Morjes!

Welcome to my blog. I write about fitting in, sticking out, and missing the motherland as a serial foreigner.

My petite, chubby baby

Magdalena has always been full of surprises. She surprised us with her weight when she was born (8/7, compared to Miriam's 7/5). I was caught completely off guard by her red hair, which has since strawberry-blonded up quite nicely. And now I've finally accepted the fact that she has wide feet.

It's the weirdest thing. She is very petite, usually falling in the 4th percentile for weight. So what little chub she does have seems to collect in her feet. They are so fat! When she first started wearing shoes - all of Miriam's hand-me-downs, of course -  I thought maybe her feet were just bigger than Miriam's had been at the same age because Magdalena seemed to grow out of them faster than her sister had. But then I realized that her feet weren't too long for the shoes, they were just too fat. I got out a pair of sandals that Miriam wore until she was 2.5 years old that were technically Magdalena's size but when she tried them on, the front of her foot was so fat it couldn't fit under the vamp.

Last weekend, we finally embraced Magdalena's awkward feet and bought her her very own pair of brand-new shoes, size 5W. The W is for WIDE.

She loves them. They fit her so much better than any other old shoe I was trying to squish her feet into. I can't help but laugh when I look at her wearing them because they look so...orthopedic. But it warms my heart to see her run and play in comfort and in all her chub-footed glory. I just wonder what other surprises she's got up her sleeve.

Literary heroines who ended up with the wrong man

While I was vacuuming