Experiments With Jello Pudding

Countdown to Delivery: 26 days
Due date: 4/18/10

I saw it on the ceiling yesterday.  It's still there.  Jell-o Pudding.  Yup, chocolate Jell-o pudding.  I'd forgotten about it until Marie mentioned it.  It's now three years old.  Guess I should paint over it.

This is why I keep a journal, and now a blog.  Because I take things that cause me pain and I bury them so deeply that even my Proctologist can't find them.  Actually he's a Colorectal Surgeon now.  Seems he was the butt of a lot of jokes with the old title.  Either way, he knows his shit.  But back to my story.

It seems Taylor, when she was young, was already demonstrating her science acumen.  Just like her mother the Geneticist, she likes to conduct experiments.  This particular day it was a test in kinetic energy.  The test subject was the Daddy.

For this experiment we need Daddy to make baby's favorite desert, chocolate pudding.  Daddy will put the pudding (I'm feeling like Vanna White here) in a mini-Pyrex serving dish, just right for little Taylor.  It is only filled half way.  Taylor will attempt to eat said pudding with a malformed baby spoon just for kids learning to use spoons.

Taylor decides to get a little pudding on the spoon and then lean to the right.  She holds the spoon dangerously over the edge of the high chair.  The Daddy, knowing that she often tests Newton's laws, gets up and moves to the other side of the table in order to intercept the spoon.  The spoon is dropped and Daddy grabs the test spoon just inches from the floor.  The Daddy does the happy dance, proud of his cat like reflexes even at his advanced age.

Little does he know that the spoon was just a decoy.  The real action is going on over on the left hand side where baby, using TWO hands in a joint effort, has lifted the pudding bowl into the air and moved it over the side of the high chair, exactly 3.72 feet above the genuine simulated wood flooring of the kitchen.  The stop watch is activated...

The d-a-d-d-y  s-p-r-i-n-g-s  i-n-t-o  a-c-t-i-o-n (all in slow motion) to run to the other side of the table and grab the pudding as it falls to its untimely death.  The baby laughs and laughs and laughs.  As Daddy nears the impact point he realizes that the Jell-o Pudding is falling at a faster rate than his lard butt can move.  Somewhere, a dog barks.

The pudding has been dropped at the precise (+/- .005mm) spot and impacts the floor so that the bottom surface of the bowl lands EXACTLY flat on the floor.  The pudding, which now takes the full impact of the force, decides to have an "equal an opposite reaction" and erupts like a volcano.  The pudding (which only fell 3.72 feet) now accelerates to an unbelievable speed upwards toward the ceiling (Perry's Law of Pudding, Harcourt & Brace, 1984).  Within fractions of a second the Daddy begins to stand up (we're still in slow motion here) and the pudding reaches the ceiling.

The pudding explodes onto the ceiling in an unbelievable demonstration of physics and Jackson Pollock.  The Daddy who is now moving rapidly upwards realizes that what goes up must come down...and begins and outward correction of his trajectory.  Unfortunately the speed of the returning pudding is more than enough to compensate for the slow moving Daddy.  We now have pudding face.  (Speed back up to normal again).  Somewhere in the distance a dog barks.  Again.

My new little one will probably be into water dynamics.  I better go buy that new pipe snake that I've been thinking about.  The toilet will be stopped up, I'm sure.