### who doesn't like bananas?

seriously. everyone likes bananas, right?

it's official. marcus HATES bananas. i have fed him bananas now on 6 different occasions, always making sure they were perfectly ripe (not bitter or overly sweet). tonight i even blended it with some rice cereal and breastmilk into a smoothie of sorts. no dice. each time i attempt it, he gags and makes a face like he's smelled something rancid.

stay tuned for a photo of his expression for utter disgust....i've just got to capture it!

fayebean said…
I guess its not really a surprise, but Joe hates bananas. I even tried to sweeten the deal in banana bread with chocolate chips and after he ate just the littlest bite he made a face similar to the one you are describing.
blissful_e said…
I didn't like bananas for a long time, but I've gotten to where I'll eat them in a pinch (we always seem to have some in the house!).

Some people like them whole, not mashed (and vice versa). The two versions do taste different.
Natalie said…
Guillermo hates plain bananas, too. He says they smell. However, he will eat banana pancakes (my favorite if you add chocolate chips), banana muffins, and banana smoothies.
ah ha! thats my boy! xo lizzie
mamahoward said…
I know that face! Although sadly, Ian makes it for bananas, applesauce and peas (otherwise known as everything that we've tried to feed him except cereal).

### On the Height of J.J. Barea

Dallas Mavericks point guard J.J. Barea standing between two very tall people (from: Picassa user photoasisphoto).

Congrats to the Dallas Mavericks, who beat the Miami Heat tonight in game six to win the NBA championship.

Okay, with that out of the way, just how tall is the busy-footed Maverick point guard J.J. Barea? He's listed as 6-foot on NBA.com, but no one, not even the sports casters, believes that he can possibly be that tall. He looks like a super-fast Hobbit out there. But could that just be relative scaling, with him standing next to a bunch of extremely tall people? People on Yahoo! Answers think so---I know because I've been Google searching "J.J. Barea Height" for the past 15 minutes.

So I decided to find a photo and settle the issue once and for all.

I then used the basketball as my metric. Wikipedia states that an NBA basketball is 29.5 inches in circumfe…

### Finding Blissful Clarity by Tuning Out

It's been a minute since I've posted here. My last post was back in April, so it has actually been something like 193,000 minutes, but I like how the kids say "it's been a minute," so I'll stick with that.
As I've said before, I use this space to work out the truths in my life. Writing is a valuable way of taking the non-linear jumble of thoughts in my head and linearizing them by putting them down on the page. In short, writing helps me figure things out. However, logical thinking is not the only way of knowing the world. Another way is to recognize, listen to, and trust one's emotions. Yes, emotions are important for figuring things out.
Back in April, when I last posted here, my emotions were largely characterized by fear, sadness, anger, frustration, confusion and despair. I say largely, because this is what I was feeling on large scales; the world outside of my immediate influence. On smaller scales, where my wife, children and friends reside, I…

### The Force is strong with this one...

Last night we were reviewing multiplication tables with Owen. The family fired off doublets of numbers and Owen confidently multiplied away. In the middle of the review Owen stopped and said, "I noticed something. 2 times 2 is 4. If you subtract 1 it's 3. That's equal to taking 2 and adding 1, and then taking 2 and subtracting 1, and multiplying. So 1 times 3 is 2 times 2 minus 1."

I have to admit, that I didn't quite get it at first. I asked him to repeat with another number and he did with six: "6 times 6 is 36. 36 minus 1 is 35. That's the same as 6-1 times 6+1, which is 35."

Ummmmm....wait. Huh? Lemme see...oh. OH! WOW! Owen figured out

x^2 - 1 = (x - 1) (x +1)

So $6 \times 8 = 7 \times 7 - 1 = (7-1) (7+1) = 48$. That's actually pretty handy!

You can see it in the image above. Look at the elements perpendicular to the diagonal. There's 48 bracketing 49, 35 bracketing 36, etc... After a bit more thought we…