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Mandarin oranges are underrated.

They are popular in the canned-fruit section of the supermarket, but nowhere else.

Why is nothing else mandarin orange flavored?

No popsicles.
No yogurt.
No candy.
No drinks.

I suppose they don’t need to sell juice with the flavor of mandarin oranges, because everyone drinks the syrup that comes with the fruit. The syrup was great, and the new stuff – the fruit juice that they use instead of sugary syrup – tastes just as great. But it’s inconvenient and dangerous to drink from a tin can.

If I were ever to start selling energy drinks – or any sort of drink at all – my first flavor would be mandarin orange.

My second flavor would be cantonese orange.

This is what the grocery store sells as American cheese:

But it’s not, really. It’s ORANGE. When you think of things that are American, how far down the list does anything orange appear?

Still thinking?
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Yesterday I presented a flowchart of candy bars. But I think a flowchart is not the best way to show the variations of candy bars and their ingredients.

What is the best way?

A Venn diagram!

I suppose it would be more appropriate to call this an Euler diagram rather than a Venn diagram, but not many people know or care about the difference.

Some of you may have ignored this post when you saw that the title contains the word flowchart. But that would mean that you’re not reading this, so why am I bothering to explain that?

Here is a flowchart that documents the choices among candy bars, in case you are overwhelmed at the grocery check-out.

Transcript (although it’s hard to type a flowchart in plain text) :
Which candy bar is right for you?
Do you like chocolate?
Do you like peanuts?
Do you like caramel?
Do you like peanut butter?
Do you like a lot of peanuts?
Do you like nougat?
Do you even know what nougat is?
Do you like crunchy stuff?
that sticks to your teeth?
Do you like coconut?
(I’m not going to bother listing the various candy bars)

Here is how things are in my house for most of the month of December:

Transcript:
Hey! There’s no chocolate in the house!

It’s the Christmas season. We need to have chocolate and cookies and stuff.

(make/obtain sweets)

These are yummy. It’s hard to stop eating them.

Oh good – they’re gone. Now I don’t have to worry about self-control anymore.

Specifically, things not to feed a child who is not potty trained.

Alternate title: how to make enemies in the church nursery

I don’t like potty humor, except for maybe this one case. But parenthood brings you into certain situations that you wouldn’t discuss otherwise.

Today is such a case.

It’s for a public service, though, not a cheap laugh. I know there is at least one new father who reads this blog, and there are things he might want to know so he doesn’t have to learn the hard way. In order to bring him up to speed, I am publishing this list of foods to avoid giving your child if you will be changing his diaper within the subsequent 24 hours.

• Blue Moon ice cream
• Corn
• Blueberries
• Spinach
• Chili

Apparently the color blue is not easily digested.

And I wonder why we even eat corn since it appears to not be used at all by the body. Surely there must be a better use of one’s energy than eating and attempting to digest corn. Unless maybe it is just exercise.

Parents who have gone through the diaper-changing phase:
Any other foods to avoid?

With the raspberry picking out of the way, we decided to go peach picking. I took the 3 older boys to an area farm and sprayed them well with insect repellent (the farm doesn’t use pesticides so that they can be certified as natural or organic or whatever).

I inquired at the weigh station about peaches and was told that the next group would go out in about 10 minutes. We could either wait or we could go pick raspberries until then. It didn’t matter to me, so I took a vote among the boys and it was 2-1 in favor of raspberries. So off we went.

This time, they all liked picking raspberries and did a fine job of doing so.

We had a couple of buckets, so we had some sharing issues
(3 boys – 2 buckets = 1 child complaining about not having a bucket).
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