A winter family tradition: Ogre Socks

Photo of two regular Christmas stockings hanging from a mantel and one giant one 60 inches tall that touches the floor.

I vividly remember the morning of one December 25th when my brothers and I woke up early and quietly whispered between our respective doors waiting for the 6 a.m. start of Christmas. We weren’t allowed out of our rooms until 6 a.m., and had even broken out my father’s ancient Official Boy Scout Twin Signal Set the night before and hooked up the wires so we could send Morse code messages between our rooms — not that any of us knew Morse code.

After we made the mad dash down the hallway to our family room… and after we found Santa had left a smorgasbord of toys laid out all over the room, not just under the Christmas tree… one of my brothers walked into the unlit, unoccupied living room and yelled, “There’s more in here!” and we found a second room equally as filled with Christmas gifts.

That memory was marred in subsequent years by disappointment. It was the only year Santa gave us two roomfuls of toys.

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Six toys I’m not buying from Amazon.de

Score one for high school networking. My wife keeps in contact with a then-German exchange student she met during her senior year. He’s buying a DVD of the Le Premier Cri documentary from Amazon’s German outfit and shipping it to us. There’s no English subtitles, and our Deutsch is quite rusty, but so what.

I seized the opportunity to browse through Amazon.de’s toy section and found one interesting toy that is not sold by the manufacturer’s American distributor. What toy do German kids play with, but is not appropriate in America? Sorry, you’ll have to wait for the review in a few weeks. Rest assured, it’s something both my 19-month-old and 5-year-old can play with.

In the meantime, here are a few toys I decided not to buy…

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Why is it?

We know that children willingly accept that Santa’s elves create all of their favorite toys that are commercially packaged in cardboard and molded plastic, complete with company names, marketing slogans and flashy graphics. Why is it that when Santa forgets to remove a price tag on one toy, the jig is up?

Music Review: Putumayo’s Family Christmas

Caution! Awesome auto-playing Christmas music when you click-through…
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Giveaway: Putumayo’s Family Christmas CD

Image of the A Family Christmas CD.

A copy of Putumayo’s awesome A Family Christmas CD is up for grabs for three lucky winners. [Read my review. Caution: audio will play.]

To enter, use the comment form to post a comment on this article telling us:

1) The name of your favorite, or most hated, Christmas gift you received in your childhood.

2) A link to a webpage containing a photo of this vintage toy, OR describe the toy for us enough that we can make a mental picture.

3) Include your valid e-mail address in the “Email:” field of the form.

The deadline is 11:59 p.m. Tuesday, November 24. Three winners will be selected at random and notified via e-mail. You’ll have 48 hours to respond or the prize might be awarded to someone else.

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Naked Eye Astronomy for Parents

A little knowledge can make you into an astrophysicist in the eyes of your child. Jack Horkheimer is your inside guy for artificially inflating your intelligence.

I got to know Jack in my youth via our PBS TV station. His 5 minute show came on after Doctor Who and before the station went off the air, usually around 12:30 a.m. on Sundays. He’s an odd fellow, seemingly old with a bad comb-over, or maybe a toupee, or worse — his hair was real. And there was a certain rashness to his voice that was mesmerizing while you’re half asleep and he pummels you with naked eye astronomy information too fast to ever be useful. Naked eye? Yeah, looking at the night sky without a telescope.

Last week’s episode discusses Tuesday’s meteor shower:

Thank goodness in 2009 Jack is still here, still doing his show, and he still has the hair, albeit most likely dyed now. The only significant difference is his show used to be called Star Hustler and now he’s a tame Star Gazer. Apparently kids googling the phrase Star Hustler were seeing inappropriate content. No joke. It’s in Jack’s FAQ.

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@#$%^&*!

Q: What’s worse than your furnace and water heater both breaking on Thursday?

A: Taking a cold shower Friday night.

On Saturday my answer will change to: Seeing the bill for replacing a 25-year-old water tank with a tankless heater. Whew, we sure got some mileage out of the old one, that’s for sure.

I’m behind on mailing contest winners, and have a couple more contests to announce, and plenty of stuff waiting to be reviewed. Gah!

In the meantime, chew on this completely unrelated parenting factoid: Time-outs as a behavior control mechanism for toddlers are the result of research conducted on rats.

“In addressing the question of how to suppress or eliminate a particular behavior, like pressing a lever or pausing between two tasks, researchers working with rats and other animals developed the tactic of time out from reinforcement, which is the full and more accurate name of what most people know as the timeout. The procedure consists of a brief period in which the animal cannot receive reinforcers for the usual reward-earning behaviors, such as getting food by pressing the correct lever. From timeout in a laboratory cage came timeout in a corner of the playground, classroom, or living room.”

The article itself is long-winded and dry, but I thought I’d share that delightful little tidbit to make your day a little more pleasant.

Baby Link Roundup #8,611: Que Sera Sera

This is a performance of Que Sera Sera by the Srisangwan School for children who have disabilities in Thailand.

You can read a little about the school and the video. I have some reservations about this performance being used in an insurance commercial, and some Youtube commenters have criticized the song as embracing fate, as opposed to teaching these children the goal of accepting no boundaries.

I see a more benign message: it doesn’t matter why you have this disability while others do not. Don’t sit around feeling crappy about your situation. Accept yourself and get busy making the best of your life. You know, it finally puts Forrest Gump in perspective for me. Life is like a box of chocolates…

And now, some links:

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Armistice Day

Here’s another not-baby-oriented idea from this baby blog, a bigger picture notion for when your child is old enough to learn about America’s Veteran’s Day.

In the United States, the holiday began in 1919 as Armistice Day, intended to remember and commemorate the ending of World War I and to thank its veterans. In 1938, it was made a legal holiday: “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated and known as ‘Armistice Day’.”

Technically, it starts on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, marking when the cease fire was enacted on the Western Front.

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In Photos: A Japanese Halloween Parade

Photo of a Dracula father pushing a Snow White daughter in a stroller decked out to look like a pumpkin carriage. Mom is also dressed as a vampire.

Snow White in a pumpkin carriage, pushed by vampires

Friend of Thingamababy Buz Carter visited Tokyo last month and brought back some awesome photos of a Japanese Halloween celebration: the Harajuku Omotesando Halloween Pumpkin Parade.

Buz explains:

I believe it was a Sunday when we saw a kid with his mom, both in costumes walking on the sidewalk — so we followed them. Is that creepy?

We tend to travel like that. We hear a drum or singing, or see anything interesting — and follow it for a few blocks. That’s how we found the Zinneke Parade (in Brussels, Belgium) and a gazillion other festivals. We have good luck this way and prefer doing this over always following Lonely Planet or a highly itineraried approach to tourism.

Anyway, we saw kids streaming into this large building. We asked about it, liked the sound of a toddler and grade schoolers’ Halloween parade in Tokyo and so hung out waiting for the start.

Suddenly drums come out and the parade is off, five groups of several hundred kids looped this street.

It was held in the high-end shopping district of Harajuku Omotesando, complete with dancers, drummers, odd mascots and tons of well dressed toddlers and grade schoolers. The parade was begun 27 years ago by Harajuku’s amazing “all-things-kids-could-want” toy store Kiddy Land. Try walking into any of its six toy and game filled floors without dropping several thousand yen.  No, really — I dare you!

Afterward, we think maps being handed out listed stores that gave out gifts or treats to costumed kids, much like trick-or-treating (sadly) is for American kids now — a trip through retail land.

But it was a blast.

From the looks of it Disney, equals Halloween for a lot of these kids, but there were even more vampires and witches.

Halloween night was marked with lots of parties and American expats (hundreds) loitering in costumes around Shibuya, a major congregating point there in the city, but that was it.

While talking about Halloween — bless Japan, they’ve taken any pastry that would have held red bean paste and crammed it with lovely pumpkin puree, lightly sweet. If France and Japan had a pastry competition Japan just might win. Fantastic foods.

Seeing pumpkins and ghosts in store windows was very common, but in a Japanese spun way. I’m so glad they’ll run with it; it will be interesting to see what they do.”

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Bibs to Go coming to a parking lot near you

Bibs aren’t just for infants with poor motor skills anymore. We adults can wear bibs too, and I don’t mean just when we’re dining at Red Lobster. Now we can wear bibs while downing Whoppers and Big Macs.

There is a bib for today’s adult, a bib to protect us while we eat alone in the parking lot outside our favorite fast food restaurant and while we stuff fries in our mouth while driving on the interstate. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.

In the olden days, a guy might have just pilfered a handful of toilet seat covers from the McDonald’s restroom, tossed one around his neck and stashed the rest in the glove compartment for future lunchtime escapades. But no more!

A businessman with a very large dry cleaning bill thought, there must be a better way!

BibsToGo are oversized, absorbent, waterproof, disposable and recyclable bibs that slip over the head and rip off easily. Napkins did not adequately cover [the guy who invented BibsToGo], and like most professionals, he found himself spending up to $1,000 a year on dry cleaning bills to remove stains. There are over 300,000 fast food restaurants in the US and eating and drinking while traveling is increasing. Multi-tasking can lead to making a mess of one’s self. BibsToGo.com wants to help people show up neat, as first impressions mean more now than ever before.”

For the low, low price of $5.99 and $3.99 shipping per box you can net yourself 12 burger bibs.

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Teaching children to shut up

My daughter’s kindergarten class received its H1N1 inoculation yesterday. Parents were invited to attend at the appointed time to help ease any fears. About one-third of the parents showed up and my daughter had no problems whatsoever.

Oh, but things weren’t totally peachy. The parent(s) of at least one student declined the vaccination. A problem arose when this child began telling classmates beforehand that the vaccination would make them sick, that it would hurt them, and boy oh boy, they shouldn’t get vaccinated.

And thus, at least one of the children broke out in tears (we know because we spoke to the parent of the shaken child).

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Dolphin-attended water births

Behold a video clip of a dolphin-attended water birth from Le Premier Cri, a documentary about birthing experiences around the world.

Sadly, I’m a product of the American monolingual education system. I’m unable to efficiently google for dolphin birthing centers located around the world. However, one such center exists in Hawaii and was profiled on the Penn & Teller cable show Bullshit! If you operate a dolphin-attended water birthing business, whoo boy, you should never agree to appear on a show called Bullshit!

Penn & Teller chalk up the subject of their dolphin episode as, “It’s all about people who believe dolphins have super powers.” You can read the counter-argument on the company’s website.

My wife turned me onto the whole dolphin birthing thing when she was researching birthing videos and found the Le Premier Cri film trailer. Unlike the above clip that appears to occur in a controlled pool, the Hawaiian business seems to use “tide pools” and “hot ponds” adjoining the Pacific Ocean.

The following Bullshit! clip succinctly captures the type of person attracted to this phenomenon. Warning: Yes, Bullshit! contains a fair amount of profanity from its hosts.

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Book Review: How Whales Walked into the Sea

The whole world is a family.” –My 5-year-old daughter on the beautiful message she gets from evolution, all of us derived from a common ancestor.

Cover image of the book How Whales Walked Into the Sea.

I previously reviewed Our Family Tree: An Evolution Story, and while it was a good introduction to concepts behind evolution, it’s a bit esoteric for young children.  I was lucky to recently come by How Whales Walked Into the Sea by Faith McNulty and illustrated by Ted Rand (who by the way began illustrating children’s books at age 70).

I know some Thinga-readers don’t believe in evolution; maybe I’ll have something more interesting for you tomorrow.

What’s exciting about this book is that it focuses on a single animal, an unlikely animal. We think of life starting in the oceans and migrating onto land, so it’s fascinating to learn about an animal that reversed course about 50 million years ago. Each page features a large color painting of an ancient ancestor from which whales descended, telling a little about the animal. You see the animals as they progress with slow adaptations over time, the legs getting shorter, the feet broadening, the jaw elongating, the tail widening, and so forth.

The last few pages focus on whales of today, explaining their differences and some of the vestigial structures that remain. For example, the bowhead whale still has tiny leg bones hidden inside its body with no exterior hind legs remaining.

I only wish there was an entire series of books like this one that so keenly explain the concept of small changes over time.

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Winners: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Photo of the Burger King grand prize gift pack.

The grand prize gift pack will be new, not previously played with by a 5-year-old like this one on my couch.

Behold the winners in the Meatball King Giveaway (Burger King and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs Movie). Thank you to all who entered, sharing one of their favorite parenting websites with us.

The winners:

Amy H. from Indianapolis, Indiana — The Burger King gift pack shown at right consists of a huge popcorn container, Burger King movie toys, a hardcover copy of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, a $40 AMC Theatres gift card and a $20 Burger King gift card.

My Boaz Ruth from Del Valle, Texas — My personal AMC Theatres $40 gift card.

Meadow from Salt Lake City, Utah and Sarah from (??)  — My extra personal softcover copies of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

Sorry I don’t have hometowns for every winner. I only e-mailed them notifications this morning.