If you see something, say something
Overheard.
6-year-old girl: Mom, what does that [automated bus announcement] mean “You are the eyes of New York”?
Mom: Well, it means we should look out for anything dangerous. Like an unattended package left somewhere.
7-year-old girl: Well…I see something dangerous…
Mom: Oh?
7-year-old: Snow! Someone could slip in it.
6-year-old: I see something dangerous–a bus! It could hit someone.
7-year-old: I see something dangerous–a tree! It could fall down.
…
7-year-old: Mom, I see something really dangerous…
Mom: What.
7-year-old: Cardboard in the street!
6-year-old: Someone could trip on it.
7-year-old: (Singing) “Cardboard in the street! Cardboard in the street! Nothing more dangerous than cardboard in the street!”
For Andrew (ala Sheila)
Thinking about grief, thinking about my brother.
For Andrew
in response to Photography and Parenthood.
The first few years, I was really just a social drinker.
From The Comments
You gotta beget while the begetting is good.
adoption in Haiti
“Some parents I know have already given their children to foreigners,” said Adonis Helman, 44. “I’ve been thinking how I will choose which one I may give.”
&
“One (8-year-old) girl was crying, and saying, ‘I am not an orphan. I still have my parents.’ And she thought she was going on a summer camp or a boarding school or something like that,” Willeit said.
“I’ll go through it with you line by line.”
I just keep on liking this guy.
Thanks, Shannon!
Childhood
…is an experiment.
(via)
ritual desperation
Every week my dad played the lotto. It was a ritual. He’d pull into the small parking lot of the liquor store around the corner from our house and walk straight to the counter. Not much was said. Last week’s ticket would be passed across the counter and scanned while my dad put his numbers on a new ticket. Sometimes, if I was with him and had opted not to wait in the car, he would buy a scratcher and hand me a quarter. With the rough edge of the quarter I’d scratch off the flaky silver coating.
As far as I know he never won a dollar. I imagine that in that moment, as he passed the old ticket over to be scanned, he would think about the money he was about to win. My dad would imagine his new life. The one without the shitty job and the hard work putting four kids through private school required. The lottery would hand him the keys to his new life.
Eventually, he would get a new life. One day, in one of those surprising twists you knew was coming the whole time, he would leave. My mom would cry but mostly because she didn’t know what any of it meant.
By now, he’s found a new liquor store. And, while he probably doesn’t play our birth dates anymore, he dreams of a new escape, from his new problems, as he waits for the clerk to scan his weekly ticket.
A Christmas Classic
I bet I’ve posted this before, and I bet a bunch of you have seen it before — but it’s a Christmas Classic, so it’s time to watch again.
(John Waters. Female Trouble.)
Quote out of context
I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language.
quote out of context
Need I add that one of the Hirsts is entitled “In this terrible moment we are victims clinging helplessly to an environment that refuses to acknowledge the soul”?
Bentley Baby Seat
Making the grade isn’t about race. It’s about parents.
After a recent state report on test scores in California schools, Jack O’Connell, the state’s superintendent of instruction, said the gap is “the biggest civil rights issue of this generation” — a very popular phrase in education circles.
But focusing on a “racial achievement gap” is too simple; it’s a gap in familial support and involvement, too. Administrators focused solely on race are stigmatizing black students. At the same time, they are encouraging the easy excuse that the kids who are not excelling are victims, as well as the idea that once schools stop being racist and raise expectations, these low achievers will suddenly blossom.
While I agree with the article’s premise*, I found myself wondering why the emphasis on fathers. I’d hedge that it’s having two parents, two incomes, and two role models that make the difference, and not just some problem with ’soft’ single mothers.
* I spend my forty-hour work week advocating for more parental involvement to close the aforementioned achievement gap.
little drummer boy
San Antonio police are investigating the wounding of a man after his elderly father allegedly opened fire when the victim refused to stop drumming. Police said the son, in his 50s, suffered a non-life threatening head wound early Friday while at the home the men share. Police said his 83-year-old father was detained on an aggravated assault charge.
Police said the son, who was grazed in the head, ran down the block to call for help.
pregnant-belly art
Seriously, I didn’t know which to pick.
“Painting the belly to look like a ball works really well,” says Greenawalt.
all the single babies
Like some rogue Baby Einstein offering, the black-and-white “Single Ladies” video provides visual and aural stimulation well suited for the under-2 crowd. Babies love high-contrast colors, steady beats and smiling women’s faces. “Single Ladies” has all of these things. It’s almost as if Beyoncé designed it for children.
There’s always gotta be the asshole.
“What putting babies in front of this video does is deprive them of hands-on creative play, which is the foundation of learning,” says Dr. Susan Linn, director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and author of The Case for Make Believe. “Babies aren’t asking to be put in front of these videos. They’re not congregating in front of the watercooler to talk about Beyoncé. They don’t get anything from the video that they couldn’t gain from parents who play music around the house.”
on stage
When my little brother was in kindergarten he stood with his class, in front of the entire school, holding a pumpkin. My mother stood in the back of the room with the other proud parents. The pumpkin fell from his hands and broke on the stage. Tim yelled, “fuckin’ pum’kin!”
I wasn’t there but I remember it like I was.
echolocation for the blind
Seven-year-old Lucas Murray, blind since birth, has mastered the ability to navigate without his parents’ assistance.
The incredible change, his mother said, is owed to a technique called echolocation, similar to the method used by dolphins and bats, that allows Lucas to paint a picture of his surroundings using sound he creates himself.
To “see” the world around him, he clicks his tongue on the roof of his mouth and listens to the echo that bounces back. From the sound, he can make out the location, depth and shape of objects around him, allowing him to navigate even unfamiliar areas.
Social justice
via Cosmic Variance
Guppy
A Dutch court ordered authorities to take temporary guardianship of a 13-year-old girl on Friday, delaying her plan to sail solo around the world until psychologists can assess her capacity to undertake such a risky voyage.
Her Papaw and Her Gran. Central Florida. Early 1970s.
Picture of a picture. Camera set on text mode. Colors “revived” in Photo Filtre.
This from M*****, on Flickr, who writes:
I don’t know much about cars. Is this my uncle’s Nova?
Papaw was born in Iuka, Tishomingo County, Mississippi in 1915 and raised in Pleasant Site and Florence, Alabama and in Hayti, Missouri. In the 1920 census his family were living in a railroad camp where his dad was working on the railroad. The census taker wrote in the margin “not on any road”. His mother had 12 kids and died young of cancer. His father remarried twice and had 8 more kids for a total of 20. Papaw never went to school. He learned to hunt and fish and trap and ran moonshine. My mom said he had a talent for being able to fix things with practically nothing. I guess he had no choice. He was a hard drinker and a philanderer. He died from malignant hypertension a few years after this pic was taken. A few months before he died he told me that I was a “mistake to be born”. I was 6 years old. My mom said he wasn’t right in the head but I believed him. Truthfully I’m glad the old bastard isn’t still around. I know I would never let him be around my kids if he was.
I’m sorry to do this to you
The Peekaru — like a Snuggie, but creepier.
Lies and Damned Lies
Last year a post by a dad about the lies he told his three year old sparked a lively thread on metafilter about the lies parents tell, the lies we cherish and the morality of lying to kids. The kid is now four and the dad has posted a new round of lies. I wish my parents had told me more lies like this when I was a 4.
Steps for Attaining Baseball Happiness
Josh Wilker over at Rob Neyer’s blog on the never-ending pursuit of happiness:
1. Buy a pack of baseball cards. For best results, pay no more than a quarter and make sure the pack has a hard stick of gum sliding around loose inside. If packs long ago stopped costing a quarter or less and no longer include flour-flecked sticks of hard gum sliding around loose inside, the attainment of happiness may be impossible.
When I was ten or eleven, my parents and I went to Woods Hole for a vacation, and once or twice a day my dad would give me a buck or two to get me out of their hair. It was supposed to be to play video games or get a MAD magazine or some taffy or, ya know, a super ball to break someone’s window with or something like that. But I just kept taking those dollar bills and going down to the drugstore and getting individual packs of TOPPS baseball cards.
I came home from that vacation with something like seven hundred new baseball cards and an awful lot of very pink gum stuck in the treads of my sneakers. I don’t remember Woods Hole very well. Great vacation, though.
Meet the Flockers’ Pets: Kitten A & Kitten B
This morning I adopted two kittens, as yet unnamed.
My family had guinea pigs when I was a kid, and I’ve enjoyed living with several housemates’ cats, but these are my first pets as an adult. I’ve always felt that I was destined to become a crazy cat lady, but “I’m not responsible enough to have pets,” I’ve said. I don’t know what’s changed, but all of a sudden here we are.
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