Better than the face of Jesus on toast

Since it’s casual Friday, I thought I’d take this opportunity to share some funny thoughts and sightings with you. I shared my son’s amazing discovery earlier this week on my Every Day I See a Cow blog, but what good does it do you if you’re not a subscriber? So here we go…

I like to see myself as a creative person. I write, I draw, I paint, I make things with my hands, and as a the queen of klutz I sometimes manage to create art out of my misadventures (remember the yogurt bunny I made almost a year ago?). On the carpet of course, not the easier-to-clean tile.

Yogurt bunny

I like to look at clouds in the sky and see funny shapes. Sometimes I even manage to take pictures of them.

Elephant cloud

For those of you who can’t see it, this cloud is shaped like an elephant head. Yes, it is! Lots of spring clouds in San Diego happen to take the shape of elephants, with long trunks. I’m not sure why but I’m not complaining!

My kids seem to take after my creative side, especially when it comes to creating art with food. Their favorite art supplies? Tomato sauce and blueberries, of course. They always manage to create permanent stains masterpieces on their clothing when eating painting with them. Just kidding. My oldest drew his first fruit bowl a couple of months ago, before he turned five. This was a completely unsolicited creation that blew my mind away. You can guess the kid is half-French (ha!). I’d like to add he’s a fan of Paul Cézanne but I don’t believe he saw any of the famous painter’s fruit bowl masterpieces before he drew this one.

Children's artwork - fruit bowl

Something wonderful about my son is that he’s highly observant, able to notice things about his surroundings most kids and adults would never see, even if you pointed them in the right direction. Earlier this week, he made his most amazing discovery yet. Can you tell I’m beaming with pride? Wait till you see what it is. We stopped by Panda Express for lunch and at my kids’ request, one of the items we ordered was orange chicken. I’m not sure about the nutritional value of our choice, but the sweet tangy taste is irresistible.

Halfway through our meal, my oldest blurted out: There’s a pig on my plate! I felt the urge to correct him right away, tell him he was eating chicken. But he seemed so insistent to show me, I had to look. So I turned his plate my way and that’s when my jaw dropped. There was a darn pig on his plate, made out of orange chicken. Here it is, in all of its cuteness!

Orange chicken pig at Panda Express

You may disagree but I think it resembles a pig a lot more than all of the Jesus faces people claim they see on their toast and sell on ebay for a fortune. Unfortunately I don’t believe there’s any story about a holy pig anywhere so this pig wouldn’t have been our “get-rich-quick” scheme. So we did the next best thing. We ate it and it tasted delicious!

Jigsaw puzzles and genetics: nature versus nurture

Children and jisaw puzzles

I’ve been pondering this question for a while, so if you have children, I’d love you to share your input. Do you think most of our talents are inherited through our parents’ genes, or are they acquired through nurturing and practice?

Here’s a perfect example of this issue at our house:

- I (the mother) have always loved doing jigsaw puzzles since I was a little kid. If I had lots of time to do anything I want, I could spend several hours a day working on a giant puzzle. The largest puzzle I’ve ever made was 2000 pieces but I’m sure I could go for larger.

- My husband (the father) is far from a puzzle master. He clearly doesn’t like doing puzzles, and when he helps out the kids, I’m actually not sure who’s helping who the most.

- My oldest, who’s almost five, is a little like his dad. He enjoys doing puzzles more than him but sometimes struggles and his frustration can make him abandon his project before completion. With a little encouragement, he can usually get the puzzle done (we’re talking about 48 pieces here).

- My youngest, who’s just over three, is a puzzle wizard. Give him a 48-piece puzzle, provide a little assistance, and he’s done within 5 to 10 minutes. After he’s done the same puzzle a few times, he can do it all by himself and won’t even look at the original image to put it together. He clearly has great visual memory and well-developed spatial intelligence.

Because of my husband’s puzzle-making limited abilities, I’ve always been the one encouraging the kids to do puzzles, guiding them through the building process. I don’t believe I’ve spent more time with my youngest than my oldest doing puzzles. If anything, it’s been the opposite since my oldest is the one who struggles.

So why is it that my youngest can complete a puzzle faster than his older brother? Shouldn’t it be the opposite because of the age difference? Did I pass on the full “puzzle gene” to one kid, but only half of it to the other? Nature versus nurture is the age-old question, even when it comes down to jigsaw puzzles. Well, not just puzzles, since the question can extend to music, art, sports, etc.

Do you think you have passed on some talent genes to your kids and they have developed specific affinities because of their genetic predisposition? Or do you think they’re just good at something because they get to spend a lot of time practicing?

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Every day, I see a cow… the French edition

Earlier this month our family of four spent two weeks in France, in the extended suburbs of Paris, to visit my family. You’d think the first thing I’d want to blog about is our trip itself, and what it was like to travel with two little boys 6000 miles and a 9-hour time difference away from home. Of course, there’s plenty to tell but I’ll have to save it for future posts.

That’s because the most surprising part of our trip was the revelation and confirmation about a theory I’ve entertained previously on this very blog – the fact that we all see a cow every day. For more on this, read “Every day I see a cow” and “Did you know they have cows at SeaWorld?“ Well, it seems that the theory doesn’t just apply to the USA, but to other countries as well, or at least France in our case.

A Royal Cow

You probably think I’m making this up, right? Well, I’ll let you judge for yourself. I didn’t get to walk about with a camera in my hand every day, so I missed the chance to digitally capture quite a few cow sightings, but I managed to seize the most flagrant instance during our trip. Here’s the photo of a cool looking cow sculpture, amidst some green pastures.

Every day I see a cow, in France

So, what’s the big deal, you ask? Well, the green pastures actually are the well maintained French gardens of this chateau, named Vaux-le-Vicomte.

Chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte

Who really expects to visit a French chateau and see a cow? Well, besides me, I’mwilling to bet that not too many people would!

The Typical Dairy Cow

The cow count didn’t stop there. Even though we frequented more of the countryside than the urban settings, we ended up seeing mostly representations of the bovine type rather than real cows. The most common places were at the grocery store, especially in the dairy aisle. The biggest offender there was “les 2 vaches” yogurt. Check out the really cute couple of cows portrayed on the top of this organic yogurt brand. If that doesn’t make you want to switch to organic dairy, I’m not sure what will!

Les 2 vaches yogurt

The Fake Farm Cow

A more surprising cow sighting occurred the day we were leaving a Chinese restaurant. The business next door featured a small yard full of chickens and ducks, alongside statues of a mother cow and her calf (sorry, still no camera on that day). I guess the presence of fake bovines is supposed to make the hens feel like they really live in a farm, which will increase their egg production? I have no farming background or training, so that’s just a guess…

The Mall Cow

Finally, a shocking cow encounter occurred at the mall. Yes, the mall! A clothing store was displaying a cow statue at its entrance. Well, it did make me look, but I’m not sure I would buy anything in there. Are the clothes supposed to make me look like a cow? I’m pretty sure I missed the point there…

I swear that every day of our European trip, we did see a cow or a representation of a cow, so I believe this theory has proven to be tru,e even outside of the Americas continent. Are you keeping track of your daily cows? By the way, if you don’t believe in the theory, I just helped make a believer out of you with the few cows pictured in this post…

DECEMBER 31, 2010 UPDATE – The brand new “Every day I see a cow” blog is up and running, just in time to document daily cow sightings in 2011! Take a look and let me know what you think. “Every day I see a cow” is also on Facebook, so feel free to visit the page, like it, and share your own cow sightings with everyone. The more, the merrier!

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How to make a yogurt bunny – a klutzy moment

I have to admit this past week has been one of the most stressful times in quite a while for me. First my son had surgery to remove his tonsils and adenoids, which was followed by complications, causing a visit to the ER and a 24-hour hospital stay last weekend. Since then the recovery has been slow and painful, and as a parent you tend to feel so helpless when your child is in pain.

Then, there was work, where things went from bad to worse as the week went on. Steven Slater, the now infamous Jet Blue flight attendant, did something only a few of us would ever dare to do by quitting his job on the spot, in quite a politically incorrect manner. I’m not condoning his actions, but boy, do I understand how you could suddenly blow a fuse and feel like screaming, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

Finally, Friday the 13th came and things started to calm down so I thought I was finally on an upward trend, until Saturday morning came around… You have to know that I’m the officially crowned Klutz of the house, and probably the biggest klutz of the neighborhood. I regularly spill things, drop things, and break things, definitely more often than the average Jane (or Joe for that matter). So in a grandiose finale to a week that will go down in personal history, I experienced some of my best klutzy moments this weekend.

As I opened the fridge and reached out for the milk, I accidentally knocked over a Danimal yogurt bottle that somehow had been placed in the fridge without a lid on (I’m pretty sure I did that…). As the bottle bounced around on its way down, it spilled its contents all over the bottom part of the fridge and on the floor in front of it. I let out a popular expletive as a natural reaction to the mess I just created, when I heard my son behind me saying excitedly, “Mama, look! You just painted a bunny with yogurt! Take a picture for Papa to see!” I looked around and there it was, laying on the rug indeed, a cute bunny head with long ears, unlike the rest of the strawberry yogurt that plastered the fridge and the floor. So here you are, I did take a picture of it. Sure, it’s no miracle as it doesn’t represent the face of Jesus or the Virgin Mary, but I’m still impressed with what came out of that incident.

Yogurt bunny

Unfortunately, my clumsiness followed me around a little longer. Just a few minutes later, I somehow managed to knock over my son’s cereal bowl all over his lap and the floor. All I can say is thank god he eats his cereal dry! And no, I didn’t take a picture of that…

To an overwhelmingly eventful week, here’s a never-too-soon goodbye!

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What can a mom do when her baby is sleeping?

Ah, I remember having my first baby like it was yesterday… The first three months went by like a blur, literally, as I was so sleep deprived that my brain turned to mush temporarily (actually, I’m not sure I got it all back!). At the time, I don’t believe I had any ounce of creativity left in my bones, even though I consider myself a pretty creative person in the first place. My baby son enjoyed taking 45-minute naps during the day, and would stretch his sleep to a whole 90 minutes at a time during the night! Whoever said “sleep when your baby sleeps” never practiced on speed napping… That’s when I discovered that interrupted sleep is worse than no sleep at all. So what did I do while my baby slept? I did laundry, cleaned up around the house, ran some errands, tried to grab a bite to eat, pumped to stock up on breastmilk for the daycare times to come, and caught up on email to not feel completely isolated from the world. That’s pretty much all I managed to do for the first few months – nothing to brag about.

Apparently, if you get enough sleep (or can live without any sleep), you can come up with brilliant ideas to keep yourself busy while your baby naps. Just ask Adele Enersen! If you haven’t visited her blog yet, do so now at http://milasdaydreams.blogspot.com.

Adele has managed to preserve her brain cells in working order after child birth, and for that, she deserves a big CONGRATULATIONS!

Take a look at what she’s managed to do during her baby’s naps, imagining her sweet dreams, creating a unique scene each time, each one cuter than the previous one.

October 22, 2010 update: For those of you who are Anne Geddes fans, she’s got a brand new book out called Beginnings that just came out on October 10, 2010. Beautiful baby pictures! She even created a 2011 Beginnings wall calendar out of some of the book pictures, so check it out!

From one mom to another, I want to thank Adele for showing us that there can be more to naptime than laundry and diaper shopping! I’m looking forward to seeing many more baby dreams on her blog and I hope she can inspire to inspire other moms to create a very special bond with their newborns.

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