Colorado 2019: Muscles

To finish out the great world tour of 2019, the Mild Wife and I ended up in Colorado the week after the Kazakhstan trip. If you've been following along, this year has included trips to two different continents away from home. This wasn't the plan at the beginning of the year, but somehow, this is where we ended up. Still, I've been lucky to be able to go on all these trips, so I'm not complaining at all. In fact, I'm blogging about it to share some of the fun.

For this particular trip, I was visiting family, so it was all play and no work. I left my work stuff at home, and the Mild Wife and I threw ourselves into spending quality time with my sister, her husband, and her kids. There were lots of fun moments, but the general memory I have was of interacting with our older nephew. His younger sibling is still a baby, so while we had some very cute moments and pictures with the baby, we spent more time talking and playing with our nephew.

Since the Mild Wife and I enjoy to cook (occasionally using unexpected ingredients or new cooking toys), we figured we'd pitch in there. If we could do a good chunk of the cooking, that would mean less for the other adults. Also, we figured that we'd try introduce a few different recipes, since we've found a couple of fun recipes that we like. If we made something that just so happened to include spinach in it and the little ones ended up liking it, that would be a win.

Of course, cooking tasty food is only half of the battle when it comes to little kids. You also have to convince them to try it. Some kids are more adventurous than others, but either way, you do have to get them to stick the food in their mouths. Well, we tried various things, but one of them was an old standby: we told our nephew that if you eat healthy food, you grow to be big and strong. As an aside, it never ceases to amaze me just how motivated little kids are to be "big." I mean, I get why that's a thing, but it's practically a primal urge. Little kids just want to be big kids. It's what they do.

So, in the process of explaining how healthy food makes you big and strong, I had the random idea to flex my biceps (like so). I don't have huge guns or anything, but I figured that if he saw the muscle "growing" it would help to bring the message home. The Mild Wife saw what I was doing, so she played along and flexed her biceps, as well. I don't remember which one of us said it, but we paired the physical action with a quip along the lines of, "see? Muscles."

The Mild Nephew, for his part, smiled and nodded along. I know that it somehow stuck for him, because a day or two later, he repeated the same basic motion and said, "muscles!" Now, I said "the same basic motion" for a reason. He understood the general idea of bringing your wrists closer to your shoulders in order to flex the bicep, but he didn't quite understand that the point of flexing is to show the bicep. So, he brought his hands to his chest, sort of as if he was doing bicep curls. Imagine this without the bar:

Courtesy of https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bicep_curls_with_barbell_2.svg

Yeah, he basically tucked his arms toward himself and exclaimed "muscles!" because that's what he had learned from us. The Mild Wife and I chuckled, and played along. We flexed the "right" way to show him again, but we let him go about flexing his biceps however the heck he wanted. Of course, we were both highly amused by this, so it became a running gag between us. In fact, that's probably going to be one of the defining memories from that trip.

All of this, however, brings me to a very important lesson from this: don't take bodybuilding tips from me. It'll all end up all sorts of chueco.