Boo!

It's that time of year again!


Guess what she's eating!

For the last couple years, we at the Piggy household have dined on human flesh for Halloween. A couple years ago, it was a free-range human, Timothy. He was treated well and ... well, I'll just pull a quote like I did last year:

Little Timothy was fed a natural diet free of growth hormones and antibiotics and was allowed to leave his cage and go outside and play for sometimes up to a few hours per day! And he lived four happy years before he was shipped off to the slaughter house and took a bolt gun to the head (really, the most humane way to kill a human raised for meat). We're pretty sure the bolt gun was painless. So don't go getting your undies in a bunch. He lived a good life. We're compassionate people here in the Piggy household.

Here's a photo of Anna feasting on the lucky little guy way back when.


And last year, we didn't have as much time on our hands, so we just picked up some human liver at a supermarket.


But this year, we've been trying to be more compassionate and eat more locally ... really adopt a back-to-the-land attitude toward food. So we raised some backyard cats. Here's Anna feasting on rice krispies and cat eyeballs.


Liam looked on in shocked horror. But he'll learn soon enough: If you don't finish your cat eyeballs you don't get any dessert.


Finally, here's Anna just taking it all in. She's such a foodie. She's my little Bourdain-in-training.


Have a Happy Halloween! I'll post some costume photos in a couple days.

Friday Liam #23

That's a skinned apple. He shaved some off with his teeth, but not too much. As with all things (especially food), he got bored with it after about a minute and wanted to do something else.

Anna Wednesday #22

Friday Liam #22

Fall in the Back Yard

The tree out back usually has some nice colors in the Fall. We didn't get the bright red this year that we have in years past, but the yellows are spectacular.




The kids are pretty freaking cute, too.

Anna loves pushing Liam in the swing, but I think he likes it even more.






And of course, some shots of the kids in the tree.






Yes, I had Liam sit on the tree, too. Don't worry. I had a hand on him.

Anna Wednesday #21

This will be funnier to the people out there who have known me within the last 10 years or so. The shirt that Anna's wearing is the one that I've worn approximately 1 out of every 2 days since my mom bought it for me back when I was a freshman or sophomore in college.

And yes ... I realize it's Thursday.

Veggie Nugget #30

"Children confront us with our paradoxes and dishonesty, and we are exposed. You need to find an answer for every why — Why do we do this? Why don’t we do that? — and often there isn’t a good one. So you say, simply, because. Or you tell a story that you know isn’t true. And whether or not your face reddens, you blush. The shame of parenthood — which is a good shame — is that we want our children to be more whole than we are, to have satisfactory answers. My children not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but also shamed me into reconsideration."

-Jonathan Safran Foer, from this piece that ran in the New York Times Magazine, adapted from Foer's upcoming book Eating Animals.

Really looking forward to reading this book. This will be the last nugget from it for a while, since the book doesn't come out till some time in November.

Veggie Nugget #29

"This isn’t animal experimentation, where you can imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Yet taste, the crudest of our senses, has been exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses. Why? Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to confining, killing and eating it? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it. Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals."

-Jonathan Safran Foer, from this piece that ran in the New York Times Magazine, adapted from Foer's upcoming book Eating Animals.

The Incredible Crawling Liam

Liam crawls!



This video was taken a couple weeks ago. I've been lazy. He's crawling a lot better and faster now.

Also, after he started to crawl he learned to roll from his back to his front. Most kids learn that before crawling. Anyway, now whenever we lay him down in his crib he immediately (even if he's already asleep!) rolls over and (if he's sleeping) wakes himself up. So we have to (gently, I assure you) hold him down for a few seconds (or sometimes minutes) until he goes limp. It would be funny if it wasn't so frustrating.

OK, it's still funny.

I just strapped him into his car seat for his afternoon nap. They usually last twice as long that way.

Veggie Nugget #28

"To give up the taste of sushi, turkey or chicken is a loss that extends beyond giving up a pleasurable eating experience. Changing what we eat and letting tastes fade from memory create a kind of cultural loss, a forgetting. But perhaps this kind of forgetfulness is worth accepting — even worth cultivating (forgetting, too, can be cultivated). To remember my values, I need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry."

-Jonathan Safran Foer, from this piece that ran in the New York Times Magazine, adapted from Foer's upcoming book Eating Animals.