We were so determined to thwart the Pink Industrial Complex with the kid, and we generally succeeded. With K2, we have basically failed miserably. The experience leads me to the conclusion that there's more to being a feminist and raising feminists than angsting over the color pink. But still. STILL. THERE ARE LIMITS.
And ask me cold, I would have said a pink crib and a pink-accented nursery crosses those limits. Extraneous girliness, must be rejected.
And yet. There's something almost hypnotically attractive about Kalon Studio's limited edition [summer only!] pink Caravan crib. I can't stop staring at it. Seriously. It's the near-neon-ness of it, I guess. Like a pair of running shorts you can't help notice as they pass you on the boardwalk. Maybe that's not the right frame of mind for a crib, even if it's what got you in the crib-buying situation in the first place.
ANYWAY, Kalon does everything else right: local manufacture, sustainability, craftsmanship, price, so somehow their mystical merchandising power has extended to color. Definitely check it out while you can. Or lash yourself to the mast, and have Siri go straight to the other six finishes for you.
Minneapolis-based artist Evan Palmer likes to create these mechs driven by adorable battalions of animals, set in a dystopian post-Scarry universe. You can buy prints of various images for extremely reasonable prices at Palmer's online shop.
Meanwhile, his Instagram is sprinkled with photos of the elaborately mundane Lego minifig dioramas he builds in his spare time. Very satisfied, would surf again.
90-year-old David Resnick ran an outfit called United Inventors and Scientists which loved to help inventors. In fact, he helped the inventor of this spring-mounted cradle right out of the photo, and right out of the 1974 LA Times feature article it ran with.
But I do know that that 2yo kid they stuck in the cradle, Jose Crespo, is too big for it, and that as soon as he stood up, that whole thing'd topple over and faceplant him on the workshop's concrete floor.
And now that I bought this old photo, I do know that that car battery underneath it is, in fact, NOT connected to the cradle, but to the dismantled pedal car behind it.
And if I had to guess who invented this rig, I'd go with Frank Grosse, of Glendale, who got a patent for a very similar design, a design that also, amazingly, had casters. Because, why not, right? How else you gonna move that thing around? People so crazy.
So what kind of help Resnick was providing 14 years later, either to the original inventor or to a guy who thought he'd just invented it, I have no idea.
I've had New Dads On The Block's blog open in my browser tabs since, like, the third trimester. Now these two dads Josh & Matt have not only made it to India for the birth of their twins [mazeltov!], they've gotten through the most difficult phase of the international surrogacy process: getting approximately one million forms stamped and approved by the US Consulate and Indian government's bureaucracies.
Anyway, they're home now, back in New York City and/or Wilmington, NC; there's a bit of posting lag now as newborn twins don't really appreciate how much time it takes to maintain a blog.
But anyone in need of highly detailed, step-by-step accounts of navigating international surrogacy in general, and India in particular [where surrogacy laws recognize genetic parents, thereby simplifying the infant citizenship process] should dive into NDOTB's archives. I now feel like I could navigate you and your DNA swabs through the US Consulate's compound by Skype if I needed to.
If your interests are more along the lines of watching new dads grapple with the realities of adorable twins, then you can just start following along now.
Children of the great failed American devil, cower in fear at the awesome creative power of the glorious future leaders of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. These children are all six months old, and this tank was fabricated in the womb by a young comrade who could not wait to be born to start honoring the Great Leader. 100,000 more are cardboard tanks are amassing at the DMZ this very minute, where North Korean superbabies will ride them into the burned out remnants of Seoul.You have been warned.
I have no idea who this is. I had no idea about this tank top rite of spring, which I had to look up on urbandictionary. And I had no idea this was gonna be Big Guns Week at Daddy Types, but sometimes you just gotta go with it.
Whenever DT wanders from the strictly pre-school-sized pedal car beat and toward the big kid go-karts, there's always a good reason. Or at least a reason that seemed good at the time.
So I can see how a vintage 70s, gas-powered, fiberglass Dodge van kiddie car can seem awesome, and perfect for your kid to grow into.
Until you see that it really is a pint-sized version of the shaggin' wagon in this ad, and you find yourself explaining how, when two people really like each other... in a van...
On the one hand, I guess it's always good for the new or expecting parent to be reminded that the entire Baby Industrial Complex is designed foster anxiety and prey on your best, but inexperienced intentions in order to sell you shit you don't need that doesn't really matter to your kid's well-being. So yeah, capitalism on that.
On the other hand, I guess I don't quite buy Adam Davidson's point that his particular brand of Park Slope overparenting and the products that serve it have some kind of trickle-down benefit for the rest of the baby market.
Side-impact resistant car seats, for example, are driven by the regulatory regimes in places like the EU, while the US government's safety standards are generally stymied by industry lobbyists and product liability issues. No company will claim their seat is safer than another, or safer than the law requires, for fear of getting sued into the ground when a kid gets hurt or dies.
Davidson also mentions the drop-side crib ban which, if anything, works against his thesis. It was the poorly designed, cheapo cribs sold by the millions in national big box chains, that were strangling and suffocating kids for years. When this problem at the bottom of the market was finally addressed, it ended up impacting the design of deluxe cribs, too.
He cites phthalate-free baby products as a misleading marketing claim [phthalates are banned in US baby products anyway, so phthalate-free is about as low a safety bar as you can clear.] But he might have mentioned BPA, a plastic additive which was only slowly pushed out of most kids products by a combination of research and grassroots activists, including some of the overwrought parenting types Davidson is trying to be ironic about.
So yeah, relax a bit, have some perspective, and instead of constantly dwelling on your parenting shortcomings, keep your eyes peeled for anecdotes you can use to rationalize whatever your parenting choices are right now. Make confirmation bias work for you.
Non-minimalist illustrator and maker Scott Bedford has been blogging up all kinds of interesting kid-related projects at WhatIMade.com. And now he's got a book. Made By Dad is a bunch of toys, furniture, gifts, and whatevers you can make for or with your kid.
Like this fine pencil cup made from dried out, blowtorched markers. Not that you need a kid to derive crafty pleasure from taking a blowtorch to a stack of old markers, but it is certainly enhanced.. Markers are a total scourge around our house, almost never worth the mess they make on faces, fingers, clothes, and tablecloths. I say burn'em all and let the kid use crayons.
When devoted gun guy Aaron Coston found out his wife was expecting their first child, he knew what he had to do: design and build the kid a crib inspired by the craftsmanship and innovation of firearms legend John Browning.
The front rail is shaped like two stocks from the 1894 Winchester. The back rail has cutouts reminiscent of his grandpa's 20 gauge Browning Auto 5 which, Coston points out, conform to the federal crib standards [which, I'd point out, are a data-driven, safety-inspired government regulation that Coston apparently does not find outrageous or objectionable]. There are black-finished steel stock posts [also safely spaced], and much more, but my absolute favorite detail of all has to be the .45 ACP cartridges Coston used to cover the bolt holes. A truly elegant solution.
Whatever your views on gun policy, I think we can all agree that this is one hell of a crib build. May all Costons big and small sleep through the night.
Robert's American Gourmet Food Company, the maker of Pirate's Booty and other Booty snacks, has been acquired by B&G Foods, a New Jersey conglomerate of totally random, orphan consumer brands that have been shed by much larger conglomerates. So this is really a big change for them.
I would go so far as to say that the Booty brand gives Cream of Wheat and Ortega taco shells a run for their money in terms of consumer recognition. Or maybe it's just another niche, like molasses. Anyway, $80 million/year in sales, around a 20% margin, and a 2x multiple, the guy who realized he could sell uptight organic yuppie parents Cheetos if he made them kale-colored will get around $195 million for all his efforts.
Until I read Christine Jones' article, I basically didn't know anything about Charles Perreault, whose 1697 collection Histoires ou contes du temps passé , Stories or Tales of Passed Times, was eventually translated into English with the title from this illustration, Contes de ma mère l'Oye, Tales of Mother Goose. And though I knew about Cendrillon, I didn't even realize Mother Goose was French.
But I still feel confident in saying this was probably the most interesting extended discussion of the historical impact of bootleg Amsterdam translations reshuffling the order of the stories had on transforming Perreault's work from literary-minded adult fiction into moralizing children's tales that I'll ever read.
Though I do wish she'd gone into more depth discussing the sheer 1950 suckitude of Disney's Sleeping Beauty, which is a horrible, horrible telling of a story filled with boring or insipid characters. Watch it as an adult and tell me I'm wrong. You can't do it.
Anyway, get yourself caught up on the latest developments in Perreault and mère l'Oye Studies.
Watching pseudo-dystopian New Coke mascot Max Headroom reciting the alphabet from the 1987 season of Sesame Street with your kid gives you the chance to explain how people once thought that in the future, we'd all be divided into warring tribes based around our favorite TV channels. Crazy days.
They were giving them out in 1938. they were giving them out in 1949. They were giving them out in 2008. And yes, the BBC's WTFScandinavianParenting correspondent reports this week that Finland is giving out cardboard bassinets stuffed with free, gender-neutral baby gear to every expectant mom in the country, and everyone's THRILLED about it.
Because despite being frozen and dark half the year, and always feeling like you're one power-mad czarist away from becoming the Puerto Rico of Russia, Finland's got some of the healthiest babies and best-prepared parents in the world, all because of a free box of stuff:
Mika Gissler, a professor at the National Institute for Health and Welfare in Helsinki, gives several reasons for this - the maternity box and pre-natal care for all women in the 1940s, followed in the 60s by a national health insurance system and the central hospital network.
Yes indeed, this is entirely and solely because of a free box of baby clothes, a box your kid can sleep in for a few weeks. If only America would give out free cardboard boxes to babies, all our healthcare woes would be solved!
There are few things more annoying than an ice cream truck, especially when they just roll up like clockwork at your playground, and the half of the kids whose parents don't care what kind of crap they eat or what kind of parasite they buy it from all go running, and the other half of the kids start pestering me for five bucks or whatever, and suddenly I'm the meanest dad and totally unfair.
But other than that, this cardboard ice cream truck called Famous OTO, designed by Måns Swanberg, which is currently raising money for production, is awesome! And it's a necessary first step to getting what I'd really want my kid to play in: artisanal foodtrucks.
Says Swanberg, "I have a massive list of other trucks I want to make down the line - tacos, noodles, BBQ, churros, hot dogs, hot rods, lemonade, the list goes on and on..."
So let's get this ice cream truck campaign on Indiegogo done and out of the way, so the kid-sized kimchi taco trucks can start rolling off the four-color presses, ASAP. Because right now it's too cute to paint over.
UPDATE: the other obvious solution is to release a plain cardboard truck, suitable for decorating. Then it could be the knife-sharpening truck, or the Cheech & Chong Up In Smoke truck, or whatever truck your kid's imagination has been programmed to create.
Way back in 2001, before a molded ply Eames kids chair was even a twinkle in my eye, Patrick Parrish was amassing a remarkable collection of kid chairs. He's shown the collection only a couple of times, once back in the day at his design gallery Mondo Cane, and more recently at Partners & Spade. One of his rarest chairs was included in MoMA's Century of the Child exhibition last year.
And now the whole thing's going to auction, in like two days.
Wright20 in Chicago is selling the Mondo Cane collection, 23 chairs, grouped into four lots, this Thursday, June 6. Each lot has a mix of major, minor, and great unknown. Let's take a look, hmm?
L to R: an aluminum rocker like your grandparents never had on their back porch; an unidentified ply rocking horse; a sweet Mategot-lookin' metal rocker like your grandparents never had on the terrace of their house in Villefranche; two variations of Gloria Caranica's Rocking Beauty for Creative Playthings; a plywood rocker by Albrecht Lange and Hans Mitzloff? Which, who? What? We have discussed this before here, these previously unidentified Russian rockers. Now we know! And this awesomely unstable-looking stool from Alex A.R. Pedersen, about which more later, because it is awesome.
L to R: a folding chair "in the manner of Hans Wegner," which is close enough for me; a kleine Thonet; a Nanna Ditzel high chair/stool, the kind that doesn't have a belt of restraining bar; a fairly awesome woven jute chair by Mogens Koch; and an actual Arne Jacobsen, not one of the bajillion knockoffs.
L to R: I had trouble coming up with a theme name for this batch, obviously, maybe because I'm confused why this Albrecht Lange & Hans Mitzloff chair was separated from its rocking partner. Guess you'll just have to buy both lots! This "leather" chair is actually described on Mondo Cane's website as masonite. Also, it's credited to Gideon Kramer. Unusual. Awesome and also random, but mostly just awesome Creative Playthings tubular steel hobby horse. This is what the future once looked like. Greg Fleischman's laser-cut plywood chair. And a sweet little L-Leg chair by Alvar Aalto that'll make you curse the Ikea darkness.
L to R: A baby Bertoia chair. The gooey goodness of Gaetano Pesce's poured resin Crosby Chair (1998), one of just four kid-sized chairs (there were also around 40 grownup-sized chairs in the series). The red-seat variation of Pesce's little chair was included in the MoMA exhibition last year. An Areta face chair of molded plastic. A trippy molded plastic Eames-style shell chair. Another Bertoia chair. And another, non-psychedelic shell chair with a label that makes no sense to me, "Midwest Hyrdofix Co." or something.
Anyway, to sum up, as great a group of kids chairs as you'll ever be able to buy all at once, ever. Which brings us to the price estimates. $5-7,000 per lot. Let's call that aspirational. I might also call it close to full retail. Especially when you average in classic-but-not-hard-to-find-or-particularly-expensive pieces like the Bertoia chairs. Or the great -design-but-a-thousand-dollars? anonymous porch furniture.
But I would not let that deter you. Get in there and bid low. And often.
A is not for Alden, or even Adidas?
B is not for Bean Boots?
C is not for Chuck Taylors?
D is not for Doc Martens?
G is not for Gucci Loafers?
J is not for Jack Rogers?
L is not for Lobb OR LL Bean?
S is not for Saltwaters OR Sperry, and T is not for Topsiders?
W is not for Weston?
Good grief, the Illustrated Alphabet of Shoes commissioned from Shea Serrano by the trendchasing styleblog Four Pins is just one misguided disappointment after another, and should be kept far away from impressionable children at all costs.
Not content with filling latenight TV with girly gossip and unfunny poo jokes, Nick Mom has decided to take on the online college course and nanny referral industries by producing pointless, viral-ready infographics.
Which, you know, I just got suckered into posting about, too. So to make up for it, I'm not linking to NickMom's site, but to the Daily Mail's, as if the British really gave a damn whether the top baby girl's name in South Dakota last year was Emma or Sophia?
For his contribution to a 1969 group show at the Kunsthalle in Bern, Switzerland, New York-based conceptual and systems artist Hans Haacke submitted his son.
The show, curated by Harald Szeemann, was titled, "When Attitude Becomes Form," caused outrage and demonstrations at the time, and has been hugely influential ever since. Szeemann had assembled a far-flung group of works by artists who were or would soon be recognized as leaders in Conceptual Art, Arte Povera, post-minimalism, systems art, and earthwork. But the show also pretty much defined the idea-driven, highly collaborative curatorial model that's still evident in biennials around the world.
That includes the Venice Biennale, which just opened this week, which is where the Prada Foundation is hosting a crazytown-sounding restaging of Szeemann's exhibit that brings almost all the original works back together and installs them in an exact replica of the Bern building--inserted into an 18th century Venetian palazzo. [By Rem Koolhaas and the artist Thomas Demand. The show is (re-)curated by Germano Celant.]
Which is all just context for wondering how the contribution to an historic show by a major figure like Haacke, can be almost completely invisible online.
Haacke did not actually send his newborn son from New York, where he'd just been born, to Bern. But he was one of the 14 or so artists whose contribution to Szeemann's show existed only in the catalogue. And he submitted documentation of his son--his birth certificate from NYU Hospital, inky footprints and all--with "COLLABORATION LINDA & HANS HAACKE" stamped in blue ink across it. The kid's name, by the way, Carl Samuel Selavy Haacke, includes a shoutout to Marcel Duchamp's notorious cross-dressing alter ego Rrose Selavy. [Duchamp had died in 1966.]
The catalogue lists the title as Informationsurkunde meines Sohnes, 1-22-69 (ID certificate of my son). The artist later gave the piece to his dealer, Paul Maenz, whose first show, in 1971, in his Cologne art gallery was of Haacke. [Maenz donated the piece along with his archive, to the Print Room in Berlin in 2004.]
From what I can tell, Carl Haacke, who is know all grown up and a dad himself, is not participating in the restaging of the "When Attitude Becomes Form," but I will look into it.
The urge to stay young is the father of invention.
Peter Van Riet and his fellow Belgian dads didn't see a reason why involved fatherhood had to mean cutting back on their longboarding time. They are hard-to-define creative types who see every challenge as an opportunity, so they are inventing the Longboard Stroller!
Obviously, it's still at the iPhone/GoPro demo video with royalty-free technolite music stage.
Actually, that's where the project was in January, too. And they don't look like they're dressed for Antwerp in January.
Maybe that's because this was shot on May 6, 2012. And the video was only released in January. It's the "Quinny Jett mobility concept," because Van Riet is an industrial designer, and Quinny, the stroller manufacturing parent company of Maxi-Cosi, and the juvenile products subsidiary of Dorel Europe, the European subsidiary of Montreal-based Dorel Industries, is his design firm's repeat client.
And sometime after that video, it seems to have been determined that a straighter, less branded name might have more viral traction, so in March, Belgian skater/ snowboarder/ designer/ internet consultant Yves Ferket registered longboardstroller.com, and voila, or whatever the Flemish say when a marketing plan comes together.
Roller Buggy being tested on the way back from the Javits Center at some point
Because the longboard paradigm is certainly cooler than the scooter-based Roller Buggy, which Austrian designer Valentin Vodev has been developing and exhibiting since 2006. A fully functioning Roller Buggy was being shopped around, seemingly ready for market, in 2010.
Which puts a kink in the Longboard Stroller narrative. Introducing the January video, Van Riet says, "Together with Quinny we worked on an Urban mobility concept with an eye to the future. By creating an all round team and including longboarders we came up with the Quinny Jett concept." But in a more self-promotey video Van Riet posted a month ago discussing the beginnings of the project, he says Quinny came to him because "they had developed a new idea" and were very "enthusiastic to collaborate." This "new idea" was a basically a Roller Buggy made from scrap.
If this is, in fact, the "prototype," it has a built-up skate deck mounted on a scooter frame, with a Quinny stroller seat for a handle. It's a fiction, built up out of junk to obscure the reality that Vodev's polished aluminum models were sitting on pedestals in design exhibitions and industry trade shows.
Which is not is not to say real design work or value wasn't done here. The most significant change is one the faux-totype tries to kludge together: switching from a scooter paradigm to a skateboard.
Going "back" from the scooter's big wheels to traditional longboard trucks wheels looks to give a maneuverability advantage. But the Roller Buggy looks significantly more stable and real-world usable. This tradeoff could be read as highly symbolic of the gap parents regularly discover between fantasy and reality.
And despite their apparent knockoffish tactics, I think Quinny moves the discussion forward in a meaningful way here in a way that has nothing to do with design or invention. But which has everything to do with the entire concept's glaringly obvious baby-as-hood-ornament problem: they put the kid in a helmet.
Think of who don't wear helmets: Grown men toodling around on skateboards. Northern Europeans riding bicycles around towns. Kids on walking bikes. Kids in strollers. Kids on buggy boards behind strollers.
Now think of who do wear helmets: Some American adults. Most American kids. Kids on the backseats of bikes, and in bike trailers.
When considered as straight-up strollers, these rideable stroller concepts look ridiculously unsafe and slightly embarrassing. When considered in the context of other adult-rideable transportation options, though, they look totally plausible and, in the case of the Longboard Stroller, even appealing.
Frankly, a few of these photos of kids sleeping in WTF? places look a bit staged. Is Bob Saget involved in this website somehow? Because one kid is supposedly sleeping on the TV. SRSLY WTF?
The U.M.O., a kid-sized bench/stool/table object by François Chambard, first showed up at Brooklyn Design a couple of years ago, in a cork version.
Some time between now and then, Chambard added a felt-covered option, UMO2, which seems both more and less practical than the cork. It also seems like a lot more work, in that there are structural and material changes involved, not just adding a fuzzy slipcover.
But that's OK, because every UMO is lovingly handcrafted in the Users & Makers atelier in Brooklyn. Embrace the artisanal cork. No idea where it's sold, or for how much. So go ahead and give them a ring.
After the warm feeling in your heart that comes from thinking you're personally saving the planet, the most undersung feature about the Tesla S, aka the Palo Alto Camry, has been the jump seat, which is supposed to boost the four-door's seating capacity for seven.
Except as this shamelessly adorable moppetsploitation video shows, you can fit an entire kindergarten class. If you disregard seat belts and stick some kids in the frunk. [Which, seriously, such a dealbreaking term. In England will they call it a froot?]
From the Tesla forum comes this comment, "But some cities now have 30 kids in a class. Can someone try that!??!!" To which I'll only say, if you're not using the first third of your Tesla money each year to get your kindergartener's student-to-teacher ratio into the single digits, you really need to re-examine your priorities.
Have you heard the one about the hedge fund manager who mansplained how those trader gals are totally useless after they have a kid?
As soon as that baby's lips touch that girl's bosom, forget it. Every single investment idea, every desire to understand what's going to make this go up or go down, is going to be overwhelmed by the most beautiful experience, which a man will never share, about a mode of connection between that mother and that baby.
And then the tape got out, and he had to start backpedaling and equivocating that he really just meant macro trading, which, you know how emotional girls get, right? Right? Help me here!
Anyway, Paul Tudor Jones made a bundle by predicting the 1987 stock market crash, yet somehow he failed to anticipate that his comments would generate a shitstorm of criticism. That's the kind of insight you get for 4% of assets under management and 23% of returns.
Did you know that the first picture book designed for children was published in 1658?
I did not.
Orbis Sensualium Pictus, or The Visible World in Pictures, was published in Nuremburg by the Czech educator Comenius. Originally in German and Latin, it was soon translated into many multilingual editions across Europe.
Each of its 150 chapters contains a woodcut image and a key with straightforward descriptions of everything in it. It's basically an encyclopedia for kids. In Latin.
The English edition on Google Books has all those s's that look like f's, too, which makes the line about the "Mafter teaching the boy how to be wife" feem a little fketchy. But I guess this is how all those 18th century 2yos learned Latin, so download the pdf and ftart teaching!
Emmanuel Sougez was a pioneering French photographer who created two of the earliest children's books to use photography.
Regarde! « Mes photos » and Alphabet were published in 1931 and 1932, respectively. Regarde! was basically a photo album of simple objects or scenes, somewhat akin to the book Edward Steichen made for his daughter in 1930, The First picture book, Everyday things for babies. [Though there's no evidence that Sougez or his publisher Henri Jonquières knew about Steichen's book.]
Alphabet, meanwhile, featured photos as illustrations for each letter of the alphabet. The book was published in three languages: French, English, and German, which doctoral candidate Juliette Lavie interprets as a post-WWI gesture of European unity and rapprochement.
Lavie wrote a very thorough analysis of Sougez's children's books for the literary journal Textimage. She situates the books' design and the auteur credit given to Sougez for Alphabet within the context of the larger, European context of modernist graphic design, specifically the work of Jan Tschichold and the principles of Ozenfant and Jeanneret.
She notes how the books' square form matched the negatives from Sougez's Rolleiflex, and she wades into the avant-garde typographers' disputes over the propriety of lower-case letters. I have to say, it is the single longest article I have ever read about a children's book. Also, maybe it's because it's in French, and I didn't want to slog through a crappy Google translated version.
Anyway, point is, iconic and innovative photo books, rare today, and now one of each is turning up at auction in Berlin next week.
Oh, wait, no, the point is, SACRE BLEU, is C really for Chinois, and I for Indien? And the photos are of a white kid drawing a Coolie, and mannequin from the Museum of Savages or whatever? C'est la France, mon vieux.
This was the first lot at Bonhams' Spa Classic Sale of vintage autos in Brussels yesterday: a kid-sized "'Lotus Seven.'" I think the quotes must be part of the actual name, since this Lotus Seven, like so many, 'Lotus Sevens' was not made by or anywhere near Lotus itself.
Belgian racing driver-turned-tuner-and-supercar-manufacturer Tony Gillett created it in his shop for a client at some point. Then it was restored in 2005, and outfitted with a carbon fiber dash, handle, and gear shift.
Which, seriously? As the owner of a car, the Scion xB, whose only factory options were LED cupholders and a carbon fiber gas flap, I think I know what I'm talking about when I call this extraneous carbon fiber bullshit? Get it off.
And you wouldn't know it by reading Bonhams' copy, but a closer inspection of the badge reveals it to be a Donky. Which I'm assuming makes it a kid-sized version of the the local Dutch Lotus Seven knockoff, the Donkervoort. Gillett was at one point the Donkervoort distributor in Belgium.
The dinky Donkervoort sold for EUR 5520 to someone who presumably is fine with all of this.
So K2's sitting on the sofa, waiting for her turn on the iPad, and telling us about some boy who chases her around the playground and is "sooo annoying," and suddenly I'm like, I don't even need to look at my calendar, I know exactly what we'll be doing in 2025.
Keeping with the luscious woodgrain theme here on Daddy Types, check out this total stunner of a station wagon, a 1971 Ford LTD Country Squire with a mere 60,000 miles. It's being sold by GR Auto Gallery in Grand Rapids, and it was advertised on Hemmings, where it was the Find of the Day, thereby prompting dozens of middle-aged men to start reminiscing about the Golden Age of Station Wagons.
Anyway, with two sidefacing rear benches instead of one single rear-facing seat, Ford claimed this wagon could seat 10 with all the ease, comfort, and state-of-the-art safety (steel, plus lap belt) 1971 had to offer.
The real reason you would buy this, though, is not for the acres of green vinyl upholstery; it's for the woodgrain spoiler.
For all you Napa redwood cabin-in-the-forest dwellers who already have wacked out kid chairs carved from a single piece of walnut burl, my apologies, feel free to skip this post.
For the rest of you, HOLY SMOKES WHAT IS THIS THING??! This kid's chair is not signed or marked, but Rago auctioneers are attributing it to JB Blunk, the master ceramicist and woodworker who had a thing in the 60's for neo-primitive burl. [Check outThe Planet, the 2-ton sculpture/bench/plaything Blunk carved from a single, massive redwood burl in 1969, which is installed at the Oakland Museum of California. Crazy days.]
You might see one custom high chair from a master woodworker come up at auction, but you hardly ever see two. Rago Arts has these two rather amazing pieces in their upcoming 20th century design sale next month.
First things first, this early (c. 1958) walnut high chair from Arthur Espenet Carpenter [above] is a straightup mid-century modernist classic, ready to pull up next to some sleek, teak Danish dining set. The $5-7,000 estimate reflects a lot of Espenet's brand premium, and very little reality. Because, let's be serious, it's a high chair. But who knows, maybe the market's there.
Designer Michael Elkan might not have the recognition of Espenet, but he sure made the hell out of this high chair. It has walnut legs and an extraordinary maple burl slab seat.
Interestingly, it dates from 1986, which means the kid for whom this was made should be around 30yo. I'd figure a chair like this'd get passed down, or at least be trotted out when the grandkid comes to dinner. But I guess not. Anyway, compared to the Espenet, it's practically free.
This dad's story of racing his Porsche 911 proves there is no substitute...for love:
When the first two-syllable word he spoke was "Por-sha," I wasn't surprised. He plays with miniature GT3s and Turbos now, steers them around tracks of his own imagination on the tile floor. I took him to a PCA club race and he cheered for a purple 911SC that finished in last place, trailing blue smoke.
I still don't understand why a seller would extract a promise from the buyer not to race it in the first place, though. Anyone? Bueller?
Chris Angelini let his toddler-sized son try on his Google Glass while they went to get some juice. The takeaway: HOLY SMOKES, KIDS ARE SHORT! SERIOUSLY, the world looks so weird when seen entirely from crotch height. [via waxy]
Rejoice, Western Hemispherians! Yvan Pestalozzi's Lozziwurm playground structure is open for business at the Carnegie. Go check it out, or maybe wait a little longer, until the amazing-looking playground design exhibition opens in June. Just sayin'.
As a public service, Daddy Types holds back on publishing all the incendiary, headscratching, anxiety-inducing, clickbaiting WTFparenting stories during the week, to offer them up all at once in a little weekend-ruining feature we call the Friday Freakout. Here it is:
"Real Winners Don't Have Work-Life Balance," argues Business Insider. To make the case for ignoring your kids on nights and weekends AND during the day, BI quotes the CEO of a PC company [did not know they still existed] and a career coach and self-styled business guru with fewer Twitter followers than an abandoned Ikea monkey. Who argues on his own siteblog, btw, that so many of his female clients are obviously lying about their career ambitions and really just want a man to take care of them. Lean in when you say that! [businessinsider.com]
So I assume you know that the Bangladeshi garment worker who sewed your kid's $5 Children's Place t-shirt and $15 Target jeans is dead now, right? In a pile of factory rubble? I have to assume that since no one in the cheap clothing industry and no one in the cheap clothing market, which is everyone at every mall ever, wants to talk about it. [NY Times]
And now, I must say, it has taken me all week to not write this post. Almost every typing hour was spent fighting the urge to unleash the hounds against this epic-level mom troll. But I made it.
A friend of my wife's likes to say, in regards to parenting, "Don't get on the rollercoaster." It's advice that comes in especially handy when faced with a tantrum or a meltdown. And you have to remind yourself that a kid does not yet have the fully developed mental or psychic capacity to control his emotions, to provide a reasonable, modulated response to a situation they might not like. Kids lack this ability; it's our jobs as parents to teach it to them, to help them develop it; this implies, of course, that we ourselves have this capacity for appropriate response and interaction ourselves.
And that when faced with intransigence, inexplicable or sudden outbursts, or wailing, a can remind himself to not get on the rollercoaster. Just because your kid is twisting and turning every which way in a melted down Space Mountain, you do not have to join him. You just wait for the ride to end and for the rage rocket to come to a complete stop.
But even such a self-aware parent can find it difficult to keep his cool. Many adults do not seem to have this capacity or inclination at all. I remember standing on the corner of Madison Avenue where a well-dressed mom was arguing with her 3yo kid to hold her hand to cross the street. The kid was refusing. A couple of back & forths in, the mom suddenly screamed, "Give me your hand RIGHT NOW or I will throw your doll in the garbage!"
We don't know what was going on in this woman's life, but we don't have to know the details to be able to identify this as a sub-optimal strategy for getting a kid to do what you want. if only because this mom was also modeling an interaction approach--of yelling, threats, escalation, infliction of emotional harm, and destruction-- at the same time she was trying to get the kid's compliance.
Such a rollercoaster. And look at that line of people passing the link around! I wonder if we should we get on?
The scandal turns out to be complete bullshit, of course. There are not "moms," but one mom, unnamed, and it's not clear that the story's writer ever actually spoke to her, or if she got the info and incendiary quotes secondhand from her former colleague, a self-styled "social anthropologist," who's writing a book on Park Avenue moms. And "guides" turns out to be one scooterbound lady and her booker boyfriend.
for the fullsize image of crowds at It's A Small World see Scootarama
And the Post glosses over the fact that Disney offers actual VIP Tours for $300/hr [min. 6 hrs] that actually do take your party of ten to the front of any ride you want, and that holds prime curbside spots for the parades, too? Shouldn't we be pitying these hapless Manhattanites who could have had the keys to the Magic Kingdom, but instead end up apparently schlepping around with a local grifter, all because they tried to save a measly thousand dollars?
This is what kept me off the rollercoaster, recognizing that every single choice in booking a Disney World visit is really a cost-benefit analysis, trading money for time, convenience and experience. Disney's entire system is calibrated to deliver precisely the experience you pay for; and everyone knows that. So what, exactly, is the outrage the Post is trying to stoke here, and who is its target?
"They are 1 percenters who are 100 percent despicable." "A shameless ritual among Manhattan's private-school set." But it all comes down to the headline, "Rich Manhattan moms." "The woman said she hired a Dream Tours guide to escort her, her husband and their 1-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter through the park in a motorized scooter with a 'handicapped' sign on it."
[Wait, a 1yo at Disney World? How many rides can't you take that kid on? Did the tour guide watch the baby while the family rode together? If the disabled person doesn't actually ride, can they still use the disabled guest entrance? But that's not important now.]
With the Post's lone, passive mention of the escorted "husband," women are left to shoulder sole responsibility for these outlandish, Orlandoish moral affronts. But by directly and repeatedly invoking The 1%, the Post tries to conflate their flimsy story of individual hustling with the ongoing protests against structural inequality and privilege. The Post genders criticism--and culpability--of The 1%, trying to ride the Tiger Mom of outrage that lingers unaddressed in our political and economic culture.
And for what? It would be seriously pathetic if this whole episode were just a plea for attention for a book of gossipy lifestyle porn that won't even be out until 2014. Even sadder would be a pitch for attention by a former Post writer trying to position herself as a faux-populist parenting expert, a cross between Caitlin Flanagan and Anne Coulter.
The most likely explanation, though, is the simplest and dumbest: that the emotional sophistication and integrity of these two NY Post hacks is such that they not only jump on the rollercoaster of this ridiculous spring break incident themselves, they try to drag everyone else along with them, for nothing more than reflexive WTFpageviews and retweets.
Alright, Stuart Gurr has so far built seven kid-sized cars for his 6yo daughter Scarlett, including a replica of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a Cobra, a Bentley, two Bugattis, a Mini-and this insane Ferrari 250 GTO.
He makes them all himself, with aluminum bodies and spaceframes, in his restoration and machine shop, when he's not working on Mini superchargers.
But seriously, how this guy is a Mini supercharger expert with a side hobby of building his daughters' fleet, and not the emperor king of all bespoke kiddie cars, is completely beyond my comprehension.
The revolution may be coming, but it's not here yet; and there's still time to outfit the children of the global 0.1% with some hand-hammered mini-Ferraris before it hits.
Ogilvy Brasil is bringing the cutting edge of first world diapering technology home with this Huggies concept whereby a robotic urine sensor sends an alert to your iPhone when your kid needs a change.
It's called Tweet Pee, which means no one's told them about Elimination Communication OR Twitter.
I have this 1967 Creative Playthings catalogue lying around somewhere, but I swear, I never noticed these cardboard play structures until John from Wary Meyers pointed out these photos on a recent eBay auction.
First, yes, a flatpack Creative Playthings playhouse made from cardboard [alright, technically "plastic-coated fiberboard"]. Dig that CP logo cutout. Nice touch.
But that's not important now, because there is a Private Booth™:
The phone is public; the booth is private. That's the way AT&T does it; so that's the way the children want it...Telephones always stimulate verbalization, long conversations with real and imaginary friends. With a private booth added, it creates almost too much excitement to bear!
Well, I might not go quite that far, but the rotary design on the outside is kind of cool.
Creative Playthings was charging the equivalent of $83 for a 4' cardboard box. Which might help explain why no vintage survivor phone booths have turned up, and why there's no mention of them online. Because they were so crazy expensive, no one bought any. And so the entire production run is sitting, untouched, in a forgotten warehouse somewhere outside Princeton, NJ.
Stay for Betadad's very mature takedown of the Wall Street Journal's nonsensically sexist story about "Mommy Business Trips" which treats the Mom 2.0 Summit as nothing more than an irresponsible bachelorette party weekend.
This is a 1993 BMW M5 Touring, one of only a very few that have ever made their way to the US. It was apparently federalized in 2001, and is currently for sale in Southern California for $25,000 or $26,000, depending on where you're reading.
1993 was the last year the M5 had the 3.8L inline-6. This example had the factory suspension swapped out, which has caused no end of consternation from the commentariat at Bring A Trailer.
But the asshauling reality and huhwhuh? rarity of the E34 M5 Touring, especially in the US, will surely help it find its next well-prepared owner.
Daddy Types is published by Greg Allen with the help of readers like you.
Got tips, advice, questions, and suggestions? Send them to: greg [at] daddytypes [dot] com
