I suck snot through a tube, so I shouldn’t be one to laugh. Oh, but I laughed and laughed at this video.
When you’re squirting water through your nose, don’t smile like you’re having the time of your life.
1. The Bathroom Song (the fun begins halfway through):
[The video is from rathergood.com, a mish-mash of odd stuff.]
2. What to do if your child has super powers (a FAQ for concerned parents)
3. Tips for a yard sale success [I've written from the buyer's perspective]
Pretend it’s Father’s Day links:
4. Second-chance family: adopted by a man who used to date her mom
5. Raising a princess single-handedly - an unexpected solo parenting story [link via Daddytypes]
6. Catch: a Father’s Day Tale:
I have three beliefs about children’s books to share. They are not open to rational argument or counter examples or people pointing out exceptions to the rule. They are my deeply held feelings.
For months now I’ve been contemplating a new type of book nameplate – the area on the front page of some books where a parent writes his child’s name.
Even if you disagree with my beliefs, you may still embrace aspects of my nameplate. I am interested in your suggestions for improvement.
Statement of faith: Books are for sharing.
“As a child, we didn’t have that many books. Most of my reading was from the library, which had limited choices. There were no used book sales, let alone yard sales. So, every book was precious and most of my books had my name carefully written inside as a very proud
possession.” –My aunt.
I don’t begrudge a girl growing up in the 1940s writing her name in her books with great pride, nor today if her circumstances make books scarce. I don’t expect parents to have thousands of books in their personal library. They could exclusively use a public library and that would be great.
But if more people today believed books are for sharing, maybe scarcity wouldn’t be as much an issue. Maybe we could see pride in ownership disappear. Own a book? Huh? Yes, I mean that as a good thing.
New alternate title: Watch a blogger piss off his entire readership with one article.
The quickest way to sully a children’s book is to write your child’s name in it. Your family only temporarily owns books. In a few years you’ve sold, gifted or donated them to other people or organizations.
New children now have your wonderful books, but when they open the covers they are reminded the books aren’t quite as special. They are used.
Don’t get me wrong. I love used books (I own thousands). I love them so much that I’m tired of seeing people permanently scar books that will have numerous other “owners” for the next 5 to 50 years. Yeah, I own a few titles from the 1960s.
Included below are ten ways people deface children’s books.
1. Plain Jane Name – I included this child’s name inscription because it’s cute. In reality, 99% of the time it’s parents who write a child’s name in a book, usually when the book is being borrowed or taken to school. In some cases a phone number is included too.
I write on masking tape and stick it to the front cover — easily seen and easily removed. Theft is not a concern because a stolen book is immediately usable no matter what or how I write in a book.
My 5-year-old daughter has become infatuated with writing forms and taping them to our living room wall as part of her pretend play.
And by forms, I mean documents she has Mom and Dad fill in with personal information. She tapes a pencil to the wall.
This week’s form was a drawing contest which required us to supply our name and cell phone number and to recreate a stick figure house displayed on the form.
For the past few days I’ve been reminding my daughter while placing my hand on her shoulder, “Next week Mom will be away at a conference for four days, so it will be just me taking care of you. I know you’re going to come to the right decision on this contest.”
Assured of victory, I would leave and come back into the room a moment later with my arms raised, running around yelling, “I win! I win!”
It became something of a running joke as she began to understand what I was really saying (always with a smile).
This morning she held the big award ceremony, giving a blue ribbon to my wife.
As you can see by the photo, I assisted my daughter. She did the cutting and coloring, and asked me how to spell certain words because she knows her phonetic spelling isn’t always accurate. Her reading comprehension is a little lacking, too.
It’s supposed to read, “You win yay!” The deeper meaning was lost on her. And no, my wife does not have a unisex name that begins with A.
Bonus: She gave Mom her drawing back, but she’s keeping my drawing to hang in her [imaginary] home. I do believe I won this contest on every level imaginable.
A year ago I wouldn’t have given any thought to A Day’s Work by Eve Bunting, a children’s picture book. A cursory glance at the cover art and flipping the pages indicates a story about the immigrant experience of day laborers in the southwest US. Oh, but it’s so much more.
Now, here’s a back history disclaimer. I don’t begrudge these folks, legal or illegal, doing hard labor that most others refuse, and certainly understand their wish for a better life.
But I never really gave much thought about these people, nor considered them something to teach my daughter about, aside from a brief conversation on César Chávez Day.
Then this spring we decided our 4-year-old daughter would attend a language immersion elementary school where instructors teach half the day in English and Spanish the other half. [I'll spare you the bilingual-education-rocks talk.]
Now, day laborers are not a topic I planned to cover when supplementing her education. They’re not representative of the peoples of Central and South America, but are a highly visible and abused class of people in the US who happen to speak Spanish.
And given that, in my 85% white community, she may be exposed to racist reactions to Latinos, hey, better I educate her now than she be blindsided by cromags getting pissy because she’s bilingual, or worse, has non-white friends.
Alright, so here’s how this book, A Day’s Work, surprised me. And yes, spoilers follow.
“The Scrunch Bottle Bib is the new revolutionary way to protect infants from spillage during bottle feeding. Catching the drips and spills that traditional bibs leave behind, the Scrunch Bottle Bib attaches to the bottle instead of the infant and catches spills BEFORE they reach the tender neck area.”
That’s right. The Scrunch Bottle Bib by Wee Baby was invented by “a proud aunt of four.” Auntie had to hold a paper towel to her nieces’ tender neck areas to clean up milk spillage, until one day she realized… there has to be another way!
The bib attaches to a bottle with a Velcro strap and it cradles the baby’s chin underneath the nipple. The bib is cotton, one-size-fits-all, machine washable and flips over for more usage. It retails for $8 and you can use the “FTPR616″ coupon code for 10% off your order until August 1, 2009.
I’ve never seen it, but The Learning Channel has a popular reality TV show called Jon & Kate Plus 8. It features the ups and downs of parenting the couple’s fraternal twins and sextuplets. Jon is apparently a full-time dad.
I’m not so out-of-the-loop that I didn’t see tabloid stories in the grocery store check-out aisle a few months ago about Jon being involved in an alleged extramarital affair. They denied the allegation, but now the confirmed news is that they are getting divorced.
Jon and Kate plan to keep filming the TV show in the same home, with each of them taking turns living there. Ohhh, sure, as if that’s going to last long. If they don’t put an end to the show, the viewers will.
This unfortunate matter made me ponder about the TV show’s poorly conceived title. Jon and Kate’s names are in the title, so they have to be in the show. What now?
Thankfully, the annuals of television history point to an answer. In 1986, Valerie Harper starred in a hit comedy called… Valerie. In the summer of 1987 she had a disagreement with the show’s producers and Valerie’s character soon died in a car accident. And thus the show was renamed The Hogan Family. They brought in Sandy Duncan as a motherly aunt figure and claimed an electrical fire burned the family home down — thus explaining why the family doesn’t display pictures of dearly departed mom. Damn, that’s cold.
So, anyhow, I was reading this news about Jon and Kate and began postulating aloud about what I would name a new TV show featuring the eight kids, but maybe not both parents.
My name: Eight is Enough (yeah, I know it’s taken)
My wife’s name: Kate is Enough
Damn, she’s good.
Do you have alternate names, or perspectives on the show? Tell me how much I’m missing as I live life uncabeled, clinging to my prized collection of Doctor Who DVDs.
Babyglow is the brainchild of a father of a 17-year-old son. A groundbreaking parenting product idea came to him one morning as he woke up on a couch following a party the previous night. He knew in his heart of hearts he would design Babyglow.
I’m not kidding. That’s the version of events described in the Suffolk Free Press. Meanwhile, the Daily Mail reports he got the idea from watching a TV documentary. Maybe he didn’t get off the couch that morning.
Babyglow are baby pajamas that change color based on the infant’s body temperature. Sold in blue, pink or green, the suit turns white when it rises above 98F (37C). They’re expected to sell for £20 ($33) per pack. How many in a pack? Photos indicate two garments, but who really knows.
When I first heard “color changing pajamas” I thought it would be nice to have a garment that indicates when an infant is overheated at night due to over-dressing… you know, in case you don’t notice the sweaty palms, moist hair and hot skin. So it was a bummer to realize the garment is targeted at feverish tots.
You want to know the gender of your unborn child, so you:
A) Get an 20-week ultrasound when medically appropriate.
B) Get a totally unnecessary mall 4-D luxury ultrasound.
C) Five weeks after conception, buy a $25 home kit that involves mailing away a blood sample to be processed for $250. [correct]
Upon learning your baby’s gender from a home kit, you:
A) Pick your baby’s name and start calling him by his name while speaking to your belly.
B) Bond on a deeper level with your baby’s and its genitals.
C) Buy your nursery gear and baby clothes totally decked out in a stereotypical fashion for your expected gender.
D) All of the above. [correct]
Email me
Subscribe to Thingamababy's RSS Feed
