Thankfully, We Aren't What We Eat

Thursday I got one of those "you might be interested in" marketing emails from Amazon. I knew what it was before opening it, because the subject line of the email was "Lion Noisy 8-flavor Soda."

If you're wondering how 8-flavor soda hard candy can be noisy, I'll let you know. At $4.28 plus free shipping, this bad boy went straight into my cart. I'm looking particularly forward to learning what lamune flavor tastes like. I'm assuming Lion is the name of the company, but if there's cat hair in my package, I wouldn't be just totally shocked.

Why does Amazon think I might be interested in noisy soda candy? Because Bruce, who loves everything Japanese, got a box of Japanese vending machine food for Christmas. It turns out that Bruce mainly likes the idea of everything Japanese, and he was more than willing to share each individually wrapped item with the rest of us. It made for a highly entertaining Christmas. All of the packaging (except for the Macha Green Tea flavored Kit-Kat) was in Japanese, which none of us could read. So we had no idea what we were eating just by looking at it.

This led to some amazing facial expressions and taxed their creative powers of description:

"It's like fruit styrofoam."

"It's like a weird spicy pizza cheeto."

"It's like brown gooey something in cardboard."

All in all, it was everyone's favorite Christmas present, and they can't wait to try food boxes from other countries. If you're wondering, yes, that is a thing. I'm thinking maybe we'll go Eastern Europe next year, but there's also a Turkish box that sounds promising. It was fun to expand our horizons and realize that everyone everywhere has their own idea of taste, and think that somewhere in the wide, wide world a kid might be trying Ranch Doritos, scrunching up his nose and telling his brother, "It's like a garlicky green fried milk carton...weird!"

This reminded me of one of our favorite family stories. Pets and babies make an interesting combination. For one thing, they both operate at ground level, where us grown-ups don't spend much time. For another, they will put almost anything into their mouths.

Back in the day, we had this awesome cat named Dewey. He was a semi-Siamese...half seal-point Siamese and half something big and white. He had a lot of personalty, but that's a story for another blog. Most relevant here is that he had spent his first six months of life on the alleys of Quail Creek (with approximately 80 other feral cats it seemed) and was a huntin' cat. You can take the outdoor cat indoors, but you can't take the outdoors out of the formerly outdoor indoor cat. Or something like that.

Dewey had a fondness for baby gear. We also have pictures of him in the bouncy seat, the swing, the car seat, and the crib. Dewey weighed more than a large baby, but it never stopped him from trying to be one. 2003.

Bruce was a year old. He is our most fastiduous child, and is not overly adventurous in eating, which is why he hates this story. But that came later. As a one-year-old, he was a normal one-year-old, which is to say, when he was teething, he'd gum just about anything. In fact, at one point, I caught him gumming our old cat Pericles' tail.

Bruce and Pericles, 2006. Pericles was the most chill of cats; however, as you can see, he is keeping his tail firmly tucked underneath him and well outside of grabbing range.

And so it was that one day I happened to look up, and Bruce was sitting on the rug with a (non-cat) tail hanging out of his mouth, happily gumming a dead lizard. A long-dead lizard, one that Dewey had played with and then thoughtfully deposited under a piece of furniture, out of sight to us, but not to Bruce.

Bruce, on the floor, where all kinds of fun things can be found, some of them crunchy. (2007)

We got it out of his mouth intact, which annoyed him at the time, but present-day Bruce is quite grateful that we didn't let him eat a lizard. Although, it probably just tasted like weird sour popcorn.