Toys.

Now most of you may not know this, but the average church nursery, or any nursery mind you (with the exception of plant nurseries...) is a life and death struggle between the babies inhabiting said nursery. A gladiator pit of sorts, the babies do what they can to kill eachother.

Watch a group of infants and toddlers in the pit (as we will be calling it) for any amount of time, and you will see attempts to shove others into sharp objects, the throwing of blocks, and most prominently, the gouging of eyes. This is especially popular in the toddler set. Place them near an infant, and watch their fingers go straight for the eyes.

In it's infinite wisdom, our generation has taken away the only true defense that children have had up until this point. That's right. Toys.

When I was little, I was given a set of weapons with which to defend myself. Hard plastic. Sharp edges. Pointy noses on dolls... All for my own safety. To protect me from the three year old with the metal jack in the box that at a whopping 9 ounces made a decent bludgeoning weapon.

But not today. Today, all the toys are soft and mushy. Rubber coated. Wimpy. They can't take an eye out! They can't gouge! The only legitimate violent use for most of these toys is suffocation, and that takes time! Before you know it the pit lord, er, nursery attendant is going to see you, and stop you. Because, no matter how dangerous your toy, you probably can't stop her.

Well. My parents, being the loving grandparents that they are, sent us a box with some of my old clothes and toys. Among which, was my weapon of choice... namely, the "Fisher Price Deathmonger Babybasher 5000."


Ha ha. My son is going to RULE!!!

Yes. This monster of a rattle sports hard plastic petals, and a terrifying google-y eyed face to strike fear in the heart of your oponent and a bright red throttling ball at the base which is just the right size to fit down a baby's throat or eye socket. Coincidence? I think not. Here is the Deathmonger Babybasher 5000 pictured below with Kiah, so that you can see its approximate size. This thing is the biggest rattle possible. A weaker baby wouldn't even be able to lift it. This is like those celtic broadswords of Ireland and Scotland that terrified enemy armies. This is epic. It even has a mirror mounted on the back with which to mock your enemies with their pitiful appearance after you've made them pee themselves. If they hadn't already... but that's beside the point.


So if you've seen a nursery lately, and wondered about Kiah's safety... fear not. The boy is well equipped, and prepared to be the terror of the pit! Hmmm. We'll need a gladiator name for him. Perhaps "Helmet."

So things were bad there for a couple minutes...

I got home from work the other day, to find this...

Needless to say, I was bothered. The computer would begin startup, but stalled on the "Starting OSX" screen. (Which, by the way, is one of the silliest screens in the operating system, as it now just a hoax. In the past, when macs were starting up, they would give you a progress bar of your start up. Well, now they've improved the speed of startup so dramatically, that the progress bar is unneeded. However, people would apparently freak without it, or feel that their computer was taking too long to start up, or something... so Apple kept the progress bar at startup, but get this, IT'S JUST AN ANIMATED GIF! Nothing more. It just makes you think that it's kicking butt. That's all.) Anyway, it froze at that screen.

I couldn't boot in safe mode, but I was able to boot from the install disc (By holding down on the C key with the install cd in the drive, for the mac users out there) and run disk utility. No luck. It let me know that there was an error on my hard drive, but couldn't fix it. Well, I remembered that a long time ago, I heard about a way to repair your hd even if you didn't have the install disk, but I couldn't remember the name of the mode that you had to boot into, or the way to do it. So I humbled myself, and did some research online. Unfortunately, I had to do the research at work. On a PC of all things. It was so humiliating. It looked something like this.

Well, the mode is called "Single user mode" and you get there by holding the command and s keys while booting. It comes up with a black screen white type that looks a little like dos, but it's just the unix underpinnings of OSX. Anyway, I ran a script that looked like: /sbin/fsck -fy.

It came up with some "errors" and I ran a script to correct them, and it came back clean!

It wouldn't work right away, so archived and installed the OS, and it booted back like a charm! I was so happy. It's really disconcerting when I think about how much music, how many photos and other things I have that are not backed up. But everything worked out, and it's as good as new again.

Woot.

Funny picture from Kaitlin's myspace.

This is too awesome to not put this on my blog.