Picture This

This week’s post is devoted to the gadget-hungry parent. By now we fully realize the marketing pressure applied to the new parent, the grandparents, and soon enough, little Penny. Not that we should be surprised; for in this great capitalist society, having children provides yet another marketable demographic for Wall Street.

We have already talked at length how we’re going to help Penny be a savvy consumer, and hopefully not fall prey to the cleverly disguised marketing and communications campaigns prevalent in her day-to-day life…written by incredibly smart, and well-meaning professionals, like, well, her parents.

However, it will be hard to teach her how best to hold onto her purse strings when her parents enjoy the wonderfully high-tech gadgets offered. And what better excuse to purchase a brand new gadget than “the baby.”

But We Needed It
With some of our Christmas money, we recently purchased a new 6.1 megapixel digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera with a 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5D IF autofocus lens. In addition to producing a superior digital photo, we are able to squeeze off 2.5 frames per second to capture little Penny’s every adorable move. It’s lighter weight than some models, and has a two-inch LCD display for photo viewing. It’s the perfect camera for the new parent, as confirmed by an online catalogue:

“The "Child" mode, for example, assures that moms and dads don't have to be photography experts to capture the most vivid color and contrast when taking pictures of their children. The "Child" mode automatically adjusts several of the camera's settings, including ISO, shutter speeds, and white balance, to produce optimized images when taking pictures of children.”

We love having the new camera! It’s been a month and we’ve already taken hundreds of photos! And just think of the wonderful pictures we’ll publish to the blog! We can’t wait for it to be spring so that we can compose photo shoots, en plein-air.

All further justifications aside, we just really wanted it. You really want a new camera now, too; don’t you?

Scent of a Baby

We noticed that it has been a while since we examined the fecal offerings of our offspring. In our last post, we looked at one side of Penny’s illness. This week we dive into another, the backside.

While the Pedialyte certainly worked, rehydrating Penny and giving her a boost of energy, a secondary effect was a diaper that smelled, well, really really bad.

We took a look at a thesaurus to see if there is a word that encapsulates the smell in a single term. We started with “rank,” which returned: bad, dank, disagreeable, disgusting, evil-smelling, feculent, fetid, foul, funky, fusty, gamy, graveolent, gross, high, humid, loathsome, mephitic, moldy, musty, nasty, nauseating, noisome, noxious, obnoxious, off, offensive, olid, pungent, putrescent, putrid, rancid, reeking, repulsive, revolting, smelly, sour, stale, strong, strong-smelling, tainted, and turned.

Quite a lot to sort through. So being aficionados of The Princess Bride, we took a look at putrescent. The first definition, “becoming putrid; putrefying.” Yeah, that sounds about right. (Bonus points: see if you can work “graveolent” into your daily vocabulary).

Even still, this lexicon really cannot do justice to the plain foulness of Penny’s diaper deposits. Words truly fail us. Instead, let us paint you a picture:

Mom sits with Penny in the family room, cradling the sick baby in her lap when she feels a little rumble emit from baby’s bottom. A few moments later, dad says, “Oh! What is that—ugh! Is that from Penny?!”

Mom and dad get up to change Penny’s diaper and discover a soupy mixture akin to three-day-old-left-in-the-sun-to-rot-Bouillabaisse; not in texture, but in smell. The rotten fish smell is so rank that mom, who is thankfully a little less sensitive to smell, tries to cover her nose while cleaning up Penny’s bottom. Dad, whose olfactory sense is stronger, retches a few times at the scent then immediately wraps the heavy diaper in thick plastic and deposits it in the trashcan outside. (He thought about sneaking it into a neighbors trash can up the street to get it as far away as possible but figured that would just be mean.) Penny, who is feeling better at this point, lies on the changing table and smiles with glee at how funny mom and dad are.