Morjes!

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

Tiger toes

When Sterling was a few days old, I was sitting outside with him waiting for the girls to come home on the school bus. I happened to be looking at his toes and I noticed the weirdest thing on his right foot: his second and third toes seemed to be partially connected. Then I looked at his left foot, and those second and third toes seemed to be partially connected, too!


As soon as I could, I googled it. And it is a thing: syndactyly, twin toes, duck toes, or tiger toes. Awesome.

Wikipedia says this condition sometimes runs in families. So we took a closer look at all of our toes, and it turns out that Magdalena has slight tiger toes, too!

Also: ME. I just learned something new about myself at age 32. This is even weirder than my crooked nostrils (ask me about it sometime. Or I'll just tell you: one of my nostrils is horizontal and the other is more vertical. But you only really notice it if you're, you know, looking at my nostrils, which means you have to be below me, looking up at, again, my nostrils. This has happened, though - a kid at church once blurted out in the middle of a lesson I was teaching, "woah, your nostrils are crooked!").

For a few moments after our discovery of Sterling's tiger toes, we mourned the lost opportunity for him to ever wear those five-finger shoes. Otherwise, though, his tiger toes are pretty neat! So are Magdalena's. And mine.

Things Sterling has smiled at

October 25th, outsourced