My Baby Is Rocket Powered

This evening in a fit of who-knows-I’ve-tried-everything-else, I swaddled Molly using a blanket which is really a bit too small for her. But eventually (and I do mean eventually) she fell asleep — probably from lack of oxygen due to the really tight swaddling. After rocking her for another 5 minutes — hey, what’s five minutes after spending 45 with earplugs jammed in my ears while I rocked her and tried to soothe her — I decided she’d really fallen asleep.

This was around 7 PM.

Just now, Anna went into Molly’s room to discover she had somehow wriggled out of the blanket — without disturbing the wrap — and was fussing around eager to be fed. So while Anna got ready to feed our little bundle of lungs, I took the opportunity to change her.

That’s when Molly let out the most sonorous fart I’ve ever heard.

I propose that Molly didn’t really wriggle her way out of the swaddle; instead, she propelled herself out with a few explosive bursts.

Why Change

Perhaps you know that I drink tea. Lots of tea. Between 10 and 20 cups of tea each day (actually that’s really 4-9 mugs of tea, but it takes 10 to 20 cups of water).

So it’s safe to say I’m fairly familiar with the packaging for Twinings English Breakfast Tea. But just the other day I noticed that Twinings had changed the wrapper for the tea bags. What sort of thinking motivates changes like this?

Now you may be thinking that Twinings is attempting to lure the hip-hop teenager crowd into dens of tea-drinking iniquity by embracing a more edgy packaging, but the general branding has stayed exactly the same. Twinings just made the wrapper for the tea bags feel chimpier.

The tag that hangs out of the pot is smaller. The paper wrapper feels more like plastic and the comfortable flap is gone — replaced with a squared-off fold of paper.

Just not a satisfying change.

More Nicknames Than A Mobster Convention

Poor Molly! She was born into a family of wackos. There is no better evidence (that we can offer without truly incriminating ourselves) than the nicknames we have given our daughter.

Here are some examples:

• The Bean
• The Beanster
• The Sea Monkey
• The Microsite (courtesy of Papou, aka Evan)
• Chewy aka Chewbacca, Wookie (she gnaws on nearly anything)
• Spewy (she drools and occasionally regurgitates)
• Poopsie (due to her exceedingly full diapers)
• Molly Poopins or just Poopins
• Pota-toh, Sweet Potato, Pota-tah, Tater Tot
• Screechy
• Gamera (or really, any critter from the Godzilla movies)
• One-eyed drunken pirate

I am certain there are (and will be) more in the future. Feel free to post your ideas- we’ll most likely use them at one point or another. But keep it clean folks!