The little men who live in your stomach

/ Shane / Leave a comment

I don’t remember how this first came about, but we have somehow stumbled upon a very effective technique to get Evie to eat things she might not otherwise eat.

The story goes that there are little men in your tummy who take the materials you send down to them and use them to build things, which help you grow big and strong. For example, if you send down broccoli, they might make trees to line the roads. If you send down some tomatoes, they might add apples into the trees. Milk might turn into clouds or little white bunnies.

Dessert doesn’t help you grow big and strong of course, so the builders can’t use that for materials. However, it’s still okay to eat dessert because when you send some down, the little men take a break, sit down and enjoy their dessert.

This works great as long as you can keep thinking of things that the little men can build. If you keep building firetrucks, red is going to stop being interesting. This is harder than you think, especially when you have to play this game day after day after day. (I had to make a rule that I would only be a little man during meal times) You know things are getting desperate when white materials are being turned into things like toilets and toilet paper.

The other problem is that, the first time I was a little man in her stomach, I instinctively used the fake I’m-shouting-from-a-long-ways-away-but-I’m-actually-quieting-my-voice voice, as if I were shouting up to her from down in the pit of her stomach. Of course that became the default little man voice, and she gets upset if I forget and talk like a regular person.

So the good news is that we can get her to eat almost anything. The bad news is that dinner time just became a high pressure situation for me!

Sharktopus!

/ Shane / 1 Comment

My brother just informed me that there is a new Syfy original picture entitled Sharktopus. At the risk of over explaining the title, that is a shark genetically crossed with an octopus to create the ultimate killing machine. This may come as a surprise, but the scientists were not able to maintain control.

For those of you who don’t have the awesomesauce to sit through the trailer, here’s a model of the rediculous:

Why did I have to get rid of satellite??

Yes, the sharktopus can grab you from land with his tentacles, but if that’s not enough, he can also crawl out onto the land to eat you. He also appears to be gigantic, as if he needed another scary aspect. The director was like, “Hmm, he’s scary, but he’s not *that* scary. What if sharktopus was 10 times the size of a regular shark!”

And the sharktopus was created to fight pirates in Somalia! Aside from that obviously being a stupid premise, I think we need a prequel movie: Sharktopus vs. Pirates! (in 3D of course). Maybe we can have the sharktopus transported back in time so it can fight pirates that are on conventional pirate ships, rather than the Somali kind. They’d be lining up around the block to get into the theater.

Well, first things first, somebody watch Sharktopus on Syfy and let me know how it goes.

She’s trying to make me cry

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Parents worry about things that kids just don’t think about. “Am I making the right decisions for my child?” or “Am I raising this kid right?” Being a parent involves a lot of uncertainty. I don’t know if children pick up on this, and thus know the weak points to prod at, or if they just ask so many questions that some of them are bound to hit below the belt.

For example, one thing on my mind a lot is the fact that raising our kids in Chicago, they are having a much different childhood than Sara or I had. In particular, we yearn for some sort of yard where the kids could go out and play.

Evie: “This is silly, but for the house, for my birthday, I wanna ask for a yard.”

Ouch.

However, lately it seems like Evie has been going for the jugular. It really seems like she’s going out of the way to try to make us cry.

Evie: “When I die, I want to bring mommy with me.”

Evie: “When I die, I want to die close to the house. Can you make me die close to the house?”
Sara: “Why do you want to die close to the house?”
Evie: “So I can see you again”

Evie: “When I die, will you let me take Oliver with me?”

Cue daddy with a lone tear dripping from his giant cartoon eyes while his bottom lip starts quivering.

She hasn’t really had any personal experience with death yet, but I assume that thinking about death probably normal at her age. It’s not like she thinks about it all day, but it does come up probably every other day or so.

The thing is, you just never want to think about death in conjunction with your child. This seems pretty obvious, but I can definitely say that, although you might think you understand, its something that you can’t really know until you have a child. How absolutely terrifying it is. And also strange to think, “I guess that means my parents felt that way about me too.”

Well, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these things, since Evie keeps bringing it up!

Myq Kaplan on Last Comic Standing

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One of my favorite comedians Myq Kaplan is currently a finalist on Last Comic Standing.

If you’re a careful reader of the blog, you will remember him from my “Dr. Show Show” post about a month ago. However, you may not remember that I actually broke the Myq Kaplan story more than a year ago.

Anyway, he’s cracked the top 10 and now they’re into the part of the show where the audience can vote. So, if you’re into that kind of thing, I think you should go with Myq (despite that first name!) I don’t want him to get so depressed that I have to page Dr. Dontkillyourself.

Mondays @ 8 Central.