Facebook Parenting
Sesame Street: Maurice Sendak “Bumble-Ardy” Animation
Inspired by Josh’s Maurice Sendak post (and by Casey’s link to the “Fresh Air” interview with Sendak).
from the comments
A ground crewman who worked on my father’s WWII plane told me their B-26 Marauder was known as the “whore of the skies.” I feel like I can’t say the rest of his quote on this family wire. It crashed a lot. So use your imagination. This was about 15 years ago, during a ceremony for a large marker with the names of the men associated with Flak Bait when it was displayed at Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum. This old fella said this to me right in front of Miss Nell, who smiled politely and said, “Okay, well now…” and took my arm and hustled ME off.
from the comments
And I should point out that the Lego Technic sets that I had as a kid are still actively developed, you just wouldn’t know it walking down the lego aisle at your local toy store.
And that brings up an even bigger point, which is that the internet has freed the long tail to go live in cheap ecommerce space, rather than cutthroat toy store shelves. If there’s a particular brick you need, there are official and unofficial places to get it. Whole communities of people online trade designs for their new transmission gearbox.
I’d argue that there’s never been a better time to get your kid interested in legos, male or female.
Have you seen this?
Wait until about the 4:45 mark…
from the comments
My parents are a doctor and nurse respectively and both would like to donate their bodies to science. They both agree that they would not like any medical intervention to keep them living longer. Also, my dad has tendencies to not get medical attention when needed. I was a day away from being admitted to a hospital with pneumonia, as both parents thought I just had an upper respiratory infection. I’d like to see an article about children of medical professionals and their thoughts about dying.
dream name
The young man, the photographer hired by the insurance company, said his name was Keith. Keith Carradine. I thought that was a pretty odd choice on the part of his parents, even by dream logic.
On waking, I recalled that our neighbors the next street over from Dutton Drive had named their daughters after movie stars. Lana. And Rita. But their last names were not Turner. Nor Hayworth.
Clusterflockers with Children…
…is there a book you wouldn’t want your children to read?
headline of the day, II
Trent Arsenault, Sperm Donor, Gets Cease Order From The FDA
Excerpt with minimal context
She looked up at him with a question in her eyes. “Did you get the graham crackers?”
“Yes,” he answered.
She moved toward him in her old slippers. He thought they looked like rabbits.
tweet of the day
Milwaukee on bed-sharing
Milwaukee Health Department’s Safe Sleep Campaign
How To
I tied a tie after consulting You Tube. My efforts were acceptable, even though I did not master the Full Windsor.
I said I needed a photo before he took off to the pre-party. He was grumpy. “But why? You got a picture before I went to last year’s winter formal.”
an iPad that doesn’t work
headline of the day, II
Kindergartener brings crack pipe, meth for show-and-tell
The London Riots
Word.
Via Alan Phelan, who wrote: 21.40 Matthew Moore, the Telegraph’s assistant news editor, filmed this extraordinary speech by a fearless West Indian woman in Hackney, East London. Contains obscene language.
headline of the day
Drunk father lets 8-year-old son drive pickup
when parents text
It’s funny to begin to see more of myself in the parents’ texts, but I suppose that is inevitable.
Update: I would have used an image of this if it had been there when I posted.
(via @fchimero)
quote out of context
The reason for Caan’s departure from the show is unconfirmed but it may have something to do with his attempt to buy a Pakistani flood victim’s baby for £725 while making a charity film.
Superhuman Bed Linen
When my friend Melanie was little, she tied a sheet around her neck for a cape and ran wildly around the backyard with her arms outstretched superhero-style, shrieking, “WooOOOooh! WooOOOooh! I’m JEsus! I’m JEsus!”
Her father sat her down and said in his most serious tone, “You should never imitate the Lord.”
Also, by way of an update, this, posted to the Dubuque Freecycle group Thu Jun 30, 2011 5:27 am (PDT):
I have a large blanket with the Incredible Hulk smashing through a wall if anyone is interested
headline of the day, II
Ohio deputies: Woman sprayed us with breast milk
Pending pick-up
“You see? You SEE? DO YOU SEE what all of your showing out and acting the fool leads to? And now everybody drives by is looking.”
How to land your kid in therapy
MFT intern Lori Gottlieb writes:
Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist and lecturer at Harvard, warns against what he calls our “discomfort with discomfort” in his book Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age. If kids can’t experience painful feelings, Kindlon told me when I called him not long ago, they won’t develop “psychological immunity.”
“It’s like the way our body’s immune system develops,” he explained. “You have to be exposed to pathogens, or your body won’t know how to respond to an attack. Kids also need exposure to discomfort, failure, and struggle. I know parents who call up the school to complain if their kid doesn’t get to be in the school play or make the cut for the baseball team. I know of one kid who said that he didn’t like another kid in the carpool, so instead of having their child learn to tolerate the other kid, they offered to drive him to school themselves. By the time they’re teenagers, they have no experience with hardship. Civilization is about adapting to less-than-perfect situations, yet parents often have this instantaneous reaction to unpleasantness, which is ‘I can fix this.’”
Kindlon also observed that because we tend to have fewer kids than past generations of parents did, each becomes more precious. So we demand more from them—more companionship, more achievement, more happiness. Which is where the line between selflessness (making our kids happy) and selfishness (making ourselves happy) becomes especially thin.
Dad takes embarrassing teenage son to a new level
Oddly, it isn’t a Onion article (via):
“You don’t want to see your dad dressing up in a wedding dress, waving at you on the bus,” Rain said.
And never did his dad use the same character more than once. Several props aided interpretation as well. Like the day he hauled a porcelain toilet onto the porch. One of the days he was sick, so a cardboard cut-out of a Lord of the Rings character stood outside in his place.
Mr. B.’s Vegas Posse
There, on the left.
