The Giving Geeks challenge this month was easy one for me, a donation inspired by a personal experience. We’d had a pretty recent personal experience I was still thinking about: my son’s hospitalization at Seattle Children’s Hospital, first for surgery to repair a blockage between kidney and bladder, and then for complications from that surgery. Jeffrey’s life was never in danger but he was in a lot of pain and he had to go through a lot of tests and procedures until they were able to figure out what the problem was.
So I knew I wanted to donate to Seattle Children’s, where Jeffrey was taken very good care of, so I checked their donation page and found that they could use handmade items. The item that stood out to me were finger puppets, which they use after blood draw pokes. After all of the procedures Jeffrey went through, I knew first hand how important something to distract a child from the discomfort and pain could be. So, a bunch of octopedes finger puppets it was!
Then I got to wondering…could I use these for any other challenges? I was a bit stuck on the Nerdology challenge, because I forgot to get a picture of the Converse baby booties I was going to tie to joggling. So, I tried a search for “extreme sports octopus”…well, of course! How about octopus wrestling? In fact, as I’m currently living very near the home of the World Octopus Wrestling Championships (held a few times in the mid-1960s), it couldn’t be a more fitting choice. No, I’m really not making this up.
Oh, and why “octopedes?” Shouldn’t it be octopuses? Or octopi? Which is correct anyway? Well, I’m going with octopedes…and working on my British accent: http://youtu.be/wFyY2mK8pxk.