Jen and Ian's Zombie Wedding

This is Jen, writing on E's profile. Teach him to have auto log in on a joint account! :-)

This is a post long over due. Overdue for many reasons, the first being of course, the last we updated anything about our darling daughter was nearly six months ago. Yep, we are slackers. Actually, as many know, the primary reason we haven't posted anything is due to the over taxing events of the past several months, leading up to our amazing and very awesome zombie wedding on October 30, 2011.

We started off in the beautiful area of Hard Labor Creek in Rutledge, GA. You may recognize the area if you sit down and watch Friday the 13th, Part Six. You see, Jason rises from the dead in a cemetery about 20 minutes down the road in a little town called Monroe. He then manages to make his way to the summer camp at Camp Crystal Lake (aka Camp Daniel Morgan.) Now, we didn't actually get married at the camp site, that was too expensive and we were frugal with our wedding, keeping all expenses, including the honeymoon, under $4K. That means we are cheap asses and we aren't forking out a lot of money and this was a DIY type of wedding. But, we did manage to score a perfectly usable group shelter right next to the lake. A large, open field allowed us to have an outside ceremony, while the roomy and cabin like enclosure provided ample amenities for our reception of, get this, finger foods!

The bridesmaids flowers were vased in severed hands. My flowers were laced with eyeballs and fingers. The groomsmen's flowers each had a finger attached. Ian and I had bought colored contacts to complete our look, along with blood splattered shoes. Where as Ian opted to destroy his Goodwill suit that he spent $17 on, I opted to not destroy my $400 dress that looked as if I had already walked through a pool of blood. My veil was homemade. The brides maids each had a cheap $40 dress on that looked super cool, and each of the groomsmen had Salvation Army suits on...yeah, cheap man, cheap. The flower girl and ring bearer just looked plain out creepy.

Props to Terry, the best man, who managed to zombify all of us on the day. He managed to do the makeup of thirteen people. The only down side to this is he is in limited number of photos. A great guy, I owe him a lot...he was there for Ian, always, and then he went above and beyond for us on our day. Kudos to him.

The pictures were all kinds of fun, attacking the photographers, each other, hangings, just plain out goofing off! I have to admit though, I really hated sitting as much as I did. Where as it was great to be off my feet in those heels, the position I had to sit in was not all that comfortable, after all, I am rather fat.

Once we got to the ceremony, we had a hoot. The minister threatened the wedding part with an axe and baseball ball. One of our guests attacked us with a chainsaw. The zombies of the wedding party shambled down the aisle and randomly attacked guests, or each other. The flower girl had the time of her life as she posed as a zombie girl, while the ring bearer was sullen, walking down the aisle with only one arm holding a hand that housed our rings. The minister started off with a "dearly departed" type of campy joke. He mentioned the that we stand by each other despite the stresses and chainsaws inevitable in any undeath. Way too much in the actual text of the ceremony to go into, but our guests were to offer up their encouragement, brains, and spleens to us. Oh sure, we had the normal mushy stuff in there. Heck, we even had the normal mushy stuff to be, well, normal. No jokes laced in that part of the ceremony, after all, this was a serious commitment.

Once the ceremony was completed, we took a bit more photo wise and then shambled our way into the reception hall were we were greeted with cheese balls shaped like faces with the skin severed off. We had a dummy on the table with a crockpot in his belly, where we scooped up his "guts" which were nothing more than BBQ cocktail weenies. We got many comments on that!

Our cakes were made by the very best of bakers, and a good friend, Brenda. Mine was cemetery style whereas Ian's was a head and a tombstone. Custom cake server was shaped like a hand and the cake knife was splattered with blood.

All in all, it was great fun! Wish you could be there if you weren't and thank you everyone who was! If you are interested in pictures, we have a few (not all) here:

Jen and Ian's Zombie Wedding

and here is a short teaser video: Jen and Ian's Zombie Wedding Vid

Babyland

The weekend before Easter we got to spend a day at Babyland, the birthplace of all Cabbage Patch Kids. I prepared myself for a pretty lame day, yet turned off my typical cynicism so as not to ruin Zoë’s time.

The day started with “Breakfast with the Easter Bunny”, an event with several hundred parents and children. The local Lyons club provided pancakes and sausage while a DJ kept us amused with fantastic (god-awful) music. Jen’s mom had bought the tickets and the breakfast was actually surprisingly fun. They gave out prizes like crazy, though we never actually won.

The “Easter Bunny” was a person in a massive CPK costume with bunny ears tucked away in a little nook with a line of bazillions of kids waiting to get a picture for $5. We didn’t spring for the picture, but Zoë was too busy enjoying the atmosphere and running around like crazy to even notice or mind.

Jen’s mom works as an accountant for the power company up in Habersham County, GA, and every year they are involved in a handful of parades in the area. Part of the reason we were at Babyland was because Cleveland, GA, where Babyland is located, was throwing a parade and Toni’s company was to be represented.

Originally this meant that Jen and Zoë were going to help with the parade. Through a large series of events, another child ended up being foisted upon us. That was Darcie, Toni’s step-granddaughter. Unfortunately, Darcie had ZERO interest in being with us at Babyland and would not do anything but sob. Jen decided to stay with Darcie and Zoë and I were sent to work at the parade.

All I knew about the parade was that I would be in the back of “a truck” helping to dispense candy or take photos.

That “truck” turned out to be a 1932 Ford. The one on display in the lobby of the power company. The first truck the power company ever owned. Totally awesome. I got to ride in the front while we prepared for the parade and noted the lack of seatbelts, unsafe glass, removable seats, and many other death features available in that year’s model. (Don’t mistake that for dislike, I was in awe being in that truck.)

Zoë and I were to ride in the bed of the truck with a few other people. There were some walking beside the truck handing out candy. I was asked to film the parade for the power company. Zoë got a little hardhat and off we went, zipping through the streets of Cleveland.

To call this parade small would be a bit of an understatement. It was small even in comparison to the annual Hartland Memorial Day parade. Maybe 7 floats altogether and only a few hundred spectators. But it was fun nonetheless.

Of course Zoë being the ever helpful type, recruited herself to “assist” with the candy “dispersement”.

I might add, as noticed in the next picture, that this was the day that Zoë discovered what pockets were really used for. She thought she was being sneaky, but I busted her.

Here’s a picture taken from the sidelines. It kind of cracks me up because it appears that I was the main attraction in this parade.

After the parade was done we headed back to Babyland for the Great Easter Egg Hunt.

Let me tell you, these guys know how to setup a hunt. They had 25,000 eggs set out for the kids to grab. These were broken into 4 separate sections, 0-2, 3-5, 6-8, 8+. Each of these sections had anywhere between 4,000 and 6,000 eggs to snatch.

Of course, these weren’t real eggs but plastic. That marks a distinction beyond just their outward appearance. Plastic eggs have goodies in them. And apparently a handful of these 25,000 eggs contained coupons for various local businesses. Most just had candy.

Zoë was so excited to go grab eggs she could barely contain herself. We had to stand there waiting a good 10-15 minutes before they blew the whistle. It was a tad chilly and VERY windy. This was the day after those major storms rolled through town.

We managed to keep her happy for a bit and even got a nice little family photo taken.

Finally, she could take no more and the whistle finally blew.

4,000 eggs. The space of half a football field. 0-2 years old. This should be a good 20 minutes of fun, right?

I took a fast motion series of photos when it started. 10 pictures in 5 seconds. Here is the first picture:

And here is FIVE SECONDS LATER

Note the nice young lady towards the right with her thong sticking out. She’s just tucking her child under her arm and snatching as many eggs as possible. These vultures managed to pick the lawn clean of eggs in LESS THAN A MINUTE. I started our video camera less than 15 seconds after it started, and all you see is the four of us trudging through a devastated war zone.

And because of the unstoppable greed of the other parents, this was what Zoë got:

Yep, tears. She got four eggs, and that’s ONLY because Jen snatched them up before the other carrion feeders had a chance to co-opt Zoë’s fun. Zoë never even left the starting line because we were afraid of the stampede. You would think it was a Black Friday sale at Wal-Mart or something.

I can’t fully blame Babyland for this. There’s really no way to contain that many people. But honestly, for the 0-2 area parents should be able to help and that’s it. Where’s the fun in the herd blindly stampeding towards egg domination?

When that was all said and done we made our way to the main attraction of Babyland, namely the Cabbage Patch nursery. This is where CPK are born and eventually adopted.

Jen snuck in there while we were at the parade to get the lay of the land and the two of us managed a trip while Zoë was in the car.

Those adorable Cabbage Patch Kids? Yeah, the cheapest one is $60. They go all the way up to $300. We had a team huddle with Toni and advised which section to steer Zoë towards.

Those kids that are half-ensconced in the cabbage? They move up and down, twisting all the while. It’s a tad disturbing, but not as morbid as the macabre workings of the birthing process.

I don’t have any photos of the process itself. I do have a video of the whole thing, but obviously that won’t be in this document.

I found it more than a little disturbing that the birthing process is rife with jokes about episiotomies, c-sections, drugs, and the like.

Apparently the mother cabbage is pollinated by some type of bee. Once she’s ready, a doctor comes along and puts in an IV (ivy, in this case), injects her full of Imagicillin and then determines her dilation status. (Ours was 10 leaves) If the baby is “branched”, they can perform a c-section (cabbage section). They even do a little sonogram before they yank the shivering fetus from the cabbage womb so all the kids can see if it’s a boy or a girl. Then they have the audience name it. Really quite frightening stuff.

Anywho, Zoë ended up getting a baby wearing a purple outfit. Purple’s her favorite color. As you can see from the above photo, it is an entirely unique and dissimilar doll from all the others.

She did, however, get to name it. Her decision? Mine. Mine Baby Hettenhouse. Poor girl, dad now torments her by grabbing her doll and calling it mine. J

Easter

If there’s one thing we’ve learned about Zoë in the last couple of weeks, it’s that she shares Lara’s absolute terror when confronted with a person in a costume. Here’s a lovely selection of photos from our various attempts at getting Easter Bunny pictures:

That’s the best one we have. She snatched the candy out of his hands and then ran screaming.

That one was at Walgreen’s. We tried removing the bunny from the scene altogether, but the fear still radiates.

This last one is my favorite and sums it up nicely:

So yeah, she might not much care for the Easter Bunny, but she seemed to enjoy Easter all in all.

Owing to illness and multiple other issues, last year there was no Easter. She was too young to have cared anyways, but this year she was ripe for the picking.

Saturday night we began the official festivities. We laid out a couple of egg coloring kits (while I played Patton Oswalt discussing Paas in the background) and set to work coloring about 2 dozen eggs. Bobby was over for the night and our friend Brian was there as well. We had tie dyed eggs, sparkly eggs, eggs you could write on, anything and everything.

There’s Dad displaying his lack of creativity.

Zoë LOVED coloring the eggs and was running back and forth trying to dictate how it would all be done. She ended up throwing (and I mean THROWING) three eggs into one dying cup. I had to keep reminding her that we were not going for the grand prize on the Bozo show here.

It may seem a bit of a cheat, but here are a boatload of pictures taken from that night. You can see she was being quite the ham.

AWWWW. Isn’t she the CUTEST? We’ll talk more about that night in "The Incident".

After the incident we hid eggs all throughout the living room. Of course, Zoë being two, we couldn’t really “hide” them, so much as “place them right out in the open”. She had a bit of a mix of real eggs and fake plastic ones that we put little candies or coins into. We figured she’d wake up, see everything and excitedly come get us.

Well, not so much.

Apparently she got up very early that morning and discovered the eggtopia we had hidden in the living room. And she found most of them. And found the candy in others. And figured out how to unwrap candy for the very first time. And ate ALL of it. She was so busy stuffing her gullet that she didn’t even notice her easter basket on the table. She came and woke the two of us with a wicked, chocolate stained grin.

Seriously, that girl was a like an ADD kid on meth drinking Mountain Dew. And this is before I’ve had my coffee, so I’m trying to placate her and calm her.

We helped guide her towards the stragglers she left behind. The problem is, she had mostly missed the real eggs. So by the time she’d gotten around to this, she’d figured out that most eggs had a surprise hidden inside. So she’d pick up the real eggs, stuff her fingers into them and crack them open, only to find yolky goodness instead of a nice choccy.

Unfortunately, I apparently set the camera that morning to ape my own vision, so every shot is essentially a big blur. This is the closest I can come to providing a halfway decent image. (Note that she’s tearing out Minnie’s brains as practice for the wedding).

From there it was off to Grandma Toni’s for Easter lunch, more egg hunting, and lots of technical support on computer / electronics issues.

Not wanting to be a rude guest, I made up some sushi to bring along.

The day was more or less uneventful, but nonetheless very fun for Zoë. She got to hunt eggs and then play in a little miniature pool. She ended up having a large water fight with Grandpa Joe.

I’d have to say she loved Easter. She played and played and more or less collapsed once we got home. We all did, actually. The average was a 2 hour nap, then up for an hour, then going to bed.

The Incident

I guess we’ve known it’s been coming for quite some time. Aside from the occasional tantrum, we like to assume that Zoë is our perfect little angel. And for the first time she sought to prove us wrong.

I like to refer to the incident as what will likely be one of Zoë’s earliest memories, and quite possibly be the reason for her laying on a couch explaining her miserable childhood twenty years from now.

So Saturday night. We’d finished dying Easter eggs. Jen took Zoë into bed and was reading her a book called “Daddy’s Scratchy Face”. Zoë requested my presence for a demonstration. I gladly obliged, then gave some loves and left the room.

I spotted something on the way out. Looking back, I could have prevented all of this.

On the way out of the room I noticed a bottle of baby powder next to her little shopping cart. Said bottle was open (the little holes up top at least, not full blown cap off). I thought this odd because we never use baby powder. Seriously. Never. But I figured Jen had just brought her in there and changed her, so maybe she was changing things up. So I said nothing.

Fool.

Twenty minutes or so later I’m sitting out on the porch having a cigarette and enjoying my favorite Mexican Narco Cartel blog when Jen pops her head in.

“I need you. We have a toddler issue and you’re not going to like it.”

The blood in my veins ran icy. All I could manage was “I think I know where this is going” as I walked back into the house.

The first thing I noticed was the smell of baby powder. Not substantial, but hanging in the air.

Then I saw the child on the naughty stool in nothing but a diaper, bawling her eyes out and white as a ghost. And I mean literally white.

I walked into her room and was greeted by a Michigan winter. Unfortunately, the very few pics I took were of awful quality. Partially because I was laughing so much and partly there was already a bit of a cloud in the room.

You really can’t tell from the photos, but she had sprinkled baby powder over EVERYTHING. It coated her bed, was all over the floor, on her toys, the walls, her furniture.

Of course, rather quickly things turned from jovial to more and more pissed as I started to clean the mess she’d made. Particularly because one thing became very evident while I cleaned. This was no accident. This wasn’t “I’m curious what will happen”.

No, her favorite blanket and doll were pushed over by the door so that she could intentionally NOT hit them. She wouldn’t want those ruined, now would she?

From what I’ve heard after the fact when Jen busted her there was a stare down between the two like an old Spaghetti Western. She knew she’d been caught red handed. I still wonder how she thought she’d get away with it.

Anyways, I set to cleaning her room, starting with a can of compressed air. At first I was joking that I felt like I was in an outtake from Scarface, but with each passing moment I began to realize the severity of what she had done.

Baby powder is incredibly fine and resistant to moisture, which means that it was kicking up massive amounts of dust. It quickly went from “Jeez, that’s some dust”, to me having to leave the room every 15 minutes or so to chug a half liter of water and hit Jen’s inhaler. My nostrils were solidly lined. I TASTED the powder. The cloud got so bad that it became difficult to see and I was hacking and wheezing trying to breathe the solid matter. By the time I was done I was white as a ghost. Zoë and I had taken a shower earlier that evening and we both once again found ourselves in there, washing a fine coating of dust off.

It took 2 hours to clean her room. Dusting, vacuuming, steam cleaning, setting up fans to blow dust out the window. The cloud infiltrated the living room. Jen has asthma and had to be told to stay far away from the room. Bobby wanted to help but I told him to stay away as well in case I needed a driver to get me to the ER. It was bad.

My lungs burned for two days afterwards. I’m still coughing up little bits of talcum.

As always, click the pics for a larger view.

Long Over Due

Been a while and we do send our apologies. December was a crazy month, with a Christmas party every other day. Amazing how no one wants you around until after you have a child! (Joking of course.)

In all seriousness, Christmas went well. Way too many of them and Zoë ended up on burn out. We went all out for her this year and bought virtually everything WonderPets as it is her all time favorite show and wouldn't you know it? The kid was upset because the flat presents dwindled away and only big presents were left. You see, the flat ones were books, and she figured that out. And if it wasn't a book, she was upset. Ultimately her favorite gifts ended up being the ever exciting umbrella and the oh-my-god amazing toothbrush. The WonderPet toys and the REALLY nice kitchen set were a bust. Heck, it actually took us close to 7 days just to get her to completely finishing unwrapping her gifts. She just simply lost interest. Ian said he will be putting a video up very shortly of Christmas, but he need to convert it first.




We recently just had a major snow storm (for GA that is) as most of you know. We thought it would be fun to take her outside. First, she hates the boots I bought her. Then she hates the hand made scarf that Brian took time to make. And the gloves were even more hated. So we manged to get her to put the boots on and that was it. Until she feel in the snow half a dozen times back to back :) Then she helped us put the gloves on. She wanted to go for a swing and we told her no. Wet put cold wind does not add up well. The ever so full of tantrums child proceeded to then toss her self angrily in the snow. SURPRISE! IT is COLD! :) A face full of snow and the tantrum stopped immediately and she was begging for us to hold her. If only we had known that is all it would take to get the tantrums to cease...

We had to stay home most of last week due to the snow. That doesn't mean we had it easy. Ian and I both worked from home and Zoë went absolutely batty with cabin fever. Friday, Ian stayed home with her whilst I went to work. When I got home, I was told the story of how Ian had to take a call for work, and once getting off the phone, he went to go check on the girl. He found her, on her knees on the entertainment center, making out with our television because Ming-Ming, her favorite WonderPets character, was on screen. He didn't know if he should yell at her or laugh. :) Fun times, I tell ya!

Well, that pretty much wraps it up. Not much really going on. The new words she has learned, which are impressive, are teamwork, serious, and frog. Frog isn't all that big of a word...but she makes it sound like a very naughty word. Kids. :)

Greetings on Thanksgiving

Okay...maybe it is a day early, but I doubt I will manage to find time to get on the computer tomorrow. Zoë will have a full day of lots of people and lots of food. This ought to be an interesting day tomorrow.

Currently, our ever growing giant baby is running amuck and terrorizing the cats. With a washcloth on her head. She actually woke up in a good mood today, the past two days she has tried my patience in ways previously unimaginable. For example, she has reached that point in her life she hates diapers. So, she takes them off. Monday, I put her down for a nap. And upon hearing her talk to herself 30 minutes later, I decided to check on her. What I found was a very clean diaper in the middle of the floor and a VERY messy room and Zoë. She had finger painted....and not with paints. Needless to say, because of that incident, we are pushing full force on the whole potty training aspect of her toddlerhood.

She is still trying to figure that part out though. I have heard that pulls up training pants tends to actually delay potty training by a significant amount so we have opted to go to panties and water proof pants. She LOVES her panties, especially her Ming Ming panties. And she is horrified when she has an accident. But she refuses to try and use the potty. When we try to show her how, she screams bloody murder because we are taking her panties away. And when we have to change them, oh my word, the kid goes absolutely insane with rage on us. The panties are a big deal to her. Just need to find a way to explain it where she understands I guess. Work in progress. No one ever said it would be easy.

She is pretty big for her age. Very tall and very skinny. She has passed 24 month old clothes because of how tall she is and is now in 2T. The problem is, she is too skinny so all her clothes tend to fall around her ankles unless it has an elastic strap. So, sweatsuits it is!

Her foot finally grew again as well, so I bought her some boots recently but apparently they are not to her liking because she hates to wear them. Too bad, they are absolutely adorable and they are retail $40 but I only paid $10. Yesterday, at Wal-Mart, I went to pick her up another pair of shoes since her size 6 are getting way too snug and she demanded, literally, to get the EXACT same pair she currently owns. She would have nothing to do with a different design. I guess she likes the pair she currently has a whole heck of a lot. Now if we can just remember to grab the right size!

I've thrown some new photos up on Flickr. All you need to do is click on the link on the right to view them. I hope to have some up soon. Where as we used to take 3000 pictures in one day, we've gotten to where we forget about the camera rather often. Not on purpose, I assure you. I hope to have pictures out in the mail the first of next month to the grandparents that don't get to see her often enough. Recent ones.

But for now, I need to get off here. It is way too quiet in the living room....

Whew, a Big One

Howdy folks,

I suppose a proper update is in order, as we generally only cover the vague specifics of Zoë and her life. For those who don't see or interact with her on a regular basis, it's only fair that you get a better idea of who she is nowadays.

Heck, I just realized as I leaned back from the computer after that first paragraph that today marks 18 months of Zoë in our life. (Well, at least externally.) Time flies when you're having fun.

I could go into the trite things that most parents say, like "Oh, she just loves life" and "She's such a happy child", but let's be honest, aren't most kids at this age? When you've only got 18 months under your belt everything is still exciting and new, so of course you'll have an overall rosy outlook. (Assuming, of course, that your parents give you a decent amount of positive attention.)

Personality wise, the best word we could use to describe Zub-Zub (as dad affectionately calls her) would be "ham". She loves getting attention from people. ANYBODY, she doesn't care. She is constantly grinning and genuinely interested in interacting with others. (I assure you, she didn't get that from me...)

It's pretty much impossible for us to take her out without some stranger pining over her for a moment. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard somebody comment on how she's just the cutest baby ever... Humorously enough, on more than one occasion this has been said by another parent IN FRONT OF THEIR CHILD, which somehow just seems wrong. Granted, there's probably a bias on my part, seeing as how it's our kid, but I genuinely believe that she's cuter than average.

Mentally she has consistently tested above her age range which is especially interesting as she was supposed to be a month behind on every milestone. (Owing to the fact that she was a month premature.) However, across the board she has excelled in all categories, particularly with reasoning and language skills. We've lost count of actual words that she knows at this point, though I'd wager it's 40-50. She's started forming basic sentences and can now give us a general idea of what she wants or needs.

Potty training officially began a week or two ago, but we're far from complete. She has a little Elmo potty that she's encouraged to sit on and she frequently joins us for our bathroom sojourns. She hasn't actually utilized it for its intended purpose yet, but you've got to start small.

Her imagination has kicked in full force at this point and she loves to pretend. One of her favorite activities is to pretend to feed us bits of food. Unfortunately, with the emergence of imagination also comes its side effect...nightmares. Most nights she does fine but occasionally will have evenings where she's plagued by bad dreams. She's generally good at calming herself down and going back to sleep, but on occasion we have to bring her into bed with us.

She is enthralled by our two cats and tries her best to get close to them and pet them. Of course the cats are a bit wary of this, as she's not the most delicate at handling them, but they usually take it in good enough humor. We have warned her many times that "kitties are pointy", a lesson she's had to learn the hard way a couple of times, but still she persists. Her love of cats is demonstrated by her apparent want to be one. She loves to crawl around and meow at us. Give her a small sized snack and she will invariably put it on the floor and eat it like a kitty. I've caught her trying to drink from their dish on many an occasion and almost nightly we have to put the cats' food and water up until her bedtime.

Another favorite game (that she only plays with me, for whatever reason) is to find an object: a small bottle, one of her shoes, etc., put it in her mouth and then have me take it from her with my mouth. We'll pass it back and forth and she'll laugh and clap. I guess dad with a shoe in his mouth is humorous. Got me.

She's recently become quite keen on dolls. She particularly likes baby dolls. She has one she got relatively recently that she totes with her everywhere she goes and snuggles up with at night.

Zoë has fully transitioned into a toddler bed at this point, replete with appropriate bedding and pillows. This definitely set off a sense of pride in her and she has begun to fully identify her bedroom as "her territory". This is a good thing, parentally speaking, as it means that she's more willing to stay in her room and babble and play a bit after getting up before summoning us from slumber. We take what we can get. ;)

Books are a major obsession for her. She has several strewn about the house at any given moment and she's read to (almost) every night before bed. Her particular favorite at this point is "A Circus of Colors", which Jen has read so many times she has it completely memorized. It's not uncommon for her to beg us to read it 4 or 5 times before she'll go down at night. In fact, Monday night when bedtime rolled around, that particular book had gone missing. Zoë went BALLISTIC because she wanted THAT book and NO OTHER. A frazzled Jen tracked me down to see if I knew where it had gone. Luckily I had spotted it earlier that evening and the crisis was resolved. When she gets a bit older I intend to start reading her the Harry Potter books, but we're still a ways off from that point.

She certainly has no concept of money at this stage of her life, but she has a definite idea what to do with it. SAVE IT! She has a piggy bank in her room and any chance she gets she will add money to it. Our friend Brian has had his loose change stolen on many an occasion only to hear Zoë dropping it in her bank and clapping each time. Can't say I'm too upset that she loves to put her money away.

We took her to her second Zombie Walk in Atlanta last weekend. The weather was rainy, cold, and miserable, but still a good time was had by all. She's obviously still too young for us to really put much makeup on her, but we did slash up an outfit, sling blood all over it and put a wee bit of blood on her face. Before you go thinking we're terrifying this little girl, it's worth mentioning that she LOVED her little outfit and kept insisting on wearing it around the house. Interestingly enough, we ran into several zombies who remembered her from the previous year. And she even made it into the promotional video that the group that organizes the walk created.

Halloween is coming up and we're letting her be a bit more traditional for that one. She has decided on a Minnie Mouse costume this year. (At a frighteningly high amount of money. I'll tell you, parents get screwed by costume companies. They know they have you by the short hairs.) No blood, no bones, no exposed viscera, just plain old Minnie.

Her desire for that costume was brought on by her love of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, a CGI cartoon geared towards toddlers that teaches basic numbers and colors in an entertaining (yeah, right) manner. It's bright and colorful and she seems to enjoy it. Luckily for us she has recently become obsessed with the show Wonder Pets, which believe it or not is pretty awesome, even for adults. It follows the life of three friends, a guinea pig named Linny, a turtle named Tuck, and a duckling named Ming Ming who rush around the world saving baby animals in trouble. It's actually quite cute and very entertaining. It's more like a mini operetta, as most dialog is sung and every episode is performed by a full orchestra. Zoë asks for "Ming Ming" every night now.

She doesn't get a whole lot of TV time, though. We generally only allow her 1 (very rarely 2) episode(s) of a show a night. We're a little more lax on the weekends, but we don't like to use the TV as a babysitter, and we're not heavy watchers ourselves, anyways. In fact, we don't even have cable, so she's stuck with whatever we have available.

We signed up for Netflix last weekend, primarily so we can stream childrens' DVDs through our PS3. They have a huge selection and it's giving us a chance to explore some new shows for her.

Zok (as she is also known by dad) is amazingly well behaved in public overall. She's usually very quiet and doesn't cause a scene very often. Part of this is due, I'm sure, to the fact that we have a zero tolerance policy for bad behavior in public. We will whisk her out of any store or restaurant the moment she acts up.

That's not to say that she's all wine and roses. She certainly has her tantrums at home, though they're not excessive. (Unless she's just having a very bad day.) The biggest problem we have with her overall is that she's an only child and she knows it. That means she's not very good about sharing with other children. That's something we certainly intend to remedy, but figuring out how to go about it is the tricky part.

She has many of the standard girly interests. She loves clothes, she loves shoes, she loves getting her nails painted. But there are definitely splashes of my personality hidden in there. (See above with her complete lack of terror at a group of more than 1,000 blood soaked monsters storming Atlanta.)

Okay, whew. I guess I went off a bit on this one. Well, I hope it helps give a better understanding of Zoë's world. She's certainly not in need of any love or attention, she gets that in spades. I'll try and get some new pictures up in the next day or so.