From Wikipedia: “The male seahorse is equipped with a brood pouch on the ventral, or front-facing, side. When mating, the female seahorse deposits the eggs in the male’s pouch, which the male then internally fertilizes. The male carries the eggs until they emerge, expelling fully-developed, miniature seahorses in the water.”
Buy related: Mister Seahorse by Eric Carle.
Take an author with a degree in physics, throw in some NASA experience and an interest in children’s books and what do you get? You get children’s books reviews about space exploration containing madly detailed lists of technical flaws.
Marianne Dyson was “one of the first ten women flight controllers, working as a Flight Activities Officer in Mission Control” before she left NASA to raise her children. Because she artfully avoids telling us the true number, I’ll guess it means she was the tenth female flight controller, not the ninth or eighth or first. A precise statement would help clarify the issue.
No, I’m not being an ass. I’m exploring what it’s like to be a precision writer. Consider this book:
I Spy A Rocketship, intended for preschoolers:
Spyler and CeCe are the book’s main characters (a child and a dog) and they have to find numbers to get the rocket ship’s countdown going. At the outset, we’re not told whether CeCe or Spyler is the child, a really troubling oversight, and it just gets worse.
CeCe says he/she can’t wait to blast into space, but when Spyler says they need to check out their countdown machine first, CeCe says they can go to the moon only if they are home in time for dinner. This statement made me not care if CeCe made it to the moon or not. He/She is the kind of character who is not willing to take a risk — even delaying dinner — to accomplish anything. That’s not the kind of attitude I associate with astronauts.
In that respect, Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things that Go is an excellent book because we can look to Dingo Dog’s temerity for risk taking as he speeds away from Officer Flossie, evading the fuzz and escaping unscathed from every car pile-up caused during the pursuit. Way to go Dingo Dog! You’re tenacious!
But on an accuracy scale, there’s NO WAY Gold Bug could get inside a different moving vehicle in every scene. After the first couple pages, I’m like, hey Gold Bug, that’s impossible, so I’m not going to look for you anymore because you’re a big fat lie.
Despite the moon book’s deficiencies, I Spy a Rocketship scored a 3.5 out of 6 on the reviewer’s accuracy scale. It’s primarily a look-and-find sort of book, but the reviewer rightly points out: did they have to make CeCe and Spyler dance at the end when they returned from the Moon before dinnertime? A real Moon trip takes longer than that!
I was even more unnerved that the reviewer kept referring to Luna as the Moon, like how people refer to Sol as the Sun instead of Sol. It’s Luna from the Latin. Moon is a generic popularization, and a rather dull one at that. Dammit people, details matter!
For the record, CeCe is the dog.
In the left corner, we have heavyweight sixth grader Matthew Wimpey slugging away with Baby Safe Deluxe, a sanitary cloth that can stick to and cover an entire public restroom changing table surface. You know, sort of like a disposable potty seat cover because you’re a germophobe.
In the right corner, we have lightweight 5-year-old kindergartner Grace Coller pushing a one-piece baby sleeper with color-coded crotch snaps. She aims to cut down on parental snap confusion, that awkward situation where you’re finishing up your baby’s crotch snaps and you discover you have one extra snap missing its partner.
Sadly, further details are lacking on these two fledgling products as they were only recently unveiled at youth invention fairs in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Greenville, South Carolina.
I’m skeptical of the boy’s invention because what does a male, let alone a sixth grade boy, know about changing tables? Meanwhile, that little girl’s crotch snaps will only serve to efficiently tell you that you’ve screwed up. Sure, you could snap the crotch snaps first using the color coding, but who among us can summon the Herculean strength required to accomplish such a feat? That’s why missing snaps are always found when finishing up the crotch!
But don’t listen to me. What say you Thinga-readers? Which of these amazing inventions will crush the competition? In coming to your opinion, feel free to fill the absence of detailed information about these products with whatever you feel comfortable making up from your imagination.
Japanese football team Cerezo Osaka takes on 100 children:
It kept me fascinated for five minutes. Fast forward to 14:55 to see the final score. Note that the video controls include a brightness setting (the sun icon).
My rambunctious almost 2-year-old son learned to climb out of his crib a couple months ago. We put him in a toddler bed, which is great, except he feels no need stay in bed once he’s alone in his room.
There is one other small problem. He easily defeats the baby-proof plastic bulb gadget on his door knob. He grabs it with the full width of his hand from the side and pulls down. The door is often open in less than 10 seconds, and we don’t always hear it through our baby monitor.
No measure of discipline has worked, owing partly to his age and partly because with his not talking, it’s difficult to know what’s going on inside his head.
As told by a fictionalized Werner Herzog (a famous German film director):
Madeline:
Madeline is a little girl at a girls-only French boarding school run by nuns. She develops appendicitis and gets rushed to the hospital, leading to this gem:
The girls eagerly enter Madeline’s room,
Curious for what medical horrors they might see,
But there are no horrors, only delights.
Gifts from a far away father,
Retail approximations of affections
That will never replace an authentic father-daughter relationship.
My 23-month-old son’s speech language pathologist is leaning toward diagnosing him with “apraxia of speech.” In short, an apraxic kid can be bright in all respects, but when it comes to speech, his brain has difficulty coordinating mouth and speech movements.
I’m in the early stages of learning about apraxia. I asked Michelle Stevens, the coordinator of the Childhood Apraxia of Speech Facebook group, to tell her story. It’s one that I think falls under a ‘best case scenario’ and so is something I cling to in thinking about the future.
Here is her story:
NPR did a decent job of summarizing how “NBC’s broken Olympic coverage manages to annoy absolutely everyone.”
My own take is quite simple. I find the way sports are covered in America to be viscerally grating as TV reporting covers the action at a glacial pace and seems compelled to spend as much time as possible showing you interviews and other content that isn’t actually the game or competition you sat down to watch.
Case in point, the subject of the Olympics came up one morning as our daughter wanted photos in the newspaper explained to her. So, we decided to show her the figure skating competition that would be aired early in the evening on TV.
That NBC was delaying the broadcast past her bedtime and that it would have been more convenient to watch it earlier in the day live was beside the point.
Here’s something I’m really curious about. When my first child was born, our hospital had a bulletin board near the front desk of its birth center. It was absolutely stuffed with baby photos tacked up by proud parents. Some scenes were photographed in hospital beds, others at home or at a park.
When you enter the hospital, you’re bound to spend some idle moments at the front desk. You naturally gravitate toward the sea of happy baby photos on the wall.
When my second child was born, the hospital had hung a second bulletin board, again already packed with baby photos. Some parents had clearly revisited the hospital to post updated images of their kids.
I enjoyed showing my now 4-year-old daughter her own photo on the wall, and the photos of her friends.
Recently, I heard through the grapevine that the hospital is undergoing a system-wide sprucing up, and first to fall were the bulletin boards. The photos? Tossed in a cardboard box and carried away.
The grand insightful plan is for some photos to be relegated to the confines of a photo album that will be available to visitors.
I can’t imagine the judging criteria that must go into building such an album.
The idea is monumentally misguided (read: idiotic) for a multitude of reasons, but I’ll reserve my vitriol to pointing out that these baby photos represented success stories. Instead of removing the images, the hospital should be redesigning the hallway to have wall-to-wall bulletin boards to make a hallway of joy (positioned just high enough to be out of reach of toddler hands). But, whatever.
I’m curious whether this is a small town hospital thing, or if bigger hospitals allow such patient-induced displays of happiness. Does your hospital display baby photos brought in by prior patients?
“We, the adults of the last 4 generations, have blessed our children with the destiny of a shorter lifespan than their own parents. Your child will live a life 10 years younger than you because of the landscape of food that we’ve built around them. [...] The statistics of bad health are clear, very clear.” –Jamie Oliver.
TED is a small nonprofit devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading.” You likely know TED for its speaker series videos. This year’s TED Prize winner, for “one wish to change the world,” is British chef Jamie Oliver. His wish is to reform school cafeterias and teach cooking as a life skill.
“It’s profoundly important that every single American child leave school knowing how to cook 10 recipes that will save their life. Life skills.” –Jamie Oliver
He had a book out last year, Jamie’s Food Revolution: Rediscover How to Cook Simple, Delicious, Affordable Meals. I’ve ordered a copy and will let you know what this non-foodie thinks.
If your American toddler attends a preschool in sync with your local elementary schools, chances are your kid(s) are home this week.
My daughter decided to celebrate the holiday with a log cabin.
“Doo you thingck this is a good hous I doo! Its the best. –My daughter’s message for the blog post”
When I was a kid, there were two uses for Lincoln Logs. One, to build a tall, thin tower we called the Empire State Building and then throw all the extra log pieces down its pipe. Two, to build a home or maze for our hamster.
Our daughter’s set is composed mostly of logs kept from my childhood, apparently culled from several sets by different manufacturers because I had to weed out incompatible logs.
My wife bought me a new set a few years ago that came with plastic windows and figurines… useless in my opinion, but kids obviously gravitate to them. The green guy isn’t a leprechaun. He’s donning a heretofore unseen new uniform for forest rangers.
The door and window pieces do present an extra building challenge — how to keep them upright during the building process. But, I’m afraid the doors and windows are so narrow they are incompatible with everything except dwarf hamsters.
It’s The New Yorker’s caption contest. The top three submissions will go up for public voting on the New Yorker website. The top submitter wins a signed print of the cartoon with his or her caption. The contest is held every week or two. I’ve been playing losing for a year or so. I mention it here today because, hey, there’s a baby this time.
Be sure to opt-out of their spam on the submission form.
Comments are turned off on this post because you’re supposed to submit your captions to The New Yorker.
I recall from my youth that Valentine’s Day in elementary school involved mass distribution of store-bought valentines. With the exception of this awesome little robot and a few other handmade valentines my daughter received, store-bought is still the standard.
It seems the corporations have succeeded in making Valentine’s Day another Halloween. The valentines she brought home on Friday were carried in a sack laden with candy. And, of course, the selling of candy began in January because the stores know we adults will buy some and eat it, and then buy some more when the holiday actually grows near.
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