I like to think I’m pretty smart.

Sure my head will occasionally get its crires wossed and I’ll make reference to “Anne of Green Gables” when I really mean “House of the Seven Gables.”  But, for the most part, I’m a relatively erudite cat.

These are a few of my favorite things.

As such it’s been quite a while since I’ve been confronted with so many words that I don’t understand.  And so today, I’ve comprised a small sampling of these interesting vocables.

Colostrum – Really?  So a woman’s internal duct work somehow knows what it should brew for the infant, and at what stage?  (This doesn’t even factor that whole foremilk/hindmilk thing.)  That’s amazing.  I wonder if it’s a function of some kind of circadian zeitgeber (“Lo, it has been eleven moons since the arrival of Princess Daphne…  Fetch the druids.“), or just hormone signals based on the total elapsed time from the baby’s birth.

Lanugo – Never too soon for a wax, yo.  Although I’m not sure what’s more unsettling, having a Wookie baby, or having a baby with no lanugo at all, which means that it all fell off in the womb and that she ate it.  *shudder*  Which brings me nicely to…

Meconium – A poop so nice, they named it twice.  Also used as a diaper-based Rorschach test.

Fontanel – This is a bit too close to “font” for my liking, and conjures up etymological images of cranial hippocampi erupting from the top of my child’s noggin.  As a fun side-effect, however, I can only hear this word in Colin Meloy’s voice.

Vernix – No.  Just no.

Apgar – Sadly this has nothing to do Jaqen H’ghar, and is apparently some kind of high score metric for newborns.   Also entirely unrelated to “Rygar,” the completion of which took up an entire month of my summer when I was 12.

This guy is terrible.

See you tomorrow.

j.s.