Anyone who frequents the Fabulous Adventures of Listgirl blog should be able to make sense of the title of my post. Christine and I met through scrapbooking back in 2008 and became fast friends, and in 2009 we flew out to San Diego to blind them with our  pasty white midwestern skin and geekiness. Her blog regularly features snapshots from their daily life, accounts of their fitness goals and accomplishments, and – my favorite – a whole lot of food photos. Todd and Christine don’t mess around when it comes to food, and it’s one of the biggest motivations we had for flying our lily white carcasses out there last year. Have stretchy pants – will travel.

Out of the masses of food photography that Christine featured, a single trend started to reappear that came to be known – in our house – as “The Todd Shot”.

We. Love. The Todd Shot.

Many people try to capture the essence of The Todd Shot, but few succeed.

Todd goes for it 100%. Mouth wide open, hunger crazed eyes – it’s a tough shot to pull off. It’s about 10% love of food, 90% complete lack of self-consciousness.

See what I mean? I wasn’t “all in”. I started laughing so I couldn’t pull off the crazy eyes, I was self-conscious about the Internet seeing my dental work. Todd Shot FAIL.

I couldn’t even look him in the eye. I didn’t DESERVE to.

Later that same trip, Todd had to right my enormous WRONG by attempting the Never Before Seen High Risk Of Being Bludgeoned By A Life-Size Vegetable (or Fruit?) Todd Shot – which will forever go down in history as one of the funniest moments of my life. Watching him stalk this giant tomato in order to achieve the shot was one of the highlights of my life.

The other day when I was working from home I sat down to eat lunch with Nicholas. I made “seven ingredient sandwiches” because Nicholas likes to have a name for his food and I’m really creative like that, can’t you tell? He and I don’t get many chances to sit down and have an actual homemade lunch together. When he’s out of school we pick up a lot of food on the go (bad mom!) and on the weekends our eating schedule is all over the place. While we ate we had a chance to talk about what he was looking forward to this coming school year and his favorite highlights of this past summer – and because I appreciated the moment so much I ran into One Little Bird World Headquarters (a.k.a. my new office) and grabbed my trusty Nikon.

And Internet, I am here to inform you that out of the ASHES OF MY SHAME has risen a phoenix. Granted, it’s just a little baby phoenix – but I have hope. Because completely unprompted, and despite the fact that he has never read the Listgirl Blog (sorry Christine!), he struck this pose:

We still need to work on the crazy eyes, but I figure a few days of starvation will cure that. You have to SUFFER for ART, child!