Playful Platypus

O faithful readers, welcome to the Playful Platypus, my new blog!

Why the platypus? For roughly the past year and a half, my daughter has informed me that the platypus is my favourite animal. This was news to me. It used to be the aardvark. But the platypus is sufficiently bizarre to satisfy the qualities I seek in a favourite animal.

Platypus: An egg-laying, rubber-snouted, beaver-tailed, reptilian-gaited, electrosensory, nocturno-crepuscular, carnivorous, burrow-dwelling, venomous mammal believed by its early foreign discoverers to be an elaborate fraud, resistant to captive breeding and protected throughout its range.

(Aardvark: A four-front-toed, long-eared, tube-mouthed, skinny-tongued, tough-skinned, sharp-clawed, fearless mammal native to Africa, initially thought to resemble pigs, with constantly growing teeth.)

Why the need for a new identity? When I first established this blog, it grew out of the desire to track the journey of life with Giggles, with all its quirks and qualms, as well as to trace the path that would bring us to Poppet (and he to us). Seeing as “onourway” (the name of my former blog) was already in use in the world of blogs, I needed to provide some additional specifications. In the rush of establishing an identifier in the five minutes I had given myself to get the job done, I chose to specify whose way we were on: “r and t.” However, now “m” has joined us (in spirit, if not yet in body), thus the initial naming convention no longer fit. Not to mention that I never really liked “On Our Way” – too boring, too plain, too dull.

So over the past few months I pondered what new identity to assume, and decided to throw our lot in with the platypuses. Seeing as life in this household is full of fun, a playful platypus seemed fitting. (Actually, my first choice was Purple Platypus, but that moniker, alas, had been appropriated. I spent several hours searching the dictionary for another relevant “p” word. After considering many more exotic possibilities, I decided that “playful” captured most fully the style and identity I wished to establish.)

All historical entries from the old blog have already been reposted here (appearing under “October 2007”). As you can see, this blog has a new “look and feel” with the addition of several new page elements – a list of subject labels, clocks for important locations, links to blogs and websites of interest, and a web counter.

So I welcome you to the Playful Platypus: An exploration and examination of life as an out-of-the-ordinary, road-less-travelled, global family of three with roots in China, Ethiopia, Oromiya, Holland, Poland and Ukraine.