From our friends over at Awful Library Books: The "Let's Talk About" series (which, today, includes "Let's talk about adoption, sex, and overdoing it).
Here's a few swaddling blankets, some free Similac samples, your checkout papers -- and would you mind letting us do a cotton swab through Junior's mouth before you leave? Strictly routine procedure....The government may have your kids' DNA -- and you don't even know it.
No child beaten on the behind: NYC teacher instructs students to settle argument with a classroom brawl.
The Boy Scouts in America turned 100 years old yesterday! Did you forget to buy it a card?
Wired ran an article — about as long as a scouting handbook — on the organization's centennial and wonders whether it's still relevant, despite the popularity of great-outdoors shows like Man vs. Wild and Survivorman. These days it seems being an Eagle Scout means little unless you commit a heinous crime, and "former Eagle Scout" fills the role or observational irony in the news story — that is, if "former altar boy" doesn't apply.
Though I was a Cub Scout and a member of a Webelos troop, I can't say I'd push Jackson into it. (I can't speak for Sasha becoming a Brownie, either.) When I was a scout, however, I was a proud member. For a couple of class pictures, I wore my uniform, which I felt was the dressiest thing I owned, and I took pride in the badges and beads and patches on my dark blue shirt. One day each week my troop or whatever it was called would gather at our den mother's house and do some kind of craft, usually involving papier-mâché, and one Friday night each month we'd hook up with the other troops in our "pack" for a ceremony in the elementary school cafeteria.
(The night would conclude by returning home to watch The Incredible Hulk and The Dukes of Hazzard. Friday nights would get no better than this until I was 17 years old.)
Eventually, after receiving my Bear badge, I became one of the Webelos, whose troop was run by the dad of one of my brother's friends. Webelos meetings meant Wiffle ball in the gym, a short break to discuss badges and pins, followed by more Wiffle ball. Once my brother and his contemporaries outgrew Webelos, the dads of two of my classmates took over. Instead of meeting in the gym, we reported to the cafeteria and for the entire session we were lectured to about actual scouting stuff, and I quit soon afterward. At this point, the uniform started to feel kinda lame, anyway.
If Jackson wants to join, and some of his friends are scouts, I'd probably consider it — maybe I'd be a "den dad" or something, even — but I'm not going to push him into it.
Wired mentions the one president who was an Eagle Scout. Considering it was Gerald Ford, I guess that means an Eagle Scout can do just about anything.Read more...
Back in the day, there were only a few ways to watch cartoons in the New York metro area. Before school or after school, cartoons ran on channels 5 and 11, and most cartoons were reruns that were 25 years old or older.
Because of the limits of cartoon availability, nearly every kid in your class watched the same cartoons as you, and some cartoon quotes were universally quotable.
Few cartoons were as quotable as the Chilly Willy cartoon Half Baked Alaska, which features Daws Butler, who voiced both Chilly Willy and his nemesis, Smedley. There's not a whole lot going on in this cartoon, except for the memorable parts at around 1:15 and toward the end, when Willy, who's usually mute, orders a stack of hotcakes (advertised on the window of Smedley's Snack Bar for $10 each! In 1965!)
To this day, Jenn and I re-enact the "Nice?" "Nice!" "More butter?" "Uh-huh!" back-and-forth between Smedley and Chilly Willy, so I figured Jackson would really enjoy the video.
He didn't. And after watching the cartoon for the first time in at least 25 years, I noticed that it's actually kind of boring. Oh well, we still love Billy Boy! Read more...
This headline from our hometown paper caught our eye (and since said hometown paper has implemented a moronic pay-for-Web-access model and you likely won't be able to link to it, we've included the first paragraph as well): "Helen Moritz expected a lot of things out of her children -- and no excuses. She'd supervise her three sons and three daughters as they did homework, correct their Long Island accents with gentle -- or not so gentle -- teasing and once criticized a guidance counselor for going too easy on her kids." If only all of our parents had been like the feisty Mrs. Moritz, the world would be a much better, Lawn-Guyland-accentless place.
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Screw Jessica Seinfeld and her sneaking-vegetables-into-everything BS: With this fine piece of kitchen literature, you and the kiddies will be making grilled sneeze sandwiches and bloody bug juice before you know it.
Hey, dummy: Principal suspended for mistakenly sending home "sarcastic" letter to parents. (Note: The CareerBuilder commercial above has nothing to do with this post, save for the "hey, dummy" in the middle, but it's one of my favorites, so I'm reposting it just for laughs.)
About.com's Working Mom's blog has a post today titled "The Best Jobs for Moms and Dads." The title is a bit misleading because it doesn't actually list any specific jobs. But the page did lead me to a number of comments about another blog post, "Does My Child Love the Babysitter More Than Me?"
For our kids and the woman who watched them from early infancy through about age 2, the answer was definitely yes.
We lucked into meeting the sister-in-law of one of Jenn's friends who'd been watching small children for a few years. We starting bringing Jackson to her when he was only a couple of months old, and though the woman was very loving, we worried about not seeing him for most of the day. It didn't help that we had had as much baby-raising experience as Jackson's lifespan, so in his mind, he was spending wonderful days with an experienced mom and then in the evening was forced to hang out with a couple of retard-parents.
Jenn was worried, as were some of the women who commented on the article, that Jackson would consider the sitter "Mommy," but at least his first word wasn't the sitter's name, which apparently happened to some of the commenters' kids.
Neither of us had a job that paid enough for the other one to be a stay-at-home parent, so sending Jackson (and then Sasha) to a sitter was something that we had to do. We were fortunate that the sitter was very loving (Jackson often didn't want to leave when it was time), and we felt that he really enjoyed the change of pace. I recall that when he and I had to spend a day together, I was so worn out from the feedings and lack of sleep and the day-to-day stuff that it was hard for me to get jazzed up for the actual "fun" part of hanging out. (Or, I'm just a lazy dad.)
For us (and the kids) the hard part wasn't sending them to the sitter—it was bringing them to daycare once they turned 2. We were worried that they'd be so used to the extra attention (the sitter watched maybe three or four kids at most, while in daycare the class sizes were larger) that they'd have a hard time adjusting.
(In fact, they did, at least initially. When they began staying with the sitter, they were so young they got used to the idea very quickly, while dropping them off at daycare was quite a mess the first week or so.)
But somehow, and I don't know how, our kids seemed to figure out who Mommy and Daddy were, even if sometimes I tried to forget myself. Read more...
Ok, stay with me here: 15-year-old girl with no vagina gets pregnant after giving some dude a BJ. She then heads to her job at the local watering hole (how she's working at a bar at 15 is puzzling, but that's incidental to our tale) and gets stabbed in a knife fight, resulting in her previous john's spermatozoa to leak from her knife wounds from her GI tract into her uterus. Still with me? Phew!
You're supposed to get the munchies after smoking pot, not after ingesting it: Teen pulled over by cops tries to swallow his ganja stash.
BAD PARENTING: And you think John Edwards is a menace: South African prez fathers 20th child -- with friend's daughter. Isn't that what friends are for?
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