Oh, the dots.

Yes, we were affected by the AquaDots recall: Bella had got a big set of them, along with some expansion packs. Truth be told, she preferred directing OTHERS to the tedious work of arranging the beads on the trays... and actually her favorite part of the whole thing was loading the beads into the hoppers, and turning on the drying fan.

In case I need to back up a bit: AquaDots are little colored beads that you arrange on a grid to make pictures, then you wet them, they melt slightly, bond with eachother, and your art can be lifted off the grid and proudly left around the house to be tossed out eventually.

The scandal is that the manufacturer (or more precisely, the manufacturing subcontractor in... wait for it... CHINA) substituted one of the chemicals for a cheaper one. The problem being that that cheaper chemical essentially turned each dot into a powerful drug called GHB - which causes blackouts and hallucinations.

Given that we have a kid in the house who puts everything including dead centipedes in his mouth, our risks of him eventually ingesting one of these beads was quite high. So we had to get rid of the toys.

Bella cried for 20 minutes, pleading to keep them, and in the end, we did keep some of the non-bead plastic bits (which will NOT cause blackouts). She also insisted that we write a letter to the company to make them promise never to take a little girl's toy away again.

Ok. Another Bella Quote:
Last night, Pamela and I were talking about how the word "Foxy" has fallen out of common usage, but how it was the ULTIMATE gauge of hotness when we were in highschool.

Pamela related that the popular girls would greet eachother in the halls with a "Hey, Fox!" She then lamented that that was NOT a greeting she and her friends could use with eachother.

Bella said "well, you then could probably say 'Hey, Turkey!'"

We were paralyzed with laughter. She really didn't have the concept of the meaning of "turkey" in this context... but landed on it quite randomly. And hilariously.