our friends. At the insistence of our friend Edith, our twin topics are dinosaurs and hippos. Since I really can't think of a good segue from one to the other, I'm going to mask it by rather inelegantly and abruptly switching by means of this awesome poster:
Unfortunately it's not for a real movie, it's just a parody of Battleship.
Other hippo related trivia: last year Edith (the friend who picked the topic of today's post, and one of the two who introduced Jess and I) was wearing a tutu and gray tights for Halloween. I couldn't tell what she was supposed to be until Jessica walked up and said "Omigosh you're a hippo in a tutu. That's awesome!" Apparently I need to watch Fantasia more often. I should point out that the word "hippo" has become a term of endearment for those in our circle of friends, and we call our friend who's a gluten-intolerant 100 pound girl a "fat hippo" more often than we do our other friend who's a 300 pound guy. (PS - why did you both move away?)
The only other things I can think to say about hippos is that I miss the show "Animaniacs", which had a segment called "The Hip Hippos". At least as catchy is the Flight of the Concords song about the Hip-Hop-apotamus (his lyrics are bottomless) vs the Rhyme-noceros. Finally, if any of you need incentive to read the "Beyonders" series of books by Brandon Mull, I'd strongly encourage you to pick it up, as it starts with a boy travelling to another world when he gets swallowed by a hippo at the local zoo.
Lest you think that we're done talking about the Wheel of Time, we decided to celebrate my completion of the series by making Wheel of Time themed cookies! Pictured below are our artistic interpretations of the 7 seals of the Dark One's prison, a few chocolate Horns of Valere, some cream cheese frosted fox-head ter'angreal, some wolves, and a few copies of the dragon banner (Jess drew some really awesome dragons on them and I got in trouble for frosting over them until Jess realized she could just lick the frosting off when she ate them). We also have a couple great serpent rings, some dragon's fangs, and a few flames of Tar Valon. Tori ate the only copy of Callandor the crystal sword that didn't get burned. It took all evening Friday to bake them and most of Saturday to frost them. I know the Horn of Valere should be golden and that a couple of the other colors are off, but by the time we were actually frosting them I was pretty much ready to be done with the whole project and didn't feel like making any more colors of frosting.
Before frosting (you can kind of see the awesome dragons Jess drew on the flag)
After frosting - Chocolate isn't black, but it's the closest we could get without using enough food coloring to make the cookies turn bitter.
If you're wondering whether reading the series was worth it, the answer is yes. The first four and the last four were the best, and the other books were really epic about half the time, but with a lot of slower moments where they're setting up some of the awesomeness of the later books. As for the final book, it was almost more epic than I could stand. Jess can attest to the fact that I spent a lot of the last week raging against Robert Jordan for putting in a lot of moments like (SPOILER ALERT!) when Fred Weasley dies in Harry Potter or when Aerith dies in Final Fantasy 7. The ending was really satisfying and wrapped up what it needed to while at the same time leaving the story open so you feel like the characters' lives will keep going and they'll still have other adventures outside the main story.
Now that I'm done with the Wheel of Time I'm going to spend some time catching up on homework, then I'll need to find some new awesome books to occupy my time. If you have any ideas I'd love to hear about them in the comments.
Speaking of fantasy series: some of you may know that we refer to our basement as "Narnia" since the door to the stairs looks like it just leads to a closet, but really there's this whole world down there, and it's a magical place because the elliptical, the XBox, and the TV are down there. Well, whenever I think of our basement I think of this webcomic:
(For those of you not familiar with Nedroid Comics I also recommend reading anything tagged with "Party Cat" or "Dinosaur Warlock". It's a very random kind of humor, but it's clean and I usually find it pretty hilarious, though you'll want to have the adblock browser extension running since sometimes the ads on the sides and top of the webpage are kind of questionable).
So this is the first time I've ever written a blog, woohoo!!! Sorry if I'm not as funny as Kevin, but moving on: As Kevin said, we're currently on shoes! I have to say you probably wouldn't know it when you met me but I have a special place in my heart for shoes, especially boots, heels and Converse. Boots are one of the few reasons that I look forward to winter. And Converse are just plain awesome.
Another reason I love shoes is it's the one place in which my being short comes in handy. I wear a size 6 - 7 in women's sizes which means around a 4 or 5 in men's sizes; this means that I can often fit both adult shoes and kid shoes which means I have a lot more selection that I can choose from :) So when we went to Journey's the other night looking for shoes for my Valentine's Day gift (cause my husband is awesome) I knew that if I wasn't definitely sold on the things in Journey's we could always go try Journey's Kids! However, I ended up with the shoes I first noticed and actually only tried on one pair. Wonder of Wonders, Miracle of Miracles!!! This never happens because either they don't fit or I'm not sure about how they look; however, as you can see, these were apparently meant to be mine cause they have Wonder Woman on them, they fit really well, and the colors work really well with most of what I wear (jeans and a T-shirt usually.)
Also, they match the dinner plate I made at Color Me Mine:
Now I have to talk a little about other shoes. There are some shoes that only work with certain clothes and at certain times and seasons. For instance: even though I really like heels they are not the most practical shoes to wear sometimes, but you look good in them! The biggest exception to this is when it's icy and/or snowy outside, then you just look ridiculous as you fall all over yourself; just do yourself and everyone else a favor and don't. It is for this reason that I generally like boots a bit more; the ones I like tend to be a little more comfortable than heels and yet they look nice too. I may love shoes but I'm much too practical to not realize that most shoes need to be somewhat functional and you have to be able to wear them for at least a few hours. (Note from Kevin: Jess may be practical, but that doesn't mean I haven't seen her salivate over boots with heels on multiple occasions). However, I must point out that not all shoes that CAN be worn for a long period of time SHOULD be worn for a long time and not all boots look good; far from it.
No offense to anyone out there who thinks otherwise, but Ugg boots are one of the worst fashion mistakes EVER! I've always wondered if the designers realized what they did when they named them (Ugg...does that stand for ugly?) I have no problem with them at home....where no one can see you! However, these should not be worn out in public because they may be comfy but they don't really look good with anything (unless you are a baby; that's completely different because babies can get away with anything.)
(The black bar was added to protect the identity of our secret agent.)
The biggest problem with Ugg boots is they are generally worn with sweat pants and a hoody and they make you look like you just got out of bed and threw on some shoes and left the house. NOOOOOO!!! (By the way, that was a link. You need to click it for this blog post to take its full, awesome effect).
Why would you do this?! We've all been there: you're late cause your alarm clock didn't go off so you're going to be late (or more likely your alarm did go off and you just kept pushing the snooze button.) However, this does not mean you should just go in your pajamas no matter what you're late for (unless it's a final exam, and then no one cares cause they're too busy trying to remember all the stuff they crammed in their heads at the last minute.)
Now, I have to admit that your shoes can't always look good. There are times when you have to go with practicality over fashion: like when you're hiking or working in the garden or working on the farm. It's at these times that the fashionable ones are those who were smart enough to wear something that won't give them blisters. I've learned this the hard way. Growing up, my family went camping and hiking quite often. When we would go hiking, my Dad always wore hiking boots and the most hideous socks I'd ever seen; they were thick wool socks that came to his knees and were red and a dark, baby-poop green (actually he wore some pretty hideous things when we weren't hiking too, like socks with his sandals.) However, I really didn't like socks that were much taller than the no-show socks, so when we would go hiking often my tennis shoes would rub the back of my foot off since my socks would slide down below the edges of the shoe. You see, we didn't do the wimpy 10 min trails; when we went hiking we started around sun-up and went until sometime in the late afternoon, which was hard stuff for us city kids.
Funny story of one of our hiking adventures: one summer my family went to the Sandia Mountains during our yearly summer trip. My parent's chose this particular place for several reasons but the one I remember was it has one of the longest tramway stretches in the world (it's 3rd according to Wikipedia.) We all wanted to ride it but it's rather expensive, especially since we have a rather large family so we all talked about it and decided that we'd ride the Tram up and then we'd hike back down. We talked to a guy at the top and he said that people definitely did it and that it wasn't too bad a hike "Only 9, maybe 10, miles" is what I remember him saying.....yeah, you remember Kevin's comment about people in Franca, Brazil having a different interpretation of distance? Well we're pretty sure this guy had some of the very same issues.
Well, we get on the tram and leave the docking station and immediately my younger siblings start freaking out. As you can see from pics like the one above, the cable car is rather large and it hangs from the cable several hundred feet in the air and when it stops (which it did so that technicians could get out and do some maintenance work) the whole thing sways. It felt rather precarious; kind-of like a roller coaster in slow motion only you're standing up and there's no seats-belts, or seats. We had someone take a picture for us and in the picture my little brother is smiling (he's pretty photogenic) but his hands are together like he's praying with every fiber of his soul that we not die. The whole way up we were trying to convince the 2 youngest to come look out the window but they just sat huddled in the middle of the car whimpering; I felt a little bad but that didn't stop me from laughing a bit to myself. And so began our adventures.
We got to the top and looked around at the museum/shop thing but we didn't stay too long because I don't remember being super interested and it was getting later in the day. We found the trail and started down. We've been on some pretty nerve-wracking trails but I think this one takes the cake for all of the ones I've been on. The trail wasn't much of a trail; it was only about a foot to maybe 2 feet wide path and on the one side was a rock wall, at times it was just a cliff who's top was somewhere in the clouds above us. The most terrifying part was the other side though; for the first few hours of our hike the other side of the trail just dropped off and we were high enough up in the mountains that there were clouds below us so you couldn't see much more than 10 feet down! As soon as we started hiking, my younger siblings begin to cry and they just sat down and wouldn't move for fear of falling off the mountain. They also wouldn't go back up either because they knew that just means riding on the cable car of death. (Another note from Kevin: if you're a fan of the Fray you should turn on the song "Cable Car" as you read this. Here's a link:.)
We eventually convinced them that they had to start moving or we were going to pick them up and carry them down (at least that's what I remember telling them, if it had really came down to it I don't think anyone would have been carried cause it was hard enough just keeping our own feet on the trail.) So we slowly began to make our descent. The best part being the fact that my 2 youngest siblings went the first mile or more on their rear ends! They were so terrified that they wouldn't let anyone touch them, not even my Mom.
We finally made to a more level part of the mountain and were down below the clouds and I remember thinking "Finally! Now we're getting somewhere!" Well we hiked for the rest of the afternoon and got to the bottom of the mountain and couldn't figure out where we were. The trail we found on the map followed the one we were on somewhat when we were on the mountain but it was definitely not the same one at the bottom. The parking lot was nowhere to be seen and the terrain was very hilly. So we started walking toward the highway and toward where we figured the parking lot was and we ended up in these hilly fields at the back of a neighborhood. I remember thinking that it seemed really creepy because the houses seemed deserted because the whole time we walked by them I never saw a single person outside of my family. Not to mention the fact that driving to the park, I hadn't even realized there was anything but mountains and grass anywhere near the mountain. But we eventually found this trail that ran along the backs of these houses, probably created by other hikers that got lost on the way down the mountain like us, and we walked......and walked some more, but unlike pioneer children I don't remember doing much singing. By this time we were all beyond sore and it hurt to move so we were all hoping and silently praying that the parking lot would be just over the next hill top.
After at least another hour, we finally found the edge of the parking lot. I could practically hear the Hallelujah choirs singing. After trudging through the parking lot (think of zombies', hobbling and groaning) we crawled into the car and drove back to where we were staying. I remember that it hurt just sitting in the car and getting jostled by the van's movement as it drove down the highway. But we were all laughing and smiling on that drive back, just happy that we made it off the mountain alive. When all was said and done we figured the whole hike was probably closer to 15 (long) miles of rocky, hilly, really beautiful terrain, not the "9 or 10 miles" we'd been told at the top.
Our friend Melinda requested that we have a post about shoes. I figure that's as good a starting point as any. First, I'll start with my take on shoes, then I'll give Jessica, who's much more of an expert on the subject, a chance to comment. That may turn into one or several posts, depending on whether we feel like it.
First of all, anyone who's known me for very long knows that one of my favorite things to joke about is the fascination women have with shoes. I suppose it's fitting, therefore, that I married a woman who ranks shoes somewhere between chocolate and oxygen on her list of necessities for life. I should have seen this coming when I was on my mission and I got transferred to the shoe capital of South America: Franca, SP, Brazil. Many of the people we visited and taught worked in the city's many shoe factories so during my time there I accumulated enough shoes to spell out the name of the city:
I was surprised to learn that a pair of dress shoes I'd purchased in the US from an ROTC surplus store (before I ever knew I'd be going to Brazil) had actually had the soles manufactured in Franca. It was also in Franca that I had one of my most exciting (read: hot, boring, and tiresome) shoe-related adventures. At the time I was living in a duplex with three other missionaries, and we decided to use one of our days off to visit the downtown shopping area. Our plans were cemented when some locals told us that the largest shoes-only shopping center in Latin America and possibly the world: "O Shopping do Calcado", was a few minutes walk from the downtown bus station. (As an explanation for our readers who don't speak Portuguese: "shopping" is the word Brazilians use to refer to what most gringos would call a mall. From what I could tell they used to call them "shopping centers" because that's probably what most of them found in dictionaries or English textbooks, similar to the way a billboard is called an "outdoor" instead of an "outdoor advertisement", although they pronounce the words "SHOW-ping" and "OUCHY-dor", respectively). But I'm rambling about etymology when I should be writing about shoes. So there we were, the four of us, headed to the big shoe mall. Unfortunately, when we got off the bus, the mall was nowhere in sight. Rather than give up, we flagged down a few passers-by who informed us that it was just a ways up the street and that we couldn't miss it. So we began walking, and kept walking for about an hour and fifteen minutes, before finally arriving at our long-sought Shoe Shangri-la (or Mocassin Mecca if you prefer). Upon arrival we were greeted with a sight that has graced the eyes of many a shoe-seeking traveler: the four shoes of the apocalypse. Outside the mall, at each of the four corners of the building, stand four big shoe statues, each with a different theme. By now being heavily affected by heat exhaustion, we decided to photograph ourselves capering around the butterfly-themed one.
I did wind up buying some pretty cool leather tennis shoes there, and I was very sad when, a few months after my return to the states, I noticed them starting to crack at the edges. On nice days I still dig them out and walk around in them, remembering our epic journey. Lesson learned: when someone from Franca tells you that something is "logo ali", don't take them at their word. Apparently that doesn't mean "right there" like it does everywhere else in Brazil.
Having talked a lot about my own shoe experiences I'll return to describing my observations about my wife's outlook on shoes. I figure that when our kids get older it won’t be as hard to tell them “no” when they ask for a toy or video game or treat that they really, really want, since I get to practice that skill whenever Jessica and I walk past a shoe store. I have to be especially delicate about it because my wife has a much greater ability to make me regret it than a small child does. I think part of it is Jessica’s tiny feet. She has a lot of options because her feet are small enough to bridge the gap between large children’s shoes and small adult shoes (the one time I was ready to cave when she wanted new shoes was one time in Wal-Mart when we saw a pair of children’s size Iron Man boots, but unfortunately they were just a little too small for Jess).
That being said, it’s only fair to point out that Jessica does have one pair of shoes that merit immediate respect. I'm referring, of course, to her Batman Converse All-Stars. I don't have much to say about these as they kind of speak for themselves, but I will point out that they're non-symmetric - each shoe shows a different set of scenes. That pair of shoes is awesome enough to keep me from making fun of the size and breadth of Jessica's shoe collection (most of the time anyway - old habits die hard).
Since I doubt that a few paragraphs will satisfy our readers' burning desire for shoe-related blogging, I'm going to see if I can talk Jessica into doing a more expanded post about shoes.
I'd like to round out the post with a bit of artwork (it seems like all our posts so far grow in image density towards the end of the post, almost like we're running out of interesting things to say and have to hold your attention with funny pictures). Today's artwork comes courtesy of the Sketchbook Express app for iPad and iPhone, and at the low low price of free it's definitely worth taking a look at. Among other things, you can import images from your device's photo library and start doodling funny stuff on them, such as what would happen if the Galactic Empire invaded Rio de Janeiro:
When Jess was pregnant with Tori and we still didn't know what gender the baby would be we started passing the time on Sunday afternoons and road trips by drawing pictures of the adventures our child would have as an adult (or if you're a fan of YA literature then they would have the adventures as an awkward pre-teen discovering their own identity at the same time they're dealing with the pressures of junior high school,
acne, and parents who just don't understand). This was all inspired in part by the efforts of our friends to find a suitable name to use when referring to our unborn child. Rejected candidates included "Cletus the Fetus" and "Horseface" (pronounced hor-SEF-uh-see). As you can see from the title of this post, the name that stuck through most of the pregnancy was "Spock", which, despite being the name of a male Vulcan, was clearly the logical choice.
We tried to keep the drawings as ambiguous as possible with reference to age and gender to account for all possibilities, but it's kind of obvious in this image that I was expecting a son:
For the next image I did a better job making it apply if we had either a boy or a girl.
We now have two octopus bath toys for Tori to practice on in case this picture ever comes true. Unfortunately the Green-Goblin glider hasn't yet become commercially available, but I'm assuming that'll come with her ninja-secret-agent-astronaut training.
Once Tori was born we adapted the artwork slightly. While I'm still confident she'll grow up to hunt dinosaurs and fight giant mutant cephalopods, the following image reflects her current personality a little better:
Recognize that unicorn? I was able to recycle the image after using it in my now famous painting "My Little Pony fights a Charizard":
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