My Daughter Killed Little Foot's Mom

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:

http://nedroid.com/2011/09/hotel/

(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).