The story of Bacon
Posted on July 9, 2006 - Filed Under Uncategorized
There’s so much to catch back up on from the last week and a half, so I thought we would start with something easy and cute. Last weekend (1-3 July), our friends Jack and Jill and their kids Lauren and Ryan came to visit. It was a full scale vacation for them; they planned to visit with us, see and spend a little time in Asheville, and go out to the Pigeon Forge & Gatlinburg areas of TN. We joined them for the first leg of the trip, which included a trip to the hillbilly haven of Dollywood, the only amusement park in these here mountains.
The Dollywood visit was good, except for the 100 deg. temperatures. Speaking of the heat, it’s what took Erin, Maggie and I off of the train ride which does a five mile journey around the park. We got on the train and felt like we were going to melt, so we decided to get off and meet the others when they were done. So, we desperately sought out some air conditioning. (Just for the record, I am the heat-wimp; Erin and Maggie were holding up pretty well but I was crying about it the whole day. I don’t know how I made it 100 days in the desert.) We found ourselves in this little store (inside what they call the Heartsong Theater), the kind they have all over amusement parks. They sold a wide assortment of stuffed animals. Now, we already have MORE than enough at home and Maggie’s not even old enough to appreciate them. But we are also prone, just like anyone else, to thinking they are cute and also to wanting to make our baby happy (sad how we think that is achieved by buying her things…whatever happened to sharing with her the priceless things the world offers but can never be purchased or acquired?). So, I was playing around with these toys and found a cute little pig. Just for fun, I gave it Maggie to see what she would do. She immediately took hold of it, both with her hands and mouth, and would not surrender it. Were I the big tough and gruff guy, I might have just taken it from her, put it back in the barrel from which it came, and never given it a second thought. Alas, I guess that’s not who I am. So, basically, I was manipulated into my first toy purchase.
We were going to name the pig Dolly (for obvious reasons) but opted for Bacon instead, mostly because it made us laugh. It did occur to me later that if Maggie forms an attachment to this thing, if she doesn’t destroy it through saliva and gnashing of teeth, she will likely never eat real bacon herself or knowingly allow us to. That’s a problem: As Erin and my Dad will tell you, I love bacon. Oh well, parenthood is about sacriface 
See the photo gallery for some cute photos of Maggie and her new friend.
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Why did you name it bacon, now gramma will never get to eat bacon if she forms that attachment. Next time buy her a frog, call it legs since I would not eat frog legs.
[…] We have also enjoyed introducing the Magpie to many ‘firsts.’ We’ve gotten around to mentioning some of these (amusement parks, hiking, and laughing) but we’ve neglected to make the time to write about others. One of the more significant was her first experience camping. Our friend Rob came to visit the first full week of July. He’s an outdoorsy kind of guy, so I got it in my head for all of us to go camping at a campground near here. All in all, it really wasn’t that great of an experience, at least from a comfort perspective. Erin and I had purchased a couple roll up Thermarest sleeping bag pads and they just weren’t enough for us to sleep well. One of the reasons was the policy of the campground that campers must sleep on the durable (read–hard) surfaces instead of on the grass. I think that if one uses the pads as intended, i.e. in the woods on the dirt, they would probably perform much better. Rob didn’t have a great time either because his air mattress deflated during the night. Other than that, though, we had a good time and will do it again (hopefully many times) but not before coming up with some other comfort measures for sleeping. Maggie seemed to enjoy herself, watching the fire burn, staring as she does at her dog, listening to the relative silence of the night, and hanging with the three of us. […]
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