Andy Smallman

So yesterday I mentioned the “cute-off” taking place on Facebook between a friend and me. I post a cute picture of one of my kids, she posts a cute picture of her kid. Each picture ups the challenge a notch. Now others are joining in, taking sides, playing along. Throughout the day today I had a big smile on my face because of it.

In response to my post yesterday, my friend, whose name happens to be Sarah, introduced me to the concept of being “snuggle-punched.” Crediting a friend for the term, she wrote, “It’s that moment when you’re just about to leave the house or switch gears in some way, and your kid sucks you back in with their irresistible cuteness…you just have to drop your stupid adult agenda and snuggle!”

In today’s photo, that’s Melinda in the center having been snuggle-punched by Ella, on the right, and Olivia, Ella’s cousin, on the left.

So last night I stumbled across a picture of Chloe when she was just over a year old and posted it to Facebook, admitting that things don’t get much cuter than that photo. In response, feeling a challenge of some sort had been declared, a friend posted a photo of her adorable son and challenged me to what she dubbed a “cute-off.”

Fair enough. Let the games begin!

In response, I present this photo of preschooler Ella, dressed, as she described it at the time, as a “cowboy-girl.”

Oh, and here is another entry point to Amazon (meaning anything you buy at Amazon having entered their site from this link nets a tiny proceed to Melinda’s and my Kind Living project). You’ll see how the item I’ve chosen is related to today’s post. 🙂

Today’s photo is a partial screenshot from the web stats link WordPress provides for this blog. It’s an overview of yesterday’s blog visitors broken down by country. There were 49 unique visitors (or views) from inside the United States, 3 from France (hello Boudeaus & Bertails!), 1 from Canada (hi, Chloe!), and 1 from Uruguay.

Uruguay? Who in Uruguay is looking at this blog? Do you think it was a lost visitor, or someone who clicked on some link somewhere that takes you to an unknown site (like Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button)?

On a side note, I paid the 30 bucks needed to make it so ads no longer show up on this blog, at least for the next 12 months. Want to help me offset this cost? If you use Amazon.com, you could go there from the link below, one that I’ve customized to include a special code that provides Melinda and me a small percentage of any item purchased when people connect to Amazon through such a link.

And what is this link? A travel guide to Uruguay, of course!

I’m just back from attending a concert. I’m done with those big venue gigs. This was in a person’s home and sold out with 30 people. The musician was somebody I *discovered* while we were in France, a guy named Jeremy Messersmith. If I could sing and write songs, I like to think I would sound like him. He was wonderful and very friendly. Don’t believe me? Check out this song, one he played on the same guitar tonight. The only difference? I bet he was wearing shoes when this video was created. The house tonight was a shoes-off zone.

Ella has always had these dazzling eyes that sparkle with kindness and friendliness (Okay, sue me. I’m her dad. I don’t have to be impartial). As a little kid, people were regularly drawn to her. In fact, when we moved into our house in Seattle in 1998 (Ella was not quite 2), our next door neighbor said, “I think an angel just moved into the neighborhood.”

Now that she’s 15 (16 in December), the same overall cute factor might not always be there. I mean, what person can be as cute as they were at age 2? But her eyes have retained a friendliness and a dazzle.

As many of you know, I’ve been offering interested people the opportunity to consider and engage in acts of kindness as part of Seattle’s Compassion Games. My idea, given these are games and all, is to have people think of themselves as secret agents performing missions of kindness. Well, this morning I offered the fourth and final mission.

My kindness class illustrator Fish Astronaut has been extra busy creating images for the missions. He’s created a different image to accompany each of my messages. With three messages per mission and four missions, that’s twelve new images!

Today’s picture is the image Fish created to go along with the new mission, to partner up with a kindness buddy. Thanks, Fish! I really like it!

Some things to know about this photo:

• it must be around 10 years old
  
• it was taken inside a Baskin & Robbins ice cream shop in Bellevue, Washington
  
• Chloe’s teeth have a blue hue because of the ice cream she just ate (it was probably rainbow sherbert)
  
• Ella is missing some teeth
  
• I’m wearing my grandfather’s wedding ring
  

Questions or comments?

This picture really looks like a caricature of me, don’t you think? It was taken just a few minutes ago, as I was stretching in preparation for going out for my Wednesday training run (yeah, it’s that time of the year when I’m running outside, training for the Seattle Marathon, at night in the dark, hence the bright orange windbreaker). When I took a look at the picture, my head seemed pretty big in relationship to the rest of my body.

Yeah, well, some people have told me I have a big head. But I thought they were speaking metaphorically…

Come to think of it, my dad has a big, as in large, head. It’s hard for him to get hats that fit. The same was true for his father. And, yes, I have a large, as in big, head.

Big head. Smallman.

After last night’s silly post, I just want to take a minute to assure everyone that I’m just fine. Everything’s okay.

It’s fun to get a little silly at times and write a post that might not make much sense, one that has some inside jokes and all, right? I had fun writing it, and that counts for something.

In fact, it reminds me of the time we traded Melinda for Rick Steves… Ah, those were the days, back during the sabbatical when life was simple.

To prove how normal everything is, I just took this picture of myself with PhotoBooth on my Mac laptop. Melinda loves it when I look over the top of my glasses like that. Catch the sarcasm? 🙂

So, yeah, Melinda and I were in Metropolitan Market over the weekend and saw a display for the Perrin family wine. Made me think that we should get some kind of discount, given Perrin is our niece and all. You know, family?!

I tried explaining this to no one in particular, thinking that’s all it would take to get the discount. But I might as well have been talking to myself, given how much good it did me (Hmmm… Come to think of it, I may have been talking to myself. Come to think of it further, some of the best “good” I’ve gotten involves talking to myself – “That’s right, Andy. You really are a nice person.” See!).

In hindsight, maybe it was the cold medicine doing the talking. I told Melinda I really didn’t want to go the store. But she wanted the company.

Reminds me of the time in France when we went to this vineyard…