My daughter is about as smart and responsible as a dad could hope of his five year would be. I was shocked last evening when I found her bawling in the bathroom. I mean, she was like Noodad-with-a-hangnail-bawling! She just told me that she brushed her teeth and my wife told her that she did not do a good enough job. I guess she took of whiff of her breath and it reminded her of Cujo or something. I thought my sweet little innocent princess was bawling because she is a little bit sensitive about having to do things over. The truth was that she lied about brushing her teeth in the first place. That little rat! Furthermore, this was not the first time she lied to me about brushing her teeth! Innocence lost already? Not quite. After a three hour search of her room, I did not find any marijuana, Pokemon cards, alcohol, firearms, cigarettes, spare ribs or chewing tobacco.
She knows that brushing her little choppers is really important. She also knows that telling the truth is important. Seems there was a problem with her toothpaste being stuck in the tube and rather than ask us to fix it, she was just deciding not to brush her teeth. Or she would use her little brother’s training toothpaste if she decided to brush at all. Read the rest of this entry »
Our weekend did not go as planned. We expected to get up on Sunday and take the kids out for dim sum, suggestion from my oldest daughter. I got up early on Sunday (in an attempt) to let my wife sleep later. Anything past 8:30AM is really late in our house. I needed some baby supplies so I took the little one upstairs. That’s when I heard a thud and THE squeal. I rushed down the stairs and put the baby down and picked up my son who was already bleeding out of his mouth. He “decided” to taste the wood work at full speed.
I got some paper towels. I started to blot the blood while I inspected the situation. Ugh. One of his front teeth was clearly about a millimeter back. FREEZE NOODAD!
Our family loves to use shutterfly.com. We find it really convenient for ordering pictures in a variety of formats including prints, postcards, holiday cards and albums. My wife very thoughtfully put together an album for my mother for her birthday. My mother is one of those people who will never tell you what she what she wants. She has always been a person who honestly thinks she does not deserve to have stuff. She always loves to get pictures of the kids though, particularly because she lives in Ohio and we do not. The album arrived the other day. My wife opened it to admire her handy work before wrapping it and to our surprise, the cover was ours, but the photos inside were of some family from Philadelphia. Immediate family fury ensued.
I almost forgot about Darda racing, then a guy I am following on Twitter reminded me with this video.
Any kid from age 3 to 93 will love this video. Be careful though as the music is not super age appropriate. I almost forgot about these awesome tracks. I had a bunch in the 80s and I think I’ll try to pick some up and play them with my boy. He will eat them up.
I recently read an article in Wired magazine that challenged my perception of autism. Reading the article sort of felt the same way as when I was first exposed to homosexuality in college. I was a corn-fed, Midwestern young man who was raised on Northeast-Ohio idealism. Anything that was not normal was either not talked about or was weird. I felt like a pioneer in Ohio just because I had broken away from listening to popular music and was into bands like Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, Dead Milkmen and Public Image Ltd. A new friend of mine came out to our crew when someone in the residence hall found out that there was a gay person living on our floor. The Midwest back then (maybe still) was pretty brutal about stereotypes and this guy challenged everything that I knew about homosexuality. For all intents and purposes, he was an All-American dude living his life on a slightly different path than society would expect from looking at him. He let us ask a ton of questions and changed our perceptions. With the Internet not as prolific, the world was a smaller place and information was limited to immediate surroundings or what we sought out through reading books, magazines and TV.
Boston Dynamics is a cool company who calls themselves the “leader in human lifelike simulation”. The Big Dog however is neither human nor a dog. It’s the conjoined Human Fly twins! I am definitely having nightmares tonight. Civilization is doomed.
The kids album of the year is already here and it was not conceived by those fabulously flamboyant Wiggles, lost-indigo-girl Laurie Berkner or that sickenly-cute-little-red menace, Elmo. Ironically, the same band that once wrote such lyrics as “someday mother will die and I’ll get the money” and “minimum wage (yaaaah!)” has put together (yet another) incredibly listenable collection of songs about numbers that kids and parents can enjoy together. And the kicker is that it’s actually educational.
One great thing about 123s is that is a full media experience. The 1 CD 1 DVD set has 27 songs and 24 videos. The puppets of John and John are also pure genius and hearken “back” to when they collaborated with the homestarrunner.com gang.
The music is fun. In typical TMBG fashion, it’s not possible to classify the album as anything but an eclectic mix of genres. The sort of thing that would kill just about any other band is gold for them. The song Zeroes has my three year old singing about millions and millionths. High Five is our family favorite, particularly because my daughter thinks “down-low-too-slow” is the greatest since the finger in warm water to pee the bed trick. I could go one and explain how Seven is mixed by the Dust Brothers or that there are some weird Disney tracks at the end due to a much deserved Disney sponsorship, but you get the picture. Now go forth and buy it, put it in your car CD player and enjoy the fact that you’re listening to TMBG with your kids and not Raffi. Just be careful because you might find yourself singing “On Mondays, I never go to work…”
My kids are part of a generation that is far less exposed to advertising than I was. At some point when I was not paying particular attention to kids shows it became taboo to put ads in little kids shows. So instead they put sponsorships at the beginning or they will put an ad or mini infomercial at the end of the show. When I was just a foolad, there were 2 ways that we knew all the kick ass, must-have toys: we would look at those awesome catalogs from companies like Best, JC Penney or Service Merchandise or we would also see about 1,000 TV ads per day during shows.
I am not even going to try and hide the fact that I watched WAY too much TV as a kid. As a result, I have themes and ads in my head that I cannot get rid of. Who needs to be able to sing the Facts of Life theme song or the Jacko Energizer ad? If I could hook my brain up to my computer via USB, I would trash all sorts of useless junk that is floating around in there to make room for more useful stuff. Plus I would be filthy rich because I figured out how to jack into my noodle and read it like it was a Linux box and a MySQL database.
China’s population represents 20.8% of the global population. It is also emerging as the next giant world economic power. China has not shown any interest in changing its official language or moving away from using 汉字 (characters) for their writing. While many Chinese speak English and in many places there is English signage (some of it pretty hilarious), business in China is still conducted in Chinese.
Kids have the capacity to learn anything, even a tonal language with writing that gives you no clue as to the tone or pronunciation. Sure, it takes a lot of practice and dedication. Actually, it takes a LOT of time and dedication and practice and usage, but in the end it is worth it because the language is incredibly useful
Now that you’re sold, how do you get the kids learning Chinese? If they are little (3-6), consider the new show on Nick Jr, Ni Hao Kai Lan. Kai Lan Chow is a bubbly, Dora-like cutie-pie who loves to play games and do cool activities with her friends. She speaks both English and Mandarin Chinese, mostly weaving the latter in when she is talking to both her friends and your kids. The show also deals with behavior issues that kids have and tries to teach them how to be patient and how to share. The sage for advice is Kai Lan’s 爷爷 （yeye) which is Chinese for paternal grandfather. He teaches the kids about Chinese culture, makes them dumplings and Chinese New Year dinner, performs taiji quan and supervises fun activities like backyard camping, a dragon parade and dragon boat races.
My daughter is about as smart and responsible as a dad could hope of his five year would be. I was shocked last evening when I found her bawling in the bathroom. I mean, she was like Noodad-with-a-hangnail-bawling! She just told me that she brushed her teeth and my wife told her that she did not do a good enough job. I guess she took of whiff of her breath and it reminded her of Cujo or something. I thought my sweet little innocent princess was bawling because she is a little bit sensitive about having to do things over. The truth was that she lied about brushing her teeth in the first place. That little rat! Furthermore, this was not the first time she lied to me about brushing her teeth! Innocence lost already? Not quite. After a three hour search of her room, I did not find any marijuana, Pokemon cards, alcohol, firearms, cigarettes, spare ribs or chewing tobacco.
