DT Short Answer: Yes. After some nutty estimates on the cost of restoring our 1985 Mercedes diesel coupe, and after some frank analysis from one of the younger guys who actually works on our car regularly, it's sadly clear we...
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Category archive: advice
February 8, 2012
DTQ: I'm Buying Another Car?
February 6, 2012
Le Tigre Mom
You may remember the Wall Street Journal's "you're doing it wrong, America!" parenting blog from such vaguely masochistic competitive parenting advice books as Tiger Mom. Now it's France's turn. Pamela Druckerman's article about her new book, Bringing up Bébé, is...
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[read the full post...]
January 31, 2012
Very Wrong And Very Bad...
...is the name of this 2011 drawing by British artist David Shrigley, whose show just opened today at the Hayward Gallery in London. David Shrigley | Brain Activity, Feb 1 through May 12, 2011 [southbankcentre.co.uk via guardian] Check out 100+...
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[read the full post...]
January 24, 2012
Mr. Caitlin Flanagan Is Barbie's Executive Producer And All That Entails
HAHA, all this time everyone's been getting all worked up about Caitlin Flanagan and her pretend-housewifery, and her imaginary teen oral sex epidemic fearmongering, and have been ignoring the real menace II society: her husband, Rob Hudnut. Hudnut turns out...
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[read the full post...]
January 13, 2012
DT Friday Freakout: Disaster Edition
Well, I just had my calendar cleared, and ended up spending ten hours out with the kids. At one point, we just sat in the car. For like an hour. Just chilling when napping wouldn't do. And then there were...
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[read the full post...]
January 4, 2012
Parody Of Momtweeting Comes As No Surprise
You never know with Twitter; I just got burned by Rupert Murdoch, who turned out to be boring, and Wendi Deng, who turned out to be fake. But I've had @JennyHolzerMom open in my browser tabs since before Christmas,...
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[read the full post...]
January 3, 2012
Don't Send Me That Perfect Mom Story
My 2012 strategy for dealing with Ayelet Waldman is the same as for Caitlin Flanagan and the Kardashians: ignore them, and they'll go away. Or to CNN, which is close enough. I was forced to watch that network for a...
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[read the full post...]
December 27, 2011
DT Ski Trip Protip
Don't leave your sippy cup on the radiant heat floor overnight....
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December 19, 2011
There Are Underground Preschools On The East Coast, Too
I knew I should wait to post about this. There are now over 350 comments on Soni Sangha's NYT story of the stresses of operating an underground co-op nursery school in Brooklyn, so I'm pretty sure that everything that can...
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[read the full post...]
December 8, 2011
This Is Your Brain On Girls. Any Questions?
Oh, you dare, Fast Company, you dare. That's why you're the out-of-the-box thinkpiece trend story content generator!Most would-be parents prefer boys, not girls. Is part of the trouble, dare we say, a branding problem--one that advertising could solve?Unfortunately, the ad...
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[read the full post...]
December 6, 2011
Where In The World Is The Carmen Sandiego Generation?
Is it too early to see what happened to the overeager, overachieving yuppie children of the 90s, who were raised on Carmen Sandiego? They dorked out, cheated a little, really showed that private school jerk from Manhattan, and went on...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
December 5, 2011
40 Million Reasons To Get Your Kid An iPhone For Christmas
In reporting on a report that reveals only 3 million of the 43 million of kids aged 10-19 have actually sexted after all, Choire Sicha shows why he is. America's Greatest Kid-Free Parenting Expert:This is why you're supposed to have...
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[read the full post...]
November 29, 2011
The Star Trek Book Of Opposites Goes Where No Boardbook Has Gone Before
Dammit, Jim! The Star Trek Book of Opposites basically looks like the platonic ideal of nerd boardbooks. And considering it costs 99.999% less than a prop baby Ewok, it will make the perfect gift. You can buy with confidence,...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
November 28, 2011
'Block Consultants' Teach The Test
Oh, brother, what to make of the NY Times' "Back To Blocks" trend story that leads off with a "self-described 'block consultant'" leading a class for parents in block play?As in fashion, old things often come back in style...
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[read the full post...]
November 22, 2011
Dear BabbleDads, How Can You Tell Your Kids' Socks Apart?
No, seriously! I've gotten so used to socks with the age ranges written on the soles in gummy little letters, I'm stumped when they're not!...
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The Boomer Over-Parenting Paradigm Is Failing Before Our Eyes
I was really not too motivated to read the NY Times' report on analysts being demoralized after getting laid off from investment banks--haven't these people ever heard of going to business school? But then Choire Sicha reminded me why I...
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[read the full post...]
November 11, 2011
DT Friday Freakout: Lollipox Edition
Sometimes it's hard not to freak out over these stories when they're dribbled out by media. But then, that's exactly why Daddy Types bundles them up into one, giant Friday Freakout, so they can ruin your weekend, not your whole...
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[read the full post...]
November 10, 2011
Am I The Only One Who Hasn't Seen The Other F Word?
Eight years in, and I never quite figure out how this stuff works. I like to think I'd have known about The Other F Word, Andrea Nevins' documentary about punk rocker dads, the moment it was greenlighted. But instead, I...
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[read the full post...]
November 8, 2011
'Where Are We Going?'
By the time I finished reading Raul Gutierrez's awesome post, I'd completely forgotten that I'd been surprised to find out he and Tina Roth Eisenberg of Swiss Miss shared a studio. Small Victories [mexicanpictures via swiss miss] Previous Raul Gutierrez...
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[read the full post...]
November 4, 2011
DT Friday Freakout: Ritalin/Candy Edition
Why give in to the publicists and media, and freak out every day, right? Here are some headlines from the worlds of science, health, parenting, and education--plus one remixed Simpsons clip--to freak you out all at once. On the weekend:...
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[read the full post...]
November 3, 2011
Kids These Days: Electric Eye Edition
Yeah, yeah, Velcro means kids can't tie their shoes anymore. The LED on the cable box keeps them from ever learning how to read a clock. And forget typing; iPad kids can't even use a mouse. And now we see--literally--the...
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Reading The Occupy Babble Blowback So You Don't Have To
In an incisive, hard-hitting report for the indie news outfit The Faster Times, Nathan Hegedus, aka Our Man In Sweden Nathan Hegedus shows he is not afraid to ask the tough questions: Are Dad Bloggers the Most Important Feminists Online...
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[read the full post...]
October 28, 2011
Small Criminals Among Us
The opening horror story vignettes may be overflowing with obvious, overlooked developmental and parental red flags, but even if it's not enough to be the best parenting advice book written by a juvenile detention psychologist, Gad Czudner's Small Criminals...
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[read the full post...]
October 25, 2011
Bruce Weber And The Webisode Of Cruelty
Oh, what to do with Don't Steal The Jacket!, Bruce Weber's truly, spectacularly, nonsensically awful kidvertainment disaster for the Italian revival puffy coat manufacturer Moncler? Don't Steal The Jacket is every Weber cliche--dopey-beautiful young, white boymen plucked from a...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
October 16, 2011
Bath Bottle Bedtime?
K2 and I were at the playground this afternoon while the kid did her ballet practice. And I SWEAR I don't do the Overheard On The Playground thing, I really don't, and I certainly don't blog about it. So let's...
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Emliy Rapp Is Intense Parent, Writer
Even if my experience and religious beliefs give me a different kind of hope, Emily Rapp's insights into raising her terminally ill son are extraordinary, inspiring--and hard-won.Our experiences have taught us how to parent for the here and now, for...
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[read the full post...]
October 13, 2011
The Clone Wars Are A Trojan Horse For The Prequel Trilogy
Look, I'm as fed up with Lucas and as baffled by The Clone Wars as the next guy. And so I appreciate Michael Agger's game attempt to make a parent's guide for The Clone Wars. But maybe because it's...
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[read the full post...]
October 11, 2011
DTQ: Ariel Wig Runoff?
So the shedding, whatever, it's ten bucks, but you know how, when a 3yo puts one of those cheap-ass Disney licensee Ariel wigs on, the unknown-in-nature red dye starts rubbing off all over her white wedding dress costume? Is...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
October 10, 2011
So Take A Kid And A Kids Book To Occupy Wall Street
Alright, here's what we do. I just got an email from Betsy, who's helping to organize the People's Library at Occupy Wall Street. [The Library's getting great coverage, btw, and GalleyCat reports they just posted their OWSLibrary catalog online.]...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
September 27, 2011
Quick, Catch! Homebirthing Q&A For Dads
Natural Papa has a quick Q&A about dads and homebirth with Lome Aseron, an East Bay dad whose two kids were both born at home. It all looks like good, basic advice, but this still totally blows my mind:5. What...
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[read the full post...]
September 22, 2011
Mmm, Bends Like Chicken
I was stunned and impressed and not a little jealous that DadWagon managed to score an interview with rock star Paul Ford on the very day he announced the birth of twins. But then I realized it was a pre-dadhood...
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And You Are NOT Watching Clone Wars
From culture trendspotter Theo Nion:Since her early childhood, a period sources said featured a Danger Mouse-themed birthday party that utterly baffled the assembled 6-year-old guests, Campbell's daughter has been fed a steady diet of marginalizing cinematic masterpieces from the world's...
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[read the full post...]
September 21, 2011
Mad Typing Skillz Roundup
Read these important things: Are people just paranoid about using family-friendly programs at work, or are their companies really after them? I can't tell. [wsj, probably via @workingdad] Figures that Dadwagon was into Park Slope Rock School PARIS before it...
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[read the full post...]
September 20, 2011
Hmm, Should I Cut Off Part Of My Son's Penis?
Here is the story of a guy--from his pen name, I'm guessing he's in Oklahoma City--who is, for the first time, really contemplating whether to cut off part of another guy's penis. He wisely asks his dad for advice--only to...
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[read the full post...]
New Study Shows Half Of ADHD Cases Are Actually GTFTSD
Go on, admit it, half the time you heard some rambunctious kid or other's got ADHD, you thought to yourself, it's either a parenting thing or a Big Pharma scam. Well:A new study published in the American Journal of Family...
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[read the full post...]
September 9, 2011
Poshbrood Reports, You Decide
Dear Celebrity Parents, Don't be shy, please let the marketing folks know the unvarnished truth: how awesome was your family's comped trip to the 1,500 acre Four Seasons resort in Puerta Vallarta really?...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
September 1, 2011
DTQ: What Makes A Horrible Restaurant High Chair?
Thanks to the SEO spammer who responded to the 4-year-old question about what makes a nice restaurant high chair with the highly unbelievable answer: more polypropylene, horrible design, krazy spelling, and pretending your kids love the colors! In other words,...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
August 26, 2011
DT Friday Freakout: I Got Nothin' Edition
Seriously? What freakouts could the worlds of science, education, or parenting propose to ruin your weekend that earthquakes and hurricanes haven't already got beat? As luck would have it, we checked our "go bag," which we call our 72-hour bag,...
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[read the full post...]
August 20, 2011
Eames Adjacent! Can You ID This Kid-Size, Mid-Century Mystery Chair?
From awaiting the future to decoding the past: Soon after super-collector Jim Linderman moved to the Zeeland metropolitan area, he snapped up this rather sweet, sculptural, handmade, kid-size mystery chair at a local vintage store. And then he sent pictures...
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[read the full post...]
August 18, 2011
It Gets Better: Dad Owns Up To Rocker Past
On the one hand, we have Jon Bon Jovi and his drummer starting a stroller company. And Steven Malkmus in a baby sling. And the moms from Blink 182 starting a nursery furniture company. And the Rossdale-Stefanis, whoo-boy. And basically...
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[read the full post...]
August 10, 2011
DT Mommy Mailbag: Blog About Your Sex Life For Marketing, Facebook Strangers' Voting Amusement!
Just when I think the whole Mommy Mailbag schtick is played out, I get a pitch that makes me feel like the entire PR Industrial Complex actually IS conspiring against men generally and dads in particular. Even the condom makers...
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[read the full post...]
August 5, 2011
DIY Bugaboo Repairs Do Not Cost $25.
Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up blogging about bullshit Bugaboo repair stories. I saw the Instructables post right before I left for a conference, but the number of people sending it in tells me it's kind...
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[read the full post...]
July 24, 2011
DTQ: Co-Sleeping On The Road?
I fear I discovered DT reader Brett's email too late to help them on their trip, but maybe someone else can still benefit from some advice from experienced traveling co-sleepers:Our family is going on a trip soon. Staying at relatives,...
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[read the full post...]
July 13, 2011
Computer Could Start By Removing All The Extraneous Bedding
Computer system designed to prevent SIDS deaths [gizmag via dt reader dt, who also wrote the unimprovable headline]...
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The Three Most Important Things For A Kid Are Love And Confidence And Communication..
For a long time, your kid can't actually tell you when something's wrong. Or what's wrong. You have to get smart about figuring it out. Looking for the signs. Learning the kid's language of nonverbal clues. But at some point,...
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[read the full post...]
July 1, 2011
DT Friday Freakout: Neuroscience Edition
A couple of stories from the world of neuroscience to freak you out over the weekend: [image: newscientist.com/Michael Crabtree] They know when they've been sleeping; they know when they're awake. A study at Kings College London using MRI scans of...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
June 30, 2011
Inside The Nick Jr Actors' Studio
In which Jon Beavers, who plays Twist, the Gilliganesque wigger wigga wegro1 DJ on Nickelodeon's Fresh Beat Band, discusses his craft with and seeks career advice from Mickey Rourke: UPDATE: O man is right. In the comments, Andy flagged this...
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[read the full post...]
June 27, 2011
'Not To Mention Fathers'
psychotherapist/author Lori Gottlieb's article in The Atlantic about how your overparenting's gonna send your kid straight into therapy when they grow up is fascinating and compelling reading. Go read it right now if you haven't already. BUT. As insightful as...
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June 23, 2011
Alot To Chew On
Sorry, it's been kind of a hectic week offline. But then just when I think I have taken on too many things, I get a press release like this one--Unique children's book tackles issues from rescue animals to domestic violence...
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[read the full post...]
June 14, 2011
Dadchelor Parties?? Mommyrexia??
You know what I hate? #$)(%ing writers thinking that coining a stupid $)#%(ing cultural buzzword's gonna give them their big break. Get'em an agent. And a tumblr-to-book deal. A cover story. Yes, I know that's how we got Yuppies. And...
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[read the full post...]
May 20, 2011
DT Friday Freakout: Apocalyptical Distance Edition
A passel of parenting and pediatric press to freakout your Friday, fellows. It's no Danny Stiles, but it'll have to do: So THIS is why the Tylenol PRs have been emailing me all this time. Big Acetaminophen is getting on...
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[read the full post...]
May 10, 2011
They Go Together Like Childhood Cancer And Parental PTSD
So this Boston Herald story is not one of those, "Oh no, nothing worse than finding out the baby has cancer" stories after all. Its' about the inevitably worse stuff that happens because the kid has cancer, and the parents...
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[read the full post...]
May 9, 2011
The Best Tweet About Rims And Sonograms Of 2011
I'm sure this is going to make the Daddy Types Top 10 Tweets of 2011 list, but it'll have to happen after the site gets bought by AOL, and I get laid off via mass email. Because frankly, I can't...
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[read the full post...]
May 2, 2011
Can Someone Please Explain Cambridge Dads?
I've added Wicked Local columnist Steve Nadis to my list of Guys Who Inexplicably Think What This Country Needs Is More Dave Barry. But it'll take another read or two before I give up and add "Cambridge Dads" to my...
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[read the full post...]
April 28, 2011
The Comforter
I have no doubt my wife knew whose teaching job it was all along, but for a while there I was like, "At some point the kid's gotta learn to make her own bed. Don't her paren--oh, right." But then...
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[read the full post...]
April 27, 2011
DTQ: A Rearfacing Convertible Infant Carrier?
DT reader David wonders if we've really entered the 3-car seat era:Our old Graco Snugride seems to be at the end of its lifespan, while our K2 is but 7 months old. It's possible Graco might fix it, but it...
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[read the full post...]
April 18, 2011
DT Mommy Mailbag: FAME!
Subject: "Are Viral Videos the Wrong Way to Fame for Kids?" Why yes, yes they are, says the child winner of Star Search 1989-turned-child fame coach whose "new CD's give kids a national platform to showcase their talent," and which...
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[read the full post...]
April 13, 2011
When Did Boys Stop Wearing Pink?
Wow, it feels like I've been waiting my whole parental life for historian Jo B. Paoletti's book, Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls From the Boys in America; I hope it doesn't drive me crazy with subjectivity and suck....
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[read the full post...]
April 8, 2011
Where Did Jar Jar Touch You?
Overheard from the 3yo next to us at the library, who's pointing to some book: "Is that Queen Amidala?" His mother: "Yes." What are you supposed to do when you find out a parent's let a kid watch Episodes I-III?...
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[read the full post...]
April 5, 2011
Needs More Adorable
Like the cherry blossoms appearing in Spring, the piercing cry of the design-savvy new parent brings hope to those who have lived through another winter in this ruffle-encrusted wasteland of kids design. At Design Observer, Alexandra Lange boldly quotes Adolf...
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[read the full post...]
April 3, 2011
No Preschool Child Left Behind
UC Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik has a great article on Slate about how--well, it's probably about how preschool education is going to hell in a handbasket because of misunderstandings about how kids learn and about what toddlers should be learning...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
Strollers And The City
Tom Scocca's NY Times op-ed/true confession of his kid's strollercentric city life is pretty great. It made me think of two things, though. OK, three: 1) Duh. That just means he's right. 2) When the kid was a few weeks...
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[read the full post...]
March 29, 2011
Don't Touch The Screen
In the most recent episode of Don't Touch The Screen, his awesome new podcast for webnerds with kids, Charlie Park talks with Matt Haughey about the challenges of working at home with kids. The fact that it took me two+...
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[read the full post...]
March 25, 2011
Do You Know Me? The Flat-Sided Mystery Crib
DT reader David still has a few months left to figure out who makes this crib and where he can buy one. Or at least one like it. The folks modeling the bedding have no idea who the manufacturer...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
March 23, 2011
Now That's A Black Flag I'd Like To See
Thomas Pluck kills it with his Punk Dad Manifesto in The Morning News. As an accomplished fiction writer, he somehow manages to conjure up a vivid image of a stultifying suburban hellscape, despite living in an idyllic, master-planned development outside...
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[read the full post...]
March 16, 2011
All Fred Roger's Children
You know, even more than most TV people, the soap opera industry is a pretty stilted bunch of folks, but watching Fred Rogers get inside their heads and feel human for even a few seconds is a real treat....
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
March 11, 2011
5 Top Tips For Managing Your Mombloggers
Dear Marketers, Publicists, and Branding Folks, It's true, mombloggers are hot and on trend right now, and they can be a smart part of your savvy social media campaign! But they can also be sensitive, temperamental, tricky to deal with....
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[read the full post...]
February 15, 2011
Bitch All Up In My Dadblogging Business
Glad to see dads' blogging efforts aren't going unnoticed in the savvier corners of the feminist media. Rachel Fudge has a long, insightful look at the dadblog world in the new issue of Bitch ["not your mother's Ms."] Magazine. A...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
February 13, 2011
Your365? Has Disney Baby's Bedside Partner Our365 Visited You In The Hospital?
Alright, after a weekend off, I am ready to take a more level-headed look at this Disney Baby thing. The world's obviously not going to end when Disney characters start appearing on newborn gear and clothing or nursery walls or...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
February 4, 2011
The Washington Post Takes Work-Life Balance Issues Very Seriously
"Where are men in the work/life conversation?" Asks the headline in Selena Rezvani's book-plugging guest post in the Washington Post's On Leadership blog. Yes, where are they? Ah, here they are: on Twitter, continuing the work-life balance conversation they've been...
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[read the full post...]
January 27, 2011
HA, Tiger Mom's At Davos, And You're Not
Well, most of you are not. I've been surprised to get a few tweets, you know who you are. Anyway, not only is random Yale Law professor Amy Chua at the World Economic Forum; she's on a panel at the...
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[read the full post...]
Gather Yer Kids' Rosebuds While Ye May
The Middle East is in revolt, the double dip is starting, it's snowpocalypse all over again, and I'm missing a quarter's worth of tax receipts. What else can we stress about? Ah yes, the fate of all the kid's art!...
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[read the full post...]
January 21, 2011
7 Jason Kottke Parenting Tips You Can Use Right Now
Wow, a couple of days of single parenting is apparently all it took to unleash Jason Kottke's inner uber-dadblogger. He's been en fuego recently with the highly useful tips. [Apologies to my ad guy for not turning this post into...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
I Was A Practice Baby
You've heard the story about practice babies, right? How random kids were plucked from whatever crib or orphanage was handy, and were given to a group of home ec students to raise for a semester? Sure you have. My mom...
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[read the full post...]
January 20, 2011
F#$*( Yeah High Expectations Asian Father
Either Chinese Moms really are everybody everywhere but you, you lazy, bad, gwai louh parent--or Tiger Mom's got some 'splainin' to do. Like, during her kids' 8-hour forced piano marches, was Amy Chua just cold hitting reload on High Expectations...
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[read the full post...]
Amy Chua Puts The Me Me In Meme
Please just tell me that all of this attention does not mean people are buying her book, right? RIGHT? Anyway, I've only seen about 100 so far, but this is my favorite; it captures the essence of what really matters...
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[read the full post...]
January 19, 2011
Wednesday WTF
In the immortal words of the philosopher, "Sometimes you just gotta say, WTF?" For alliterative purposes, this is one of those times: One day, and you can't swing a Russian baby on the Internet without hitting a fevered reaction to...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
Not Your 'Usual Psychic Child Material'
This blurb for Sara Wiseman's new book, Your Psychic Child contains entire universes I didn't even know existed:Sara Wiseman is the Erma Bombeck of the psychic crowd...Her writing style and her personality offer us a break from the usual 'psychic...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
January 18, 2011
Dadwagon Babyswings For The Fences
Duck, there's another babyswinging video coming out of the Inscrutable East! And this time Dadwagon's there to catch it. A couple of years ago, a vaguely Russian-seeming babyswinging video made a splash onto YouTube--and got the guy who uploaded it...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
January 17, 2011
'Sperm banking was--and in many ways, is--the Wild West'
Wow, from Maud Newton's interview with Misha Angrist, a geneticist whose new book, This Is A Human Being, addresses the personal, social and political issues of the current & coming genomic inforevolution:MN: Speaking of using DNA to determine ancestry, I...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
Bobos In Utero
David Brooks has a fascinating article book pitch in the New Yorker where he distills all the amazing research in neuroscience to help explain our ice cream choices. Sorry, I meant gelato:To give a sense of how this inner story...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
January 9, 2011
Chinese Mothering Involves Neither Joy Nor Luck
Woo-hoo, this just in from New Haven, aka the place where Amy Chua's kids already are, and your kids will never get, because they have lazy, weak, over-coddling you for a parent instead of a real Chinese Mother: Uh, well,...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
December 10, 2010
The Name Is Baby WEE-Pay
Remember when you got that email in 2004 asking you to send Costco baby wipes to the Troops because they were, uh, perfect for getting the Iraqi sand out of their rifles? No? Remember when the company you'd just merged...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
December 1, 2010
The Mozart Effect Of Sports
I could say the lack of posting around here is because I've been in a work crunch, and because everyone's sick at home, and because I've been doubling up nights, prepping for a presentation in Miami Friday. But the real...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
November 22, 2010
We're All Black Men Now, Honey
I recently happened to have dinner with a senior federal law enforcement official who happens to be acquainted with the head of the TSA. It was right before the TSA's aggressive, invasive new genital-grabbing or naked photography search protocols were...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
The Underpants Revolution Will Be Tweeted
Car guru/dadblogger/DT hero Dave is live-tweeting his kid's first big day of toilet training. Let's just say that so far, there is no stagefright. After a super-low-to-no-key approach based primarily on our own laziness, K2's about a week into full...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
November 17, 2010
Help You This Public Service Announcement Will
Alright, this is pretty damn funny. And by funny, I mean totally serious. [via dt reader eric]...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
October 27, 2010
Watch Out, Neal Pollack
Whether you're a parenting advice expert or a momblogger, a filmmaker, a comedian, a hipster memoirist, a singer or a Kardashian--hell, it probably even happened to Erma Bombeck--there's that moment anyone who makes money off his kids dreads: Hahahaha, no,...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
October 25, 2010
Mommy Steps: Lisa Belkin's Slowly Coming Around
Whether it's a couple of years of intensive parentblogging, or the shifting economy, finding the right research, or whatever, the NY Times' Lisa Belkin is finally seeing work-family balance issues as a parents' problem, not just a moms' problem. From...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
September 29, 2010
Lazy Environmentalist Puts The E-C In Eco-Friendly
What's a modern treehuggin' new dad--and the author of a green lifestyle book to boot--supposed to do when confronted with the absorbent hyper-convenience of Pampers Cruisers? Josh Dorfman aka The Lazy Environmentalist, we're looking at you, buddy:"Because we feel guilty...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
September 27, 2010
Fake It Till You Make It
I didn't click through when the publicist sent me the link for Phillip Toledano's essay about reluctant fatherhood, because I thought it was going to be all about his own dying father or whatever. Which is fine and good and...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
September 15, 2010
Q: How Do You De-Scum A Crazy Straw?
I've tried soaking, sucking and blowing, but so far, nothing....
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September 14, 2010
M3 Cliff's Notes. And Brian's Notes. And Jason's Notes
In my six-plus years since I started Daddy Types as the "Gizmodo for dads," my ambivalence about the weirdness of professional parenting has only intensified. And before I decided not to, I did originally plan on doing a panel at...
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September 8, 2010
Congratulations!
I guess it's not uncommon for second kids, but K2 got interested in toilet training unexpectedly early. We've been taking it super low-key, letting K2 set the pace and be interested in it when she wants. But we were...
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September 7, 2010
The First Nation Of Hockey And Dad Time Outs
I can't figure out how to do it, so I'll just say to imagine Mister Rogers as you read about how Nathan's recent Dadwagon discussion of parents getting angry at their kids got turned into a Teaching Moment by the...
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September 3, 2010
DT Friday Freakout
With a long weekend, a hurricane, a roadtrip, and kids waking up at 6:30 when they're supposed to wake up at 8, you'd think nothing could ruin one's weekend any more. Well, the reporters of science, health, parenting, and education...
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What To Expect From A Movie Called Hobo With A Shotgun
There are so many different versions of the end of Blade Runner, it's hard for even the diehard fan to keep them straight. So let's go with the basics: there's the Domestic Cut, originally released in US theaters with...
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August 16, 2010
Infant Stool Illustrations By The Inestimable Mrs J.D.Z. Chase
Sure, she produced, for the purposes of diagnosis and education, the hand-drawn illustrations of the contents of various infant diapers included in Dr. Harry Lowenburg's 1916 A practical treatise on infant feeding and allied topics, for physicians and students....
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August 11, 2010
It Takes A Playgroup To Raise An Only Child
The Wall Street Journal reports that the parents of several only children have created a once-a-week playgroup to socialize them. This is now or will be a trend, seeing as how some people only have one kid. How will this...
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July 28, 2010
Don't Bring A Penis To An Obstetrician Fight
No one becomes an obstetrician so they can interact with more men. So what do four of the whiniest OB's imaginable really think about dads in the delivery room? Thanks to the lack of nametags at Esquire's open bar, now...
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July 22, 2010
Playdating Around
Another great story from Theo Nion: Kid Ready To Start Playdating Again [theonion via dt reader ponch]...
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July 21, 2010
When The Mocha Moms Are Away The Token Dads Come Out To Play
High five to the dads--dadbloggers all, in fact--who appeared yesterday in place of the regular Tuesday panel of "Mocha Moms" on NPR's Tell Me More: Jason Sperber of Rice Daddies, Keith Morton of FatherDad, and Paul Fidalgo of Bloc Raissoneur....
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July 16, 2010
DT Friday Freakout: Jobs Edition
I'll apologize in advance for this week's Friday Freakout. I've been trying hard to muster a freakout over anything, anything at all related to kids, parenting, safety, whatever, that can match the freaking out I've been doing since reading that...
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July 11, 2010
DT Friday Freakout: Chemicals Edition
I've been freaking out over it all weekend, and there's just no way around it: it's hard to top Z-Recommends for Freakout News: "This made the purchase of synthetic urine feel a bit spendy, but can you blame me?...
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July 8, 2010
Sociologists Read Woman's Day So You Don't Have To
DT reader DT reminds us just what a rich source Context's Sociological Images blog is for Women/Men/Kids These Days! material. I mean, seriously, who even thought of looking in Woman's Day for valuable insights into the impact of gender on...
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June 28, 2010
Metafilter Answers: Before There Were Car Seats
A very amusing discussion on Ask Metafilter about how kids rode in cars before there were safety regulations or car seats. Or seat belts. I'd find it more awesome if ANY of the many ingenious-but-deadly inventions featured on DT over...
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June 23, 2010
Procter & Gamble Totally Crumble In The Face Of Rebel Dad's Pampers Boycott
It's been several weeks since Rebel Dad announced his boycott of Pampers for their four-years-and-counting insistence on calling him a mom in all their mailings and marketing campaigns. And guess what, P&G has utterly caved in the face of this...
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June 22, 2010
My Name Is Clek Oobr, And I. Am. An Awesome Canadian Booster Seat.
I've often wondered why more car companies don't get into the car seat business. Recaro is a rare example. And as auto hyper-expert and longtime DT reader David Traver Adolphus explains in an exclusive guest review, Clek is another. David...
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June 21, 2010
The Top 10 319 Ways Living With A Toddler Is Like Being At A Frat Party
289. "Your one goal is to get someone in bed and, when you're finally successful, you're so tired all you want to do is go to sleep." 10 Reasons Having A Toddler Is Like Being At A Frat Party [suburbansnapshots.com...
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June 1, 2010
Your Sippy Cups Are Probably Gnarlier Than You Think
Ours sure were. Fortunately, we have someone who not only noticed how chewed up and beat up they were, she did something about it. The new cups sparkle like jewels. And now they have some tricky silicon cover, which...
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May 15, 2010
DC Wants To Be Brookln So Bad
Kid-free bloggers complaining about babies in bars. Stroller bans in twee local hangouts. Message board flamewars over family grocery runs on the bus. Just one train ride to Manhattan! All they need is a sex shop with a changing table,...
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May 6, 2010
Nestle Is NOT Amused By Enfamil's Sugary, Chocolatey Toddler Formula
Holy crap! Formula Freakout! I just read on Twitter that dadwagon had a new post about a Los Angeles Times article about the momblogger outrage over Enfagrow, Enfamil's new flavored [and sugar-loaded] toddler formula! Which went on sale in February....
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April 29, 2010
Nipple Confusion Is A Myth
Yes, all this time [i.e., since breastfeeding came back], the problem with pacifiers has been that they screwed up a kid's latching. Which is an improvement when you consider that, for much of its 150-year history, the complaint against pacifiers...
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April 27, 2010
That's Really The Kind Of Parent-Playing Lie I'd Expect From An 8-yo
K2 just walked in wearing her sister's swimsuit. Me: That's your sister's swimsuit. K2: I can wear it. Me: Why don't you wear your own swimsuit? K2: I asked her, she said it's OK. So advanced....
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April 23, 2010
At Home [Depot] Dad Meets Changing Table [Saw]
Nice. After a few years of chronicling the presence and absence of mens room changing tables, I am glad to see some changing table rebellion--on any surface I'm not eating off of:My last trip to the great orange tool warehouse...
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April 22, 2010
Ellie For Willie
Whether you think it's exhaustive or exhausting, New York Magazine's sprawling feature talking about circumcision from every angle imaginable should be required reading for anyone deciding the fate of somebody else's foreskin. And as of tonight, it seems like the...
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April 16, 2010
DT Friday Freakout
Friday Friday Friday--Ooh, what does it mean? It means it's time to ruin your weekend with alarming and/or depressing news from the worlds of science, safety, and parenting! Mother Jones has a shocking story about how, according to a mind-blowing...
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April 15, 2010
Kids And Parents And Photos And iPads
Maybe it's because her camera was better than mine at the time, or because she was already all into her iPhoto, but my wife is the Chief Kid Photo Officer around here. She does the awesome, annual photobooks for the...
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April 12, 2010
Get In The Habit Of Checking Whether Your Kid Is In The Back Seat
It's spring, not too hot yet. And the Gene Weingarten's March 2009 story for the Washington Post just won the Pulitzer Prize. Which makes it an excellent time for every parent to get in the habit of checking, every single...
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April 1, 2010
White House Notices Dads, Announces Actual Policy At Work-Family Forum
Haha, April Fools! The wife and I had some serious conversations in advance of the White House's forum on Workplace Flexibility. For one thing, she has worked at the White House and organized a deeply substantive yet highly photogenic presidential...
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March 19, 2010
Kids Threadless T-Shirts Are All Ten Bucks Til Saturday Morning
I'm stoked that Threadless, everyone's favorite crowdsourcing t-shirt cult, is celebrating their 10th anniversary by selling all T's, including kids' for just $10 each. [Order by Saturday morning, 3/20 at 10AM CT!] But I'm also kind of paralyzed by the...
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March 10, 2010
Mathowie's iPhone Apps For Kids
It might look like I'm slow to finally link to Matt Haughey's recommended screenful of iPhone games for kids. But really, I was just waiting to see how long it would take his commenters to mention Pee Monkey, the best...
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March 2, 2010
Drinkin' & Drivin' The Dadwagon
So awesome, and yet so reasonable! CNN has a great story about Dadwagon's own Matt Gross, whose adorable 1-yo daughter is apparently harshing buzzes in bars all over Brooklyn. I'd clicked the article open and was going to read it...
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February 22, 2010
DT Friday Freakout: Monday Makeup Edition
Tell me why I don't like Mondays? Because they remind me that I have so many open browser tabs left over from the Friday Freakout I didn't do, I start out the week feeling behind. So let's just clear the...
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February 16, 2010
What Is Wrong With You White People?
So much going on in Jonathan Liu's Geekdad post about how parents are turning our kids into racists. And by parents, I guess Liu means white parents: The attitude (at least of those who think racism is wrong) is generally...
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February 8, 2010
This All Goes Down On Your Permanent Google Record
There were a lot of manly man ads and daddish and baby birthin' ads in the Superbowl last night, but none that beat Google's punchline. Eventually, though, Google will probably start suggesting you put that extra cookie back, and then--if...
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February 3, 2010
New York Magazine, Seriously.
I cannot get over how dead-on accurate this is. I get a press release every. single. weekend from New York Magazine about some over-educated city parent anxiety-inducing cover story or another. Every. Single. Week. Dear New York magazine, My baby....
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January 21, 2010
Babies In Bars? Take The Dadwagon Poll
In case you haven't been following it, Dadwagon is totally owning the WTF? Babies In Brooklyn Bars? story. Today there's a poll. And tomorrow, I hope, a drinking game, to help the kidded and the kidless come back together. The...
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January 19, 2010
An Incomplete List Of Things That Are Not A Toy
Plastic bag The stove Silverware drawer The toaster The microwave The toilet My phone My iPod My computer Your mother's phone Your mother's computer Your mother's purse The car door lock That window button All the stuff in your dresser...
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January 17, 2010
DTQ: So The Kid Wants To Boogie
Alright, I realize I haven't yet explained how and why the kid ended up with an iPod Nano, so I'll get back to that. Right now, she just wants to boogie, and I'm a bit conflicted about which funky disco...
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January 12, 2010
Pop Goes The Weasel
She was literally begging for it while wearing her swimsuit around the house all day, so last week, K2 and I started swimming lessons. We go to the brand new city pool near us in DC, which--hey-ho!--is utterly fantastic. And...
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January 10, 2010
DT Friday Freakout: Weekend Washout Edition
It's 10 o'clock. Is it too late to ruin your weekend with alarming news from the worlds of science, medicine, safety, and parenting advice? The BBC reports that a parental survey of some kind finds that "'One in six' children...
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December 30, 2009
Spitting Is Sign Of Love After All
In his last interview, conducted while writing his great, posthumously published novel, 2666 and finally published in English last month, the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño discussed parenting:In the end, one could talk for hours about the relationship between a father...
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Discovered: The Purpose Of Second Children
So that you can still hold a shred of hope for the future after your first kid announces that, when she grows up, she wants to do water ballet....
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December 29, 2009
Bring'em Onboard! Traveling With The Steele X Reference Library Tote Was Awesome
No offense to the family on our flight who successfully recreated a domestic oasis among the benches at Heathrow using their Orbit Stroller and massage-table-sized folding travel crib, but we like to travel as relentlessly light as possible. One...
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December 17, 2009
Look, Anyone Can Teach Any 2-YO 'Hamlet'
I really don't like just reposting random things. I like to be able to add a little context, a little more useful info where I can. And I'm very wary of just posting other peoples' random kid videos or...
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December 15, 2009
DTQ: Anyone Know How To Say 'Snow Fencing' In French?
So we're getting ready for our Christmas trip to France, should be gone a while. We've got the kids' new suitcases, the kid's bringing her recurring ear infection ["amoxycillin's amoxycillin, except they call it le amoxycillin."], and K2 is as...
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December 11, 2009
Time Out Of It
I'm a little slow to this, but my grandmother only saw the article at her doctor's office this week. Time Magazine has one of those big trend-calling pieces, "Helicopter Parents: The Backlash Against Overparenting," about how This Generation of Parents...
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December 10, 2009
Jumpin' On The Dadwagon
Sorry it's been kind of quiet around here. Work's been kind of crazy, the kids have the Swine Flu, but I still had to do my shift at the Book Fair, Christmas shopping is going full-- Oh, who am I...
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December 9, 2009
Through The Enchanted Gate: MoMA's Kid Art TV Show
I've worked with MoMA in various ways for almost twenty years now, but I only really became aware of the incredible legacy of Victor d'Amico since having a kid. He oversaw the education programs at the Modern for decades,...
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FLASH! Dadslapping At Brooklyn Starbucks!
War? Depression? Global warming conferences? Serial, cross-country exploitation of a special needs child to sell a fact-challenged book? If ever there were a time this country needed fewer objects of righteous outrage, this is it. And yet here we are:...
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December 7, 2009
Finally, Secrets Of The Cardboard Play Dome Revealed!
And here, all this time, I thought the secret to making easy, awesome cardboard play domes was the Esko Kongsberg i-XL24 die-less cutting and creasing table. [Actually, I knew that something was missing. Thanks to veteran domologist Tom Camilli's...
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December 2, 2009
Meat Industrial Complex, Baby Industrial Complex, Dadbook Industrial Complex
Meanwhile, from the yuppie rabbit hutches of Park Slope, Brooklyn: When I thought it was just a passive aggressive manifesto of smug vegetarianism, I was happy to let Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, Eating Animals go by with nary a...
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DTQ: The Right Age For A Sheep Slaughtering?
A question from DT reader DT:We have a sheep to slaughter on Saturday, and I'm wondering how old is old enough for butchering? I know it isn't age 2. I seem to recall reading that a lot of hunter-gatherer cultures...
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November 18, 2009
Madeleine Brand Thinks That Tree Should Just Stop Giving, It's Only Encouraging Him
It's apparently NPR Bad Decisions Day around here. After her slightly quirky, mid-day news/talk show "Day To Day" was canceled, West Coast radio host Madeleine Brand found another gig: momblogger. She is leading the LA Times' new blog/podcast hybrid, Parenting...
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Working Mother Fans Sexist Hysteria Over Child Custody
Wow. I am just blown away by the incredibly sexist premise and alarming tone of Sally Abrahms' article in Working Mother magazine about supposed changes in divorce and family law. The magazine considers dads' increased involvement in parenting to be...
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November 16, 2009
DT Monday Mommy Mailbag: Feng Shui Edition
Haven't gotten any really great crazy-sexist marketing pitches lately; The DT Monday Mommy Mailbag must be working! And for that, I am thankful. So to help make your holiday party the most harmonious ever, here are some handy tips to...
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Jim Coudal's Pro Dad Tips
Pro/dad Jim Coudal's been sprinkling his Pro Dad Tips into his agency's awesome linkblog stream to great acclaim. Now they've been gathered into one, delicious Twitter feed, it's like bacon you don't have to clean up. I give it...
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November 12, 2009
Leave Me Alone, I'm Self-Soothing! Onesie
If you're going to put parenting advice on the back of a Onesie [sic], shouldn't it say, "Whatrya tryin' to do, SIDS me? Put me on my back!" Wait, this is at Zazzle. How do I know this is...
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November 10, 2009
Factchecking The Childrearing Experts
You may remember NY Post reporter Jeremy Olshan from such blog posts as "My boys can swim, there just aren't that many of them,", "Brooklyn bike stores fix stroller flats!" and "Holy smokes, IVF means we have twins now!" That...
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November 8, 2009
As Finally Seen On TV
"I just saw the bestest thing ever on TV, and it's only $19.95!" When the kid comes bouncing in to tell me this, barely able to control her excitement, a lot of thoughts pile up in my mind: we certainly...
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November 3, 2009
NYT On The Pruetts: 'Fathers Do Not Mother, They Father.'
The NY Times has a great article discussing some recent research on the involvement of fathers in raising kids, including the work of Dr. Kyle Pruett a child psychiatrist at Yale, who is one of the leading researchers on fatherhood,...
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October 23, 2009
DT Friday Freakout: Nuclear Edition
Here are some stories from the science, safety, and parenting worlds designed to help give your confidence a little extra push--over the cliff. Have a great weekend! Actually, these first two are just funny-sad: Do you remember going outside to...
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October 22, 2009
Parental Yelling Experts Declare Parental Yelling Crisis
I know this should be in the Friday Freakout, but hey. The New York Times reports that this generation of parents is yelling at their kids in unprecedented numbers. This, according to authors of books on parental yelling, actresses starring...
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October 15, 2009
MKT Rsch
Dadblogger/car guy Dave Thomas is reviewing the new Lincoln MKT for Cars.com and is looking for the dad's eye view of the thing. The MKT is a three-row, SUV-sized not-a-van/not-a-wagon that shares a platform--and a second-row fridge option--with the...
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October 14, 2009
No Dads Were Harmed In The Making Of These Babble Thinkpieces
I've had these nice Babble essays in my browser tabs now for over a week, and I've been looking for an excuse to mention them, even though they're so chicky. [Disclosure: I wrote a couple of things for Babble when...
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October 9, 2009
DT Friday Freakout
The moon is still here, and you didn't win the Nobel Peace Prize this year, but surely, there are still reports from the worlds of science and parenting to freak out about this weekend? Yes, and don't call me Shirley:...
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HAHA, Gap Casting Call Turning Into Mall Mom Version Of Survivor
Given that they're all wearing all the same clothes from the same two stores, you'd think I'd have an easier time recognizing This Country Of Mine, America. A post about the Gap Casting Call on the popblog Bumpershine has become...
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[read the full post...]
October 8, 2009
Poo-ology Evolves Beyond 'More Bananas Or More Pears?'
In Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, the eunuchs study Pu Yi's poo every day to determine his diet. In The Madness of King George III, analysis of the king's stool was a key plot point. Speaking of, did you know...
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October 2, 2009
DT Friday Freakout: Unfit Mothers Edition
Sometimes it can be really hard to sit on some of these newly released studies all week and not freak out about them. But this way, it only ruins the weekend: The BBC's headline which took a new Institute of...
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October 1, 2009
Apparently, Jogging With A Stroller Is Different
I'm no jogger, so really, I have no idea, but the NY Times' collection of facts and tips for adjusting your technique, expectations, and strategy when you run with a stroller sure seems handy. Still, doesn't everyone just do whatever...
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[read the full post...]
September 29, 2009
Sidewalk Grandma Has Several Pieces Of Advice, If You'd Just Put Down That iPhone For Two Seconds
Seriously, when she was a young parent did she ignore her kid all around town while chatting on her Blackberry or her iPod or her iPhone all day? She most certainly did not. And another thing--well, technically several:Count the...
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[read the full post...]
September 20, 2009
Sartorialist Temporarily Screws Up Arthur Elgort Camera Ready Market
In 1997, fashion photographer Arthur Elgort published Camera Ready: How to Shoot Your Kids, an awesome and inspiring collection of eleven years' worth of his best photos of his own kids, combined with wise, useful, not overly technical advice....
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[read the full post...]
September 18, 2009
DT Friday Freakout: Back To School Edition
Just some news and science to freak out over this weekend: School officials summoned police to confront a family who rode their bikes to school together. They were told they were "out of compliance." [streetsblog via dt sr wtf correspondent...
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A Child's Machiavelli, AKA The Other Little Prince
It's like my dad always told me: "If you can't beat'em, make sardonic Machiavelli references about'em." When John DiIulio fled the Bush White House in 2001, he described the hyper-politicized environment as being run by "Mayberry Machiavellis." And when...
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September 16, 2009
From The Niemann Family Bed
Is there anything that can't be made funnier or more awesome by being drawn by Christoph Niemann? I think not. Good Night and Tough Luck [nytimes blogs]...
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[read the full post...]
September 11, 2009
Feminism? You're Immersed In It!
While I was immersed in the imaginary dialectics of crayonmaking, Backpacking Dad was tackling more substantial matters, namely the state of feminism in the era of supposedly equal parenting. You win this round, Backpacking Dad! It's pretty great stuff:Fish out...
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[read the full post...]
September 9, 2009
You Know, It's Funny
This is Merrill Markoe talking here. She created the David Letterman Show , among many other things, and is really damn funny and insightful:The stuff that happens in early childhood, before you're three years old, you know, that's who you're...
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[read the full post...]
September 3, 2009
Babyproofing With Martin Short
In 1993, Martin Short starred in Home Safe a 40-minute walkthrough of vital babyproofing advice and information. It's as funny as a heart attack baby swallowing a balloon. [Some context: that was two years after Father of the Bride,...
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[read the full post...]
August 30, 2009
Seriously, What IS Up With Crib Mattresses?
Now that you mention it, Mark, what's up with all those impossible-to-comparison-shop crib mattresses? I'm a newly expecting father and I'm usually pretty good at cutting through the myriad of choices and identifying preference when it comes to most babies...
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[read the full post...]
August 21, 2009
DTQ: What iPhone Picturebook Apps Do You Use?
It just gives me a headache to wade through the iPhone App Store. And the few picturebook apps I've seen look like crap: a jury-rigged reader with a couple of dopey clip art-lookin' titles no one's ever read twice. Still,...
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Let's Panic About Babies!: What To Really Expect When You're Expecting
So awesome, even if the only mentions of dads are the "Is your partner an Insensitive Jock or a Deadbeat Dad?" poll and the "10 things to do with your partner instead of even pretending to be interested in having...
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[read the full post...]
August 19, 2009
Advice For When The White House Asks You To Read A Book To Children
Alright, Melody and Rahm, you are the fifth and sixth White House-related celebrities to read books to large groups of children [the other four being former Utah governor and HHS secretary Mike Leavitt and his wife, and two guys...
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[read the full post...]
August 6, 2009
The End Of Adventure, Literature As Michael Chabon Knows It. Them. Also Maps
Here's what I hear: We don't let children go out in the woods today alone anymore, because of our unfounded fear of strangers in vans. The result of this Razing of the Wilderness of Childhood is, in the future, no...
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[read the full post...]
Grilled Placenta With Peanut Sauce And Rice Vermicelli
Wait, is the annoying, new dad, placenta-schlepping, Time Magazine column-having Joel Stein related to the annoying, peanut-allergy-denying, yuppie-parent-blaming, Los Angeles Times column-having Joel Stein? Why would anyone take a single piece of food-related advice from that guy? Does the placenta...
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[read the full post...]
July 30, 2009
The Details Guyde To Fatherhood
Which one do you think wants the SNL audition the baddest? Also, chain wallets for babies are a serious choke hazard, yo. [via the awl]...
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[read the full post...]
July 22, 2009
Slate's Toddler Tuesday Reminds Me Why I Hate Consulting
Between Slate's trademark pseudo-scientific shopppertainment, blurby non-review of a couple of sippy cups that would work better as a PowerPoint slide, and their bone-dry, scandal-less recap of the FDA's BPA review panels that feels like it was torn from the...
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[read the full post...]
July 20, 2009
DT Monday Mommy Mailbag: Rack After Rack Edition
Wondering what Smart, Haute Moms are being sold this week? Just check out these marketing messages meant for the Mammary Set from the Daddy Types Monday Mommy Mailbag: First up, Sea Goddess contouring swimsuits:Hi There - Every summer, women agonize...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
July 16, 2009
LOLNYT: Nude Kids Are Funny, Normal, Awkward, Inappropriate
There are amusing reactions aplenty in Julie Scelfo's NY Times article about how, when, where, and if kids could or should be nude. I think I'm pretty laid back about the naked kids thing--K2 strips down far more than her...
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[read the full post...]
June 27, 2009
Once Upon A Time, There Was A Little Girl Who Lived With Her Father
Simon Van Booy's tale of raising his 4-year-old daughter alone is just fantastic. Raising a Princess Single-Handedly [nytimes]...
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[read the full post...]
June 25, 2009
DadCentric On NuPoppa
Damn you sports camp carpool lane gridlock! I missed Jason from DadCentric's interview on NuPoppa, the, uh, dad-centric podcast for, uh, new poppas, hosted each week by Doug and Ted. The wife's out of town this week, so I'm soloing...
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[read the full post...]
June 24, 2009
Holey Crap! How Do You Clean Up Saturated Diaper Crystals?
Oh no she di'int? Oh yes, she did. K2 just came charging out of her room waving her unfurled, supersoaked overnight diaper. The fabric had split, and so left a wide trail of pee-saturated diaper tapioca in her wake. It's...
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[read the full post...]
June 12, 2009
DTQ: What Do You Say To Street Smacking?
So the other day, I was walking along the street, and I cut across a little triangular park, all cobblestone, with a few chairs in it. And there's a dad standing there. His kid--18 mos, maybe more, but not 2--is...
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[read the full post...]
June 5, 2009
The Chimp Wasn't The Problem
Harry Raven, 82, would like to make two things clear: Contrary to all the press coverage at the time [i.e., the 1930s], Meshie, the orphan chimp his father brought home to live with them, was never considered a sibling. He...
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[read the full post...]
May 28, 2009
Let's Read The Sphinx Story Again!
We've been reading our way through the d'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths at bedtime, and for once, I'm wishing it was more prudish, not less. Because though the kid is loving it, reading the story of Oedipus and the Sphinx...
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[read the full post...]
May 21, 2009
97 177 Commenters Agree, Dad's Overanalyzing Playground Hubbub
Jason Kottke wrote about a playground incident, where he intervened to stop a slap-happy 2yo from beating on his own son Ollie, only to be accused by Slappy's mom of threatening her son. The particulars of his situation matter, of...
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[read the full post...]
May 17, 2009
ASD: The Next Generation
Matthew Baldwin makes a pretty compelling case for Spock as the role model [Spocksmodel?] for the new generation, where neurotypical kids and kids with diagnoses along the autism spectrum live side by side in galactic peace and harmony:That Spock is...
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[read the full post...]
May 15, 2009
"Otherwise They Get The Wrong Idea"
K2 loves tearing pages out of books. Once, in the car on the drive to NYC, she was fileting a gimmicky boardbook copy of There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly in the back seat. It was keeping...
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[read the full post...]
May 14, 2009
The Case For Regifting
This idea of regifting has been eating at me for months now, ever since a discussion with a parent at the kid's preschool about how, between family, church, work, neighbors and school, it seems like there's at least one but...
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[read the full post...]
April 30, 2009
Living On The Earth [While Mostly Naked, And With A Kid]
As soon as I saw the cover of Alicia Bay Laurel's Living on The Earth at the library sale, I knew I was buying it, and as soon as I opened it and found out the whole thing was...
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[read the full post...]
April 24, 2009
Tito, Bring Me A Tissue
A list of things that, rather than use a baby wipe, are easier to clean up after it dries: Steamed rice...
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[read the full post...]
April 22, 2009
GTWDs Are The New Hotness In Australia
The Sydney Morning Herald has the scoop: seems that the business culture is starting to change in Australia, and more and more dads are demanding flexible work schedules so that they can be more involved with raising their kids. So...
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[read the full post...]
April 20, 2009
We're From The Government, And We're Here To Help Stop Baby Tossing
When the Children's Bureau of the US Department of Health, Education & Welfare published its first edition of Infant Care in 1914, there was no data on birth rates or infant mortality, no child- and birth-related research, no pediatrics, and...
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[read the full post...]
April 17, 2009
Not To Be All Andy Rooney About It, But...
Did you ever notice how hard it is to navigate a voice-activated phone menu with a crying kid standing next to you?...
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[read the full post...]
April 8, 2009
Make Sure Your Kid's Head Is The First Thing You Scratch In The Morning
My theory is that Life Maple & Brown Sugar cereal is actually designed to produce the smell of maple syrup, not the taste. But according to some olfactoryologists or whatever, women have a more highly developed sense of smell so...
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[read the full post...]
April 1, 2009
Novelty & Birth Order: A Negative Correlation Theorem
It's four o'clock, and this is the first post of the day. We're collecting a helluvalot of data, that's for sure, and the analytical model is still in the rough stages, but the operating theory about why birth order matters...
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[read the full post...]
March 16, 2009
Learning To Interpret A Baby's Cries
Some parents look to Science to translate their babies' cries. This is a mistake. The attentive parent will, with a little experience and practice, eventually be able to distinguish between his child's cries, and thus he can be confident that...
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[read the full post...]
March 10, 2009
DTQ: What Up With That Backwards Diaper, Kriss?
Did you just not notice you put the diaper on backwards, did you do it just to see what'd happen, or is that what you was born to do?...
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[read the full post...]
March 5, 2009
DTQ: Now What?
Out of the mouths of babe-tending new dads... Matt Gross, aka the NY Times' Frugal Traveler, just emailed with a great question which, remarkably, I have never heard before:As a brand-new stay-at-home dad, I'm a little mystified about what to...
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[read the full post...]
February 25, 2009
DTQ: When's The Best Time To Install Safety Latches Under The Kitchen Sink?
It's funny, I get this question all the time, and I never would have said "G." Is the answer: A. As soon as you find out you're going to have a kid, so you can get used to opening the...
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[read the full post...]
February 15, 2009
Scrubbed, Sterilized And Disinfected
At some point, you'll surprise yourself because not only will it be no big deal, but you'll actually count yourself lucky that you only needed a slotted spoon when someone dropped a Baby Ruth in your pool or tub....
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[read the full post...]
February 11, 2009
DTQ: Forget The Must-Haves. What Are The Won't-Misses?
Some friends are expecting their first kid in a couple of months, and when we had them over for dinner, the wives took the nursery tour while the men adjourned to the library to talk about important stuff, like US...
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[read the full post...]
February 2, 2009
1001 Rules For Some Tumblrer's Unborn Son
Considering that it feels like "1001 rules for my unborn son" seems to emanate from Brooklyn [I mean, come on, it's a tumblr], there's a strange animus towards facial hair. But there's a healthy animus toward Julian Schnabel, too, so...
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[read the full post...]
January 29, 2009
Survey Says....Moms Are Pretty Pissed
Yow. Parenting.com has the results of a survey of 10,000 MomConnection moms, and they are pissed. And it's not about the impending demise of Wondertime, either. It's the self-centered bums who knocked them up and then don't remember when...
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[read the full post...]
January 22, 2009
Why Does Consumer Reports Want To Kill The Used Bugaboo Market??
The March issue of ShopSmart, the no-ads shopping guide published by the Consumer Reports folks, includes some tips for figuring out which used baby gear is still considered safe to use. [Get the pdf of the article here.] Though the...
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[read the full post...]
January 21, 2009
"Don't Let Him Hit You!": Manhattan Playground Cultures, Circa 1972
There were once hitting playgrounds? If we've become a nation of helicopter parents raising a nation of wimps, maybe this 1972 survey of the entrenched-but-unwritten ground rules at various [uptown] Manhattan playgrounds will help identify the point where we went...
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[read the full post...]
January 13, 2009
Park Slope Parent: Is It OK To Take A 2yo To MoMA?
Because this one time, someone's bubbie complained about the parents chatting up their toddler at every painting, a Park Slope parent is a bit worried about taking her 22-month old kid to the Museum of Modern Art:A childless friend with...
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[read the full post...]
December 31, 2008
Creative Playthings Playsack Turns Classic "Bag-On-Head" Punishment Into Hours Of Flame-Retardant Fun!
Hmm, look what else is in that New Jersey basement. An unopened Creative Playthings Playsack, which, as you could probably guess, is a giant paper bag that a kid is supposed to play in. The eBay description is intriguingly...
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[read the full post...]
December 12, 2008
DTQ: So You Give Your Kid An Antihistamine Before Bed
And instead of tired, they get wired. Like running around the house and moving chairs wired. What can you do, or do you have to just ride it out?...
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[read the full post...]
December 5, 2008
DT WTF Friday: Texas Edition
From East Texas, the four top ways not to quiet a 13-month old baby who cries like she's possessed, presented in the wrong, wrong wrong order: 1. Exorcism, amateur 2. Biting the kid back 20 times 3. Smashing the kid's...
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[read the full post...]
November 24, 2008
DT Freakout Monday? The New Yorker Looks At Overparenting
So you want to prep yourself for Thanksgiving table discussions of the Overparenting Crisis, but, what with the baby yoga and Mandarin playgroups, you don't have time? No problem. Joan Acocella has summed it all up for you in this...
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[read the full post...]
November 14, 2008
Nirvana Baby, 17, Going Through Awkward Fame Stage
The naked baby from the cover of Nevermind is 17 now. It's an age where kids face face challenges figuring out who they are, and experiment with addictive drugs like alcohol, heroin--and arbitrary fame derived from their parents dropping them...
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[read the full post...]
November 7, 2008
DT Friday Freakout: Sara Edition
You know, I'm not feeling particularly freaked out this weekend. In fact, I'm feeling pretty good. And here are a few more reasons why: Because I'm not "mommy dating," and imagining that people are judging me for my watch and...
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[read the full post...]
It's The End Of The World As You Know It
You live in San Francisco. You find out you're having a kid, which means you'll never be able to hop in the car with your friends on a whim and just go wherever ever again. What better way to celebrate...
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[read the full post...]
October 31, 2008
"We're Potty Training And Anything Can Throw That Off"
And she did mean anything:"I was potty training Anna, she was sitting with her book. I stepped away for five minutes and I hear her fighting with somebody, saying, 'It's mine, it's mine!' I turned to go back, the book...
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[read the full post...]
October 16, 2008
Dad Fights The Car Seats, And The Car Seats Win
David is a new dad and one of the car guys [little c, little g, Magliozzis, relax.] at Cars.com. Well, the kid's six months old now, and Dave's care-free days of swapping the bases for his son's infant car seat...
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[read the full post...]
October 5, 2008
The Post-Modern Literalist's Guide To Parenting
The Swedish literary criticism quarterly Glanta recently published a satirical article on raising children in strict accordance with the arguments of post-modernism. It reads a bunch of tips cobbled together one night at an MLA convention, and it pales in...
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[read the full post...]
September 25, 2008
School's Out?
We're in the middle of a "don't want to go to preschool today" standoff this morning, so posting might be a little light. has this ever happened to anyone in the history of preschool? [update: aha, maybe she can't go...
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[read the full post...]
DTQ: Is It The Powdered Formula That's Stinkin' Up Our Fridge?
Because we've cleaned that fridge like three times, it still smells funky. And that's after we put them squirrels Ma shot into double freezer bags, and even after we threw out the rest of that brie wheel I snagged...
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[read the full post...]
September 24, 2008
OG Detailed Dosage Info At Dr. Sears
You new dads coming up now will get a kick out of this. Back before the FDA miraculously cured all colds, coughs, and flu in kids under 2 years old, we used to actually give'em medicine when they were sick....
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[read the full post...]
September 18, 2008
Too Much Pressure
We really like Dr. T. Berry Brazelton's Touchpoints books; they present research findings and what Brazelton looks for in child development in a very approachable, useful way. Now it turns out Brazelton ["and his colleague Dr. Josh Sparrow," gotta plan...
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[read the full post...]
September 12, 2008
DTQ: How Many Diapers Does It Take Before You Realize The Whole Pack Is Bad?
So you're going along, changing the kid's diaper, and she's covered in sodium polyacrylate crumbs, so much it looks like someone sprinkled parmesan cheese all over her butt. But you just wipe it all off, and put the new one...
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[read the full post...]
September 3, 2008
DTQ: How Flat Was Your Kid's Head Before You Did Anything About It?
Because K2's got this flat spot on the back of her head, and it's kind of bugging me out. It started early; she'd almost always turn her head to the right when we'd lay her down; and while we'd always...
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[read the full post...]
August 26, 2008
DTQ: What's A Dad To Do [When He Gets Home From Work]?
I got an email from a reader the other day asking for advice. At first, I felt like I knew the "right" answer, but then I caught myself. I realized I was trying to parse the email for clues, identifying...
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[read the full post...]
August 25, 2008
Inhabitots Looks For The Right Cloth Diaper
Did you know the classic ecotrend blog Inhabitat just had a babybloig? Mazeltov! So cute. So far on Inhabitots, the most actively discussed topic is Andre McCann's extensive roundup of the best cloth diaper options: pocket, one-size, pre-fold, g-Diapers,...
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[read the full post...]
August 22, 2008
I Spit On Your Five Second Rule [And Put It Right Back On The Tray]
Seriously, screw the Five Second Rule. We have the Our Floor/Not Our Floor Rule. But now that's not enough. So I ask you: How many times do you return a piece of food to the kid's tray after it gets...
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[read the full post...]
August 19, 2008
Does Your Mouth Move When You Spoonfeed A Kid?
Because I'm trying like crazy to keep mine still, and I just can't do it. It's the "Do you breathe in or out on your backswing?" of babyfeeding....
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[read the full post...]
August 18, 2008
Kids: It's The Little Differences
I was just saying to Andy, sometimes having another kid feels like Groundhog Day; it only dawns on you slowly that you're going through the exact same ordeals as you did before [e.g., kid fighting her naps like crazy; or...
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[read the full post...]
July 21, 2008
Awe. Some. Baby's First Internet At The Morning News
Wow, The Morning News is back from vacation, and how. As if in answer to my offhand Facebook Generation [sic] question, Kevin Fanning and Kean Soo have created Baby's First Internet, a boardbook in slideshow format. It is awesome:...
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[read the full post...]
July 9, 2008
DTQ: How Much Does That Formula Scoop Actually Hold?
Short answer: a rounded tablespoon, or about 3.5 teaspoons. Longer explanation: Breasts travel well, especially to the beach. Just one more way in which they're the best. But the true sign that you love your child is that you don't...
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[read the full post...]
July 8, 2008
Not Self-Evident Enough, Apparently: Park Slope Dad Pens Declaration Of Co-Dependence
If Blognigger isn't actually one of Thomas Jefferson's long-unacknowledged descendants, he's still the black Patrick Henry of Park Slope. Like his blog handle, Blognigger's Declaration of Co-Dependence is not for the meek. [Unlefs maybe all those f-words are actually s-words...
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[read the full post...]
July 4, 2008
NYT Reviews Backpack Carriers In Five Words Or Less
The NY Times has tiny, Zagat-style reviews of five backpack carriers, four new, and one ratty old Chicco, which still does just fine. Whatever the results, the product list reads like some sort of shroom-fuelled branding poem: Deuter Kid...
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[read the full post...]
"Dad: Dude or Dud? Which One Are You?"
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Dad, Dude or Dud?, originally uploaded by agfachrome25. Lord knows. And if you have either...
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[read the full post...]
July 1, 2008
DTQ: How Do You Manage Your Kid's Online Info?
You know, it seems not enough to just say, "There can be downsides to blogging about your kid." The WSJ's parentblogger Cybele was specifically worried about what happens when they post pictures of their kid on flickr [though apparently not...
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[read the full post...]
WSJ Momblogger Worries, Blogs About Kid's Privacy
On The Juggle, Wall Street Journal momblogger Cybele Weisser worried in print this morning about all the photos of their kid she and her husband post to flickr. By the time I got around to posting about it tonight, the...
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[read the full post...]
June 20, 2008
DTQ: Stroller Detailing Tips?
I've been wondering about the fine art of stroller detailing lately, and how little I do it. Does anyone actually read the manual and follow the maintenance instructions, and clean their stroller? I think the last time I actually washed...
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[read the full post...]
June 18, 2008
Israeli Au Pairs Not The Next Tibetan Nannies After All
That's the conclusion one American Jewish dad came to after his family burned through--Oy, the tsuris!--three Israeli au pairs, with no success. The problem: their "Israeli attitude" [his quotes]. Though they praise their "indigenous charm," American Jews apparently have the...
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[read the full post...]
June 15, 2008
Obama Explains Why They Don't Call It Baby Daddy's Day
Barack Obama got his Cosby on this morning, criticizing men who don't take responsibility for helping raise their children in a Father's Day speech at Apostolic Church of God in Chicago. If you just read the prepared text of his...
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[read the full post...]
June 10, 2008
Don't Call Them Token: Dadbloggers Rap On NPR
Tuesday is normally Mocha Moms day on Tell Me More, NPR's daily talk show with Michel Martin; it's as if The View were just about parenting, and just happened to be black. It's also the kind of chitchat that gets...
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[read the full post...]
June 7, 2008
Speaking Of Pooh, Or The Five-Wiper
The one-L lama, he's a priest, The two-L llama, he's a beast, And I will bet a silk pajama There isn't any three-L lllama.* * The author's attention has been drawn to a type of conflagration known as a three-alarmer....
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[read the full post...]
May 27, 2008
DTQ: What's Under Those Bugaboo Hub Caps?
DT reader Mark has a problem. He lives in a brownstone apartment, and his Bugaboo Frog is about 1/2-inch too wide to fit into the phonebooth-sized elevator. So they have to fold the stroller every time they go in or...
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[read the full post...]
May 21, 2008
Daddy's Playmates
Hugh Hefner's son Marston is turning 18. He lives with his younger brother and his mother, 1989 Playmate of The Year Kimberley Conrad, next door to the Playboy Mansion:“With Marston, I was there, a hands-on father. As you look at...
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[read the full post...]
May 20, 2008
DT Headline Roundup: Peace & Love Edition
From the Boston Globe's profile of early childhood development researcher Nancy Carlsson-Paige, all I can figure about her new book, Taking Back Childhood: Helping Your Kids Thrive in a Fast-Paced, Media-Saturated, Violence-Filled World, is that kids should cut back...
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[read the full post...]
May 14, 2008
DTQ: Anyone Going To ICFF? Anything I Should See?
I'll be at the ICFF this weekend. If you're there, or if you know of something I should check out, definitely let me know, either in the comments or via email. thanks and see you and/or your product or event!...
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[read the full post...]
Boston Likes Its Local Parent Sites The Way It Likes Its Baseball: Totally Nutless
You gotta give them credit for sticking to the concept; when the Boston Globe created its local parenting website/community, they named it "BoMoms: for moms in Boston & beyond." And damned if it isn't the girliest girl talky girl...
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[read the full post...]
May 12, 2008
In 'N Out, In 'N Out. It's What A 4-Month-Old's All About
Never mind that I can't believe K2's already four months old. After she checked out fine with the doctor last week, we thought we might as well get ready to try her out on solid food sometime, so my wife...
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[read the full post...]
May 7, 2008
DTQ: What Do You Think Of Your Dozuki?
So I'm still kicking around the idea of building a dining table using a design by Enzo Mari [see some longwinded discussion of it here.] It's supposed to be made out of plain, unfinished pine lumber, which you can...
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[read the full post...]
May 6, 2008
Bribes For Surrounding Passengers: They're Not Just For Infants Flying To Australia Anymore
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Collin's Gift, originally uploaded by mnot. This is awesome. A couple flying from San Francisco...
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[read the full post...]
April 28, 2008
WryBaby's Safe Baby Pregnancy Tips
David & Kelly Sopp's Safe Baby Pregnancy Tips has been around almost as long as their Safe Baby Handling Tips. But sometimes it takes someone posting damn near the whole thing online before it really sinks in. Though it's...
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[read the full post...]
April 9, 2008
"Blatantly Unfocused Play With Their Daddy"
I'm re-reading Calvin Trillin's 1998 book, Family Man, and it's rather more interesting now that I'm a dad. Jim's right, he's the godfather of all typing daddies, not just those who make a big deal about changing tables in the...
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[read the full post...]
April 7, 2008
Calvin Trillin On Theories Of Child-Rearing
My stack of unread New Yorkers and I agreed to start seeing other people a long time ago. So while I remember the buzz about Calvin Trillin's 2006 remembrances of his wife Alice, I didn't read the piece. And now...
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[read the full post...]
March 25, 2008
DTQ: Road Trip Tips? We're Coming To Los Angeles
So my wife's got an astrophysics conference next week in downtown Los Angeles, and we all decided to tag along. I think I know my art world Los Angeles, and I know my way around some of Sunset's scene-ier, but...
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[read the full post...]
March 24, 2008
Horton Hears Who, Freaks Out Kid, Gets Dad Thinking
So the kid went to a theater for her first, actual movie over the weekend: Horton Hears A Who. It totally freaked her out. Technically, her first movie ever was John Cassavetes' Shadows, which she watched with me when...
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[read the full post...]
March 19, 2008
Nickelodeon's ParentsConnect Useful For Dads With No Other Humor Outlet
So I pointed out yesterday that Nickelodeon's executives described "moms" and kids "on mom's lap" as two prime targets for their new $100 million, 600+ games, online marketing push. Which is a little lame, but mostly, it's fine, and not...
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[read the full post...]
March 18, 2008
Hey, Ladiiiiees!!!
This just in from DT advertiser--and pudgy baby nixer--Cookie Magazine:Moms are the real experts, so we know that the most trusted advice is the Word of Mom. Tell us what the best products are for you and your family!This...
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[read the full post...]
February 27, 2008
The New York Times Is The New Urban Baby
Five months ago, Keith Dixon and his wife lost their dining room to the new baby, and now he's struggling to figure out how to cook dinner in silence so the toppling towers of pans don't wake up the just-asleep...
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[read the full post...]
February 21, 2008
30 Years Of Studies: Tell That Kid To Grow A Brain!
I think we all know by now that praising a kid for being smart or talented instead of for working hard will doom them to failure--or even worse, a state school--when they're older. [And by "we," I mean people who...
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[read the full post...]
February 19, 2008
Dr Harvey Karp: "You say, ‘Cookie, now. Cookie now.’"
Dr. Karp, the sultan of swaddle, soothe and swing, has a new book out an August pub date for the revised edition of his 2005 book [huh? -ed.] The Happiest Toddler On The Block. Because apparently, "Logic and persuasion, common...
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[read the full post...]
February 18, 2008
Ruby's First Diatribe: "EWW!!!!!!!!!!"
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } , originally uploaded by timothy b. buckwalter. Though the headline pretty much says it all,...
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[read the full post...]
February 17, 2008
DTQ: What To Do About The Plastic Bottle Crisis?
It figures that just as we get back into the swing of the baby bottle phase, and we break out a new pack of the Playtex Ventaire bottles--in mix-and-match pastel colors--a new study comes oot of Canada showing that all...
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[read the full post...]
February 14, 2008
Victoria's Secrets To Successful Parenting
The NYT's critical shopper column this week takes on the giant Victoria's Secret across from Macy's, "a slick, two-story mega-sexopolis, catering mainly to the boudoir needs of angry tourists." It's pretty damn funny [though I'm crying for America on...
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[read the full post...]
A Message For Those Who Choose To Babywear: R-E-S-P-E-C-T
You sick of the gear-heavy, alienating inconvenience of the stroller/swing/playpen combo that 150+ years of Anglocentric parenting culture foists on us all, and you want to try some of that practical, bonding-friendly, elemental goodness of wearing your baby instead? Fine,...
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[read the full post...]
February 7, 2008
Great Moments In Marketing: The Story of Hushamok
The boardbook comes down from the Hushamok tribe, In the big game I call, "Pitch it to me." The PRs, it's said, try to get in my head, And since I find the press kits quite gloomy... I was gonna...
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[read the full post...]
January 26, 2008
Elisha Cooper On Delivering, Ass-Kickings
In the Q&A the other day about his book, Crawling: A Father's First Year, writer Elisha Cooper mentioned the benefits of taking out your parent stress on someone who really deserves it, like that delivery guy who almost mowed you...
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[read the full post...]
January 24, 2008
Safe Baby Handling Tips From Wry Baby
It's been out for a couple of years, but Safe Baby Handling Tips is a classic. It's by Kelly and David Sopp, the founders of Wry Baby, and its helpful instructional diagrams will provide literally minutes of raucous, entertaining...
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[read the full post...]
January 23, 2008
DTQ&A: Elisha Cooper, Author Of Crawling: A Father's First Year
I've been an admirer of Elisha Cooper's writing since I first got a copy of his book, Crawling: A Father's First Year from his publisher Pantheon in 2006. His stories of taking his newborn daughter to Chez Panisse cracked me...
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[read the full post...]
January 17, 2008
From Willy Wonka To Teletubbies: MeFi Movie Recs For 2-3yo Run The FreakyScary Gamut
Metafilter dad Matt Haughey asked the hive to recommend some non-dark, non-scary movies suitable for a movie-loving 2-3yo kid like his daughter. So far, Curious George and My Neighbor Totoro are it:I've tried all the pixar films and they all...
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[read the full post...]
January 15, 2008
Not As Pungent As Changing Him On The Genius Bar
Supposedly, when asked by a Brooklyn parent why there were no changing tables in the Apple stores [or at least in the SoHo store], Steve Jobs emailed back saying, "There doesn't seem to be a demand for it, and it...
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[read the full post...]
January 14, 2008
DTQ: What White Noise Do You Use?
Just about this time last kid, I posted about an ancient [i.e., circa 1996] family remedy for quieting a fussy kid: a CD with a few white noise tracks on it of everyday household items: a vacuum cleaner, running water,...
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[read the full post...]
January 13, 2008
Experts Help Parents, Children, Manage The Private Jet Question
According to New York magazine the two things every wealthy parent wants to know about raising his kids are: how not to raise another Paris Hilton, and how to keep flying private without turning the kid into an over-entitled monster....
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[read the full post...]
December 31, 2007
Parenting Advice Is Different In China, The Old Days, Every Damn Book On The Market
In an excellent Boston Globe article, writer Tom Scocca lays out what you already kind of suspected: the burgeoning crop of parenting advice books is designed to lock you in with a combination of authoritativeness and anxiety. Also, yes, the...
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[read the full post...]
December 13, 2007
"The Spectre Of Roaming, Near-Feral Children"
Colin Ward? Graham Greene? Adventure playgrounds? creeped out West Village parents? There are like five things I want to link to in it, so instead, I'll just say click over right now to Things Magazine's thoughtful essaypost about how...
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[read the full post...]
December 11, 2007
British MDs Debate Infant Male Circumcision & Kids' Rights
The British Medical Journal has published a pro & con debate on whether infant male circumcision is neutral, harmful, or beneficial, and if there are demonstrable medical benefits should operation be put off until the guy can decide for himself....
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[read the full post...]
December 8, 2007
DTQ: Is Four The New Three For Baby Names? How About Five?
Not only are we still undecided on the other kid's name, our short list is twice as long as it was at this stage the first time around. It's got some great names on it [1], but I wonder if...
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[read the full post...]
December 7, 2007
DT Q&A: "A Million Little Diapers," By Actor/Playwright/Dad John Mooney
It's Daddy Types editorial policy that there's no quid pro quo for advertising on the site. So when I saw the ad appear on Daddy Types for John F. Mooney's play, "A Million Little Diapers," my interest was piqued. So...
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[read the full post...]
Cookies & Blow
Gawker took special note of the juxtaposition of these two features on the front page of Cookie Magazine's website today. When taken in conjunction with the ad Cookie is running on DT right now--"Help Us Reward an Amazing MOM!"--one...
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[read the full post...]
December 4, 2007
DT Checklist: Stuck On Some Juddy Wall Shelves
So the other kid's crib, which was originally going to be the kid's toddler bed, is inching toward conversion, and you must admit, it is rather Juddish. Given the crib and the overall minimalist [as in art] vibe, I...
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[read the full post...]
November 28, 2007
As Not Seen In Details Magazine: Scientists Begin Studying How To Raise Good Kids
Does no one in the University of Nebraska - Lincoln cognitive psych department read Details magazine?? Professor Gustavo Carlos et al's newly published research on the impact of various parenting styles and behaviors is based on the assumption that parents...
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[read the full post...]
Details Knows Its Readers Very, Very, Very Well.
I can't believe I ever actually wrote for a Conde Nast magazine. And not just once, either, repeatedly. What an embarrassment. The title of one of the cover stories in this month's issue of Details magazine caught my attention, just...
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[read the full post...]
November 27, 2007
DT Checklist: Modular Storage To Fill Kids Room Gap
While the room itself is bigger, the closet in the kids' room is much smaller than in the kid's old room. So we need to get some actual storage furniture to hold their clothes. I really like the idea...
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[read the full post...]
November 26, 2007
Does USAir Forbid FAA-Approved CARES Safety Harnesses?
DT reader Darren and his gang are planning a trip to France and Switzerland soon, and he was considering putting his kid in a CARES Safety Harness--which is FAA-approved--rather than haul a freakin' car seat around the Alps on a...
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[read the full post...]
This Is The Sign For 'Real Estate Envy'
As a perk of his wife's job, Bill Eville and his family live in pre-war, parklike splendor in the heart of Chelsea cathedral-like splendor near Columbia at the Union Theological Seminary. [I assume the picture at left was taken either...
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[read the full post...]
DT Checklist: Fixing Torn Bugaboo Foam?
H is for Holy Crap, we're gonna have another kid in a few weeks. My wife's now solidly in the Alien stage, where you can see her belly writhing from across the room. Superficially speaking, we're ready for the new...
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[read the full post...]
November 23, 2007
H Is For Holy Crap, By Marc Johns
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Post-it note drawing: H is for holycrap, originally uploaded by Marc Johns. After he made...
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[read the full post...]
November 14, 2007
DTQ: Find The Car Seat Crazy In This Picture
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Driving already, originally uploaded by plasticrevolver [and in no way related to the story below]....
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[read the full post...]
November 13, 2007
Old Codger Paper: New-Fangled Toilets Freak Out Young Whippersnappers
So according to someone at the New York Times who probably just started toilet training her kid, these new [sic] automatic flush toilets everywhere are traumatizing young children. Like so many articles about Kids These Days, the real issue is,...
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[read the full post...]
so tired. so so tired.
holy smokes, I'm tired. I'd ask when it all stops, and I can take a break, but we've got the other kid coming in like eight weeks now. plus the book, the house, the holidays, and on and on and...
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[read the full post...]
November 9, 2007
Honor Thy Godfather--Or Else: The Cosa Nostra Fifth Commandment
A police raid on the house of the new head of the Sicilian Mafia netted a list of the ten commandments of Cosa Nostra--oh, and the head of the Sicilian Mafia, who looks more like [F. Murray] Abraham than Moses....
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[read the full post...]
Start Pointing! International Adoption Study Shows Kids Learn Nouns First
A team of researchers including Harvard psychologists Jesse Snedeker and Joy Geren published the results of their study of international adoptees, whose English-acquisition technique, they figured, might yield some interesting insights on how kids learn a language. It seems they...
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[read the full post...]
November 8, 2007
Charlie LeDuff: At-Home Dad, Inappropriate Yoga Guy
As a New York Times reporter, Charlie LeDuff was a little bit Dharma Bum [drifter], a little Hunter S. Thompson [gonzo], a little Joseph Mitchell [character hound], and a little Joyce Wadler [crazy]. Now that's he's got a kid, and...
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[read the full post...]
November 6, 2007
If You Were Still Wondering Why To Take Your Son To The Museum
Because your dad might have picked up your mom there after listening to the sixth track on Eric Weber's 1975 album, Picking Up Girls Made Easy!: "Van Gogh? Who's that? You see, I don't know much about the Impressionists; I'm...
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[read the full post...]
November 3, 2007
Sorry About The Ximphids: Paul Ford's 100 Ways To Say, 'I Love You'
I really hope working for Harper's doesn't somehow disqualify Paul Ford for the MacArthur Fellowship, because he is our official Genius Of Love. Of his 100 ways to say, "I love you," the dad-specific ones are Nos. 36-40, 64 ["Say...
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[read the full post...]
October 28, 2007
DT Headline Roundup: Adoption, Boys Named Sue, Ramones & Flash Cards Edition
The DT browser tab clearance is on now: NYT Magazine: Looking for Their Children’s Birth Mothers Maggie Jones takes a personal look at the complicated emotional and cultural landscape of open international adoption. Though she and her husband decided to...
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[read the full post...]
October 25, 2007
Can You Talk About Paying The Nanny Off The Books Without Sounding Like A Total Ass?
Because if I had to go by Mijka Samora's blog post, "The Nanny Arbitrage," I'd have to say no. Samora makes the argument--what used to be called "self-serving rationalization"--that paying a nanny off the books is not only awesome, the...
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[read the full post...]
October 21, 2007
Cough Medicine, The New Opiates Of The Masses' Children, Ain't Got Nothin' On The Old Opiates
It's funny what three years of parenting will do to your attitudes on drugging children. Last week, I was plotting to promote an underground band of renegade dads, calculating their own doses of contraband decongestants, but in August 2004, when...
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[read the full post...]
October 14, 2007
Book Traps
Recovergirl sets book traps and game traps for her sons, and they apparently always work:you can use book traps to divert your children to different parts of the house. I needed to clean the boy’s room but I knew...
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[read the full post...]
October 11, 2007
DT Currently Hoarding Infant Drops, Overdosing On Dosage Information
So the major drug makers--members of the Consumer Healthcare Products Association--are voluntarily pulling their over-the-counter infant cough & cold medicines from the market rather than be forced by the FDA to pull them [or to put decades-old, grandfathered-in drugs through...
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[read the full post...]
October 4, 2007
DTQ: At What Age Do You Attain Parenting Nirvana?
And by parenting nirvana, I meant, of course, that your kid could go to the fridge, get you a drink, and bring it back, and the fridge wouldn't be left wide open or dumped all over the floor? The...
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[read the full post...]
September 28, 2007
There Is No Cry, Only Poo: Introducing The Kid To Star Wars
Lead, schmead. It's good to see someone's tackling the real issues of burning importance to new dads these days. Like what order to show the Star Wars movies to your kid: Let's say you're a new father and a movie...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
September 27, 2007
DTQ: Has Anyone Ever Been To The Bologna Children's Book Fair?
I just finished a very enticing account in PingMag of the Bologna Children's Book fair, which is held every spring [the 45th installment is coming in 2008.] It's more than a little breathless and boosterish. And as the title...
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[read the full post...]
September 12, 2007
New Yorker Confirms What You Know: Colic Is A Form Of Torture
The Sept. 17 issue of The New Yorker has a long, fascinating, informative, but ultimately frustrating article on the vexing mysteries of colic. If your kid has colic, though, please don't use your one precious hour of quiet reading about...
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[read the full post...]
September 9, 2007
Wait, Say Agin?? Mutton Bustin'??
"He's lookin' at dad, 'What am I doing in here?' 'Jes hang on,' the dad says." No ride longer than 3 seconds? We need a montage! No helmets in Caddo, OK's Rodeo, and it ain't never harmed them a bit....
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[read the full post...]
September 8, 2007
Wait, Say Again?? Parents Take Kids To Slasher Movies?
Alright, Californian parents, stop talking about the size of your baby's penis and start explaining why the hell you are bringing babies and toddlers to freakin' slashfests. Here's SF Chronicle film reviewer Peter Hartlaub's second post about this mindboggling trend...
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[read the full post...]
September 7, 2007
Wait, Say Again? Moms Sit Around Comparing The Size Of Their Kids' Penises??
Is this just Californiatalk or did Josh from Cookie's Daddy Underground blog stumble upon something mothers have known about for years--but don't mention in front of their baby daddies? Or when you have a boy, everyone just talks about his...
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[read the full post...]
September 1, 2007
But He Wins Big In Those Great Extra Innings In The Sky
25-yo Minnesota Twins pitcher Scott Baker and his wife Leean's second son Easton was born Friday before last, five weeks premature. Baker took a few days off, then hustled the clan back to Minneapolis to pitch the second game of...
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[read the full post...]
August 27, 2007
Henry Hill: Wiseguy, Artist, Parent, Circumcision Fan
You may know Henry Hill--the original Wiseguy who informed [sic] Nick Pileggi's book which became Scorsese's and Liotta's Goodfellas--from a question in the Movies Edition of Trivial Pursuit that you bought at a garage sale for a quarter and...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
August 25, 2007
Freakonomicist Teaches Rock, Paper, Scissors, Not Bedtime Stories. NYT Makes Quiznos Commercial About Same
My second reaction to Freakonomicist Steven Levitt's strategy of focusing on teaching his kids the things they won't automatically pick up at school, like creativity, instead of math and reading: brilliant. [Note: for purposes of Freakonomics, "Creativity" is defined...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
August 23, 2007
After BPA Blurb, Publicists Reach Out To "Headline Parenting" "Expert"
So while I didn't get on CBS yesterday, I did get a quote in the Washington Post's article about the latest developments in the whole Bisphenol A toxic plastic baby bottle controversy. [I guess that means I'm not TV-hot, only...
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[read the full post...]
DTQ: What's Too Long For A Kid's Book?
So the kid and I just read Mister Tall, one of the Roger Hargreaves books, and I know some old man at the Wall Street Journal will harrumph when I say it, but the book's just too damn long and...
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[read the full post...]
August 20, 2007
DTQ: What's Missing From The Non-Fugly Kids Market?
DT reader, advertiser, and mailing list drawing prize donor Mark from Sparkability took a break from his sweet kids design guru-ing to email his list of the Top Ten Most Needed Kids Products:Cribs under $400 Doll/Play furniture (crib/cradle/highchair) Cookie Jar...
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[read the full post...]
August 17, 2007
FOUND: Documented Evidence That Babble And Alternadad Are, In Fact, Different
You know how, around the beginning of the year, Babble was launching at the same time Neal Pollack's book was released, and Babble's reviewer kind of threw a hissy fit, as if there was only one seat left in the...
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[read the full post...]
Vanity Fair: Arthur Miller "Deleted" His Down Syndrome Son
I am totally floored. The playwright Arthur Miller had a son with Down Syndrome in 1966 who he never publicly acknowledged and all but wrote out of his life. [What an odd choice of words, under the circumstances.] The boy,...
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[read the full post...]
August 13, 2007
"I'll Show You The Wife Of The Mind!"
Writer and creative block expert Susan O'Doherty's teaching an interesting-sounding seminar tomorrow night at Mediabistro in NYC:How to balance your job as a mom and your job as a writer It's possible to be both a great mom and a...
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[read the full post...]
August 3, 2007
What's? The Deal? With That? Don't Mohels Have To Sign NDA's?
Good L-rd, people, PLEASE tell me you are not out there choosing your mohels based on which celebrity offspring penises he's circumcised?! Just check out what happened to Babble contributor Sam Apple when he went chop-shopping at the JCC:Thirteen circumcisions...
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[read the full post...]
July 30, 2007
Ollie Kottke + Nintendo Mashup
Old blogger/new dad Jason answers the burning question, "iPhone, Wiimote, or newborn baby: which has the best built-in accelerometer?" [here's a hint: it's the one with the Moro Reflex plug-in installed]. Surprisingly, he doesn't make the next leap of logic:...
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[read the full post...]
July 21, 2007
The Myth Of The Stay-At-Home-Dad: The Digested Read
Can I be frank and honest and open? The only happy stay-at-home dads are the bloggers. The rest are insecure, career-abandoning losers with no friends. So get some friends, you say? With a LinkedIn profile that says "SAHD"? Good luck...
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[read the full post...]
July 18, 2007
Hot NY Trend: Tibetan Nannies Teach Kids How To Be Oppressed By Kids With Chinese Nannies
When daddytypes was born, I started the category UrbanBabyWatch. The idea was to sift through the impenetrable archives of just-the-girls talk and pull out those rare, invaluable, or at least useful, nuggets of information dads needed to know. Screw that....
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[read the full post...]
July 17, 2007
Non-Risky Business: Can You Fit A Car Seat In A Porsche 928?
A DT reader--we'll call him Joel--has a problem. It's not his wife Lana who, by insisting he get that low-mileage, late model Porsche 928 GT, sounds like what every white boy off the Lake wants. No, Joel's problem is...
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[read the full post...]
July 12, 2007
Q: Any "Conscientious" Toy Companies Out There?
Lead painted Thomas engines, poisonous Veggie Booty powder, rubber duckies with a 5,000-year landfill half-life, the environmental insanity of shipping Fiji Water around the world. DT reader Shawna emailed with a question I've been wondering myself. Are there any "conscientious...
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[read the full post...]
June 27, 2007
Babblepedia, Little Girl, Is An Advice Site That Babble Wants Parents To Write On. To Write On
The new Babblepedia is a wiki-style advice site for parents--or at least the cool, urban sub-demo--that aims to be an "encyclopedia of parenting knowledge that anyone can edit!" [Or add your two cents to, anyway. Make your contribution funny...
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[read the full post...]
June 25, 2007
Bewildered Brits Stare At Park Slope Parents
All the editors at BritLit journal Spiked Online asked for was a Those Crazy Americans! article on these so-called Park Slope Parents they'd just read about three weeks ago in the Telegraph. Is that so hard? Instead, Nancy McDermott's critique...
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[read the full post...]
June 22, 2007
Gov't Tips For Leaving Your Baby Nightmare-Free
Silly mums with their Munch-like Screamfaces. This nightmare would never happen to dads. We don't have purses to drape over the stroller handles, so when we leave the kid on the street, there wouldn't be anything to grab for....
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[read the full post...]
June 21, 2007
Not The Only Gay Babies In The Village Voice
First off, I think I have to call BS on the Village Voice's cover story on gay toddlers: it's horribly written, full of unnecessarily incendiary mock-shock that is an insult to the paper's supposedly progressive and aware heritage. You'd almost...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
Getting Dead
The kid's been on a kick about dying [or as she puts it, "getting dead"] lately. It started with balloons and flowers, then animals, roadkill, the disappearing creatures at the National Zoo [old people, then wanting to know why people...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
June 5, 2007
37 Things A Bloke Should Know About Daddying
A couple of weeks ago, the British NHS [no, I don't know what it stands for; probably some raging communist thing] published an 8-page magazine supplement titled, 37 Things Every Man Should Know Before He Becomes A Dad which,...
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[read the full post...]
June 2, 2007
Words Are Like A Certain Parent Who Can't Say What They Mean
Don't mean what they say. Fortunately, there's MetroDad, The Tina Weymouth of our parenting generation, to keep making sense of it all. His Parentionary provides the "True Meaning" of the phrases parents hear and use everyday, whether it's the meaning...
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[read the full post...]
May 29, 2007
Graco, You Wanna Take This Outside?
Happy freakin' Father's Day to you, too, Graco. Oh, and you're welcome. My dad asked me what kind of portable crib he should get for the beach [our kid sleeps in her own bed, but my sister's 1.5yo needed a...
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[read the full post...]
May 19, 2007
Sir Ken Robinson At TED2006: "Gillian Isn't Sick, She's A Dancer."
Let me preface this by saying I haven't ever seen Cats or Phantom, but I'm sick of them. And even I was choked up when I watched this. The British education expert Sir Ken Robinson spoke at TED last year...
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[read the full post...]
May 18, 2007
Baby Soothing Tips From Dr. Harvey Karp, Esquire
Magazines drive me crazy with their boil-it-down oversimplification and poppy listicle infographic entry points and the utter subjugation of actual, actionable content to the "overall" reading experience, which is actually about their advertisers, not you [1]. The tagline Esquire magazine...
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[read the full post...]
May 15, 2007
Tips For Travel With Kids, Nos. 1, 10 & 495
NOTE: unless you can't read, there is no reason for you to click on either of these videos. You hear me? NO reason. at. all. 495] Hold the damn kid's damn hand, dammit. That's why they call it Times Square,...
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[read the full post...]
May 3, 2007
Slate: Everything You Didn't Know You Wanted To Know About The Fertility Industry Because You Were Too Emotionally Involved To Ask
Slate has short reviews of two books that deal with the unspoken or unregulated implications of fertility treatments: Liza Mundy's Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Men, Women, and the World and Peggy Orenstein's more experiential Waiting For Daisy,...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
April 30, 2007
Flowerspotting Question, Or Help Preserve My Paternal Omniscience
When it comes to preserving your aura of omniscience, I would've thought Wikipedia would be a parent's best friend, but no such luck. I'm sure it's partly because I try to tell the kid when I don't know something,...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
April 26, 2007
Toilet Seat Stuck On The Kid's Head? Try Dishwashing Soap
A 2.5-yo toddler from Braintree, Essex, England got a toilet training seat stuck on his head. His mom took him to the fire station, where the firemen lubed the kid's head and ears with dishwashing liquid and slid the...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
April 23, 2007
Q: Who Cleans Up Your Home Birth Bathtub If You Don't Have An Assistant?
Lessee, 3pm, that means it's lunchtime on the Coast. Sorry. Because she was concerned with the increasing frequency of Caesarian births at hospitals these days, Ricki Lake produced a documentary about the Delivery Industrial Complex which debuts this weekend at...
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[read the full post...]
April 19, 2007
Q: One Good Piece Of Advice That You Didn't Give That Dad On The Street?
Most folks have a governor on their flow of unsolicited advice, and while New Yorkers probably have theirs jammed open much wider than average, I could fill a whole blog with the hundreds of suggestions I bit my lip on...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
April 17, 2007
What Else Could You Build With A Bunch Of Refrigerator Boxes And Mr. McGroovy's Box Rivets?
Mr. McGroovy is dad and an art teacher-turned-entrepreneur, the success of who's main product, Mr. McGroovy's Box Rivets, is almost entirely dependent on getting more parents to make more play-related structures for their kids out of large cardboard boxes. On...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
April 13, 2007
Harvey Kurtzman, Josef Schneider, And The Art Of Child Photography
After he founded and left Mad! magazine, Harvey Kurtzman edited Help!. Suck.com co-founder Joey Anuff posted a collection of Kurtzman art, including the layout notes for the Feb. 1964 cover above, which tell a bit about how they got...
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[read the full post...]
April 12, 2007
88 UP: The Article For Old New Dads
Not quite sure what the takeaway is from the NY Times' eleven years later follow-up article on men in their 60's, 70's, and 80's having kids, other than that the original article's star dad, Tony Randall, died in 2004 at...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
March 30, 2007
So What Makes/Breaks An Infant/Toddler Day Care Setup?
Whatryagonnado? Here's a quote from Emily Bazelon's article about what the results of the latest NICHD day care study really do and don't mean[study author Margaret] Burchinal points out that on average, day care for infants and toddlers is worse...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
March 28, 2007
If You're Receiving, Then You're Not Thinking About Syphillis
Can't decide whether to file this one in the Never-on-Bloggingbaby folder, or the Front-Page-of-StrollerDerby folder. Or maybe the health risks to the fetus of extra-marital blowjobs during pregnancy are significant enough to warrant their own folder. From Dan Savage's...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
March 27, 2007
It's My Kid In A Box
Over at GearAbility, Marty has the first in a series of posts and photos about being raised in--and then raising her own daughter in--an Air Crib. Marty's family was friends with B.F. Skinner, the famous Harvard psychologist who invented the...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
March 20, 2007
"But Daddy, I NEED To Watch It Again."
Oops. I made the mistake of inviting the kid over to watch this Chris Ware animation, which was released as a preview to the new This American Life TV show that starts Thursday on Showtime. I figured, cartoons, cute...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
March 14, 2007
Don't Hold Your Breath, Kid
So we've noticed lately, maybe for a few months now, the kid holds her breath a lot. Then she gasps/breathes kind of loudly. It's the same breathing pattern you hear while pounding a sippy cup, maybe with slightly shorter intervals....
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
March 12, 2007
On The Subject Of Your Biracial Child's Hair
Suffice it to say that when it comes to hair, and particularly to perceptions, ideals of beauty, and norms of socialization, white folk have been messing with black folks' heads long before they actually started caring for them. Which...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
March 4, 2007
SPOILER ALERT: Hollywood Guru Story Has Happy Ending
The obviousness of this NYT article on how a few childrearing gurus in Los Angeles was getting really annoying: Neighbors and friends and people who work together refer each other to the same sleep consultants??! Self-absorbed agents want solutions to...
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[read the full post...]
WSJ Scoop: Rich People Spend More Money On Their Kids
Yes, that's the gist of this article in the Wall Street Journal. Over the course of 17 years, parents with more money spend more money raising their kids. Some people even spend up to--wait for it--one million dollars. The...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
March 2, 2007
More News From The "Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time" Department
You take an ad from an idiot, you suggest live on the air of your cable news program that your female guest come to your office to pose for nude photos. Everyone makes choices that, in retrospect, look a less...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
February 27, 2007
This Landfill Is Your Landfill, This Landfill Is My Landfill
Idaho dad Anthony Doerr takes a break from hipster parenting to agonize over the devastating amount of trash his family generates. His, yours and ours, that is:Before I became a parent, I didn’t bother to think about garbage all that...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
February 26, 2007
Paradise For The Bobos! David Brooks Declares Fatwa On 'Hipster Parents'
Seriously, where to start? It was only a matter of time until NY Times columnist David turned his shopping=culture magnifying glass onto 'hipster parents', who are identified by their "hummus snacks," and their "abusively pretentious children’s names like Anouschka...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
February 22, 2007
You've Come A Long Way, Brah!
Now that's what I call progress! Just a couple of weeks ago, MomsRising was just another post-feminist attempt to reinvigorate interest in demanding improvements to intractable issues of work-family balance that nevertheless focused exclusively on women and mothers, basically taking...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
February 12, 2007
Knit Tits A Hit With Brits
Lactation consultants in Liverpool are deploying handknit model breasts to teach new mothers proper latching and milk expressing techniques. The idea started when one consultant brought a pair in from home and got a favorable response. More were needed, though,...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
London Preschool Admission Antics In Place For >100 Years
So supposedly, London's private preschools are a madhouse to get into, but not like New York's. It's not based on the parents, or some gnomic playdate/audition; it's first-come-first-served from the moment of birth. Only now that the numbers are so...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
February 8, 2007
Mom Babbles On About The Problem [sic] With Perfect Dads
So I read Jessica Francis Kane's somewhat agonized [not a rant, she gets full credit for that] rumination on Babble about the new set of complications that arise from having a perfect, involved dad for a husband. And I come...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
February 7, 2007
Burglar: Hide Your Money In The Kid's Room
A reformed burglar gave PFAdvice some tips on where to hide your money and valuables at home. The first tip: have a plausible-looking decoy stash with some stuff in it [in NYC, they used to call this your 'mugger...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
February 4, 2007
Running The Numbers On At-Home Parenting
Pitt fan Caleb has been at-home dadding for going on six years now, and when they started thinking of him going back to work, he ran some numbers. Factored in: the cost of childcare for two kids the marginal...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
February 1, 2007
Moms Rising, Presumably To Get Dads A Beer
Not quite sure what the hook is, but the advocacy organization Moms Rising got a nice profile on CNN Money a little while ago. Moms Rising was started by Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner and MoveOn co-founder Joan Blades as part of the...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
January 31, 2007
WTF: Park Slope Dad Cheaps Out, Buys Graco Toy Stroller
From the Park Slope Parents listserv, The case of the missing toy strollers:When she lost his other toy stroller, we didn't charge her for it, but this one is just really all the more aggravating because of the prior history...
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[read the full post...]
January 29, 2007
Leaving The Toilet Seat Down: A Game Theoretical Analysis
Am I just blindly internalizing an inefficient social norm as a way to mitigate my own costs? I mean, forget the seat; doesn't the toilet just look better with the lid down, the way it was designed? Siddiqi, H. (2006):...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
January 25, 2007
"Oh, The Beemanity!"
Q:Dear Daddy Types, I'm a dad in Florida. Over Christmas, a swarm of bees flew out of my neighbor's wall and engulfed by children's swingset. I tried throwing the 40 lb trailer hitch from our Dodge Caravan at them, but...
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[read the full post...]
Canadian Critic Harshes On Hipster Parent Buzz
CBC arts critic stopped watching Much Music long enough to dump a Diaper Genie II full of hate on "hipster parents," which this week means Neal Pollack's Alternadad and Nerve.com's new parenting website, Babble.On several occasions, Pollack rhapsodizes about his...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
January 24, 2007
Q: Painting A Kid's Play Table
OK, so I don't talk about the kid's school on the blog, but this is about furniture. I'm supposed to oversee the class project, which'll be auctioned off to raise money for tuition assistance. We're making a play table and...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
January 18, 2007
Q: Strollers On Escalators?
Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up sucking up to the Baby Industrial Complex. First, Consumer Reports blows it, so the kid's riding around in a European deathseat; the shady phone store can't unlock my new,...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
January 17, 2007
Q: One Good Piece Of Advice Of Pre-Dadhood Advice?
About six weeks before the kid was born, I was checking out a flock of strollers parked in the gym lobby, when the owners, a group of Tribeca moms, showed up. After figuring out I wasn't trying to steal their...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
January 11, 2007
New Bed, New Nightlight, Now If Only She'd Sleep...
After an enthusiastic embrace of the new toddler bed and love-at-first sight with the ghost, the kid has had a really rough week sleepwise. Most nights, the problem's been not going to sleep. The first couple of nights were great,...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
Child Friendly Australia's Ad Campaign Packs A Punch
Child Friendly Australia is an advocacy initiative launched last year by National Association for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (NAPCAN). Their first advertisement, titled "Children See, Children Do," is aimed at getting parents--and all adults, according to the...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
On Pregnancy & Drywall
Another datapoint for the Doing Major Renovation Projects While Pregnant file, from the NYT. The Olsons' blog about their DIY renovation is called HouseinProgress.net:“One thing I always ask myself is, ‘is this really about the light fixture or something more?’...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
January 10, 2007
PeeWee Was A Grup: Baby Boomer Talk Design For Children, c.1994
Funny, I don't remember 1994 looking like the zany cruft on an Exersaucer. And I don't recall Post-Modernism retaining even half that credibility as long as it does in Steven Heller and Steven Guarnaccia's book, Designing For Children [first mentioned...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
January 8, 2007
Pre-School Play Audition Smackdown
When little Natalie was almost two, her entire future hinged on how well she performed during the succession of 30-40 minute play auditions for Brooklyn's private pre-schools. A veritable Burgess Meredith to Natalie's Rocky, dad Tom Roston accompanied his daughter...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
January 5, 2007
Tony Scott Lives In A Movie Fantasyland
The NY Times film critic tries to buck the imagination-stifling money machines that are "family films":I cringe at the sight of strollers at “Apocalypto” or “Saw III.” But I also cringe at the timidity and cautiousness — the hypersensitivity —...
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[read the full post...]
January 1, 2007
Kid Steps On A Tack, Freaked Out Mama Calls Back
Consumerist got a report from Brady, a dad in Burlington, Vermont who works nights and stays home days with his 14-month-old son during the day. Turns out Brady & Son went to Playdate, and indoor gym-type deal at the University...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
A Soldier Dad's Journal To His Son
First Sgt. Charles King didn't take leave for the birth of his first son, Jordan, his fiancee, Dana Canedy writes, because he refused to come home ahead of any of the young soldiers under his command. [He did take two...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
Edgeheads: Diapers, Dads Who Change Them, Change World
Every year now since 1996, EDGE has been asking a few really smart and/or talky people to answer a Big Question. This year, it was, "What are you optimistic about, and why?" Set aside for a moment the tautological critique...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
December 5, 2006
Alone in the Wilderness
Am I the only one not convinced that a 529 savings plan is the only way to save money for future education expenses? I want to save as much as possible for the Kid's future—but what if her future...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
November 27, 2006
Did I Mention We're Back To Diapers 24/7? Must've Slipped My Mind
So the kid's been pretty much a rock star on the toilet training front since the summer, which we figured was our deadline, since she obviously had to be ready to go to school in September, right? Wrong. Toilet training...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
November 25, 2006
Read This Month's Vogue Magazine, Just Be Careful
So I was flipping through my wife's Vogue, trying to help her get out the door by distracting the kid, and so I do an off-the-cuff play-by-play of each page, that is until the kid goes, "Tell me the story...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
November 22, 2006
BabyPlanners Let You Outsource Everything But The Womb
Pregnant but too busy to do anything about it? Why not let the experts at Baby Planners take care of all that annoying stuff like finding and reading pregnancy books, getting gear and furniture and setting up a nursery, finding...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
November 21, 2006
I Was Not Aware That October Was SIDS Awareness Month
All I can figure is that someone from the crib bumper industrial complex must have deleted my email announcement from someone in the sleepsack industrial complex. Anyway, kid sleeps, rests, and hangs on his back. No loose or puffy bedding....
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
November 17, 2006
Q: How/When Do You Work Out Post-Baby?
DT reader Jeff asks a question that we struggle with ourselves. It seems like the first thing to get cut from a busy schedule, where you're being pulled in different directions by work, the kid, family, etc., is the gym....
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
November 16, 2006
Math Is Hard. Let's Go Shopping.
The kid can count to 20 in one breath, and she can add and subtract numbers up to 4. But every once in a while, it really hits home, the difference between these kind of toddlery parlor tricks and a...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
November 15, 2006
Hothouse Kids: When Smart Kids Are Born To Dumb Parents
Let's be real about something: Einstein was a freak. Do you really want your kid to be spelling bee-winning, college-at-12-going, forgets-to-eat-for-3-days-zoning freak? No. So put down that DVD and that womb music enhancement system--which don't work anyway--and read Alissa Quart's...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
November 10, 2006
No Way, Metrodad Is My Kid's Father, Too
This explains a lot, but it also opens a host of new questions. Baby. Still, it's a relief to finally know why she's turned into a TV-addicted, fartaholic diva lately. 5-1, I guess she really is my daughter [metrodad]...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
Bugs. Why'd It Have To Be Bugs?
The kid's been having nightmares pretty regularly these days. This week, it's been bugs. She'd wake up in the middle of the night, crying, "I don't like spiders!" And my wife'd have to go in and shoo the spiders away...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
October 31, 2006
Q: NYC Hotels With Daycare?
DT reader Mark asks a question I'd never thought of before:Do you know any hotels in NYC with daycares? My lovely wife wants to come to New York with me for work, and it would be fun for the kiddo...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
Bad Parentwatch: My Daughter, The Junkie
I am absolutely slammed at work, with a deadline for today. The kid's off to Grandma's for Halloween, but here is what she did yesterday: Sesame Street Sesame Street Looked for the Wiggles, weren't on. Read a dozen little...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
October 29, 2006
Because There's Nothin' Better--Or Funnier--Than A Good Lickin'
Spanking your kids helps them succeed in business and/or capital crimes, so get crackin! Someone needs to take this columnist out to the woodshed and teach him a lesson--a lesson in how to make embarassing attempts to shrug off the...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
October 28, 2006
Want A Friend? Get A Dog.
Heartening news for the SAHD's out there looking for playgroups and playdates. The NY Times says it's the newest trend. For for Stay At Home Dog owners:Nothing involving pets, though, is just about the animal. Just as it’s no secret...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
October 27, 2006
Daddy Wars: The Central Front In The War On/Of Daddies
Flush with our culture's stunning victory in The Mommy Wars [I guess we showed those capitalist moms who's boss, eh, Caitlin?], pundits may be looking to open a new front in the global war on parenting. So in his weekly...
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[read the full post...]
Q: Tips For Great Playgroups, SAHD Groups?
In addition to being a source of fun, entertainment, note-comparing, germ-swapping, and polysyllabic conversation, good playgroups can save an at-home parent's sanity, too. But for a whole host of reasons, they can also be awkward or even unwelcoming for dads....
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
October 25, 2006
How Crazy [sic] Is Therapy For Babies?
This Wall St Journal article talks about early diagnosis of autism and anxiety disorder in infants [signs: crying, agitation, inability to express self, mood swings, what?], but my diagnosis is there's a whole lot of projection going on. Parents' own...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
October 21, 2006
Hey Microsoft, LamerDad.com Is Still Available.
So for three+ years, GamerDad.com has been a leading independent, pioneering resource to help parents get involved with their kids' video gameplaying. Started by a tech journalist and at-home dad and edited by parents and gaming enthusiasts, it's a...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
October 14, 2006
DWDC: Driving While Driven Crazy
Californians are all up in their own grilles over a new ban on cellphones while driving. From the LA Times: The distraction caused by children is likely at least as serious a problem as cellphones. Unlike cellphones, it is not...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
October 12, 2006
Malcolm Gladwell Reveals Roots Of Adult Achievement, Proceeds To Tease And Zhoozh Them A Little
They say, "write what you know." Malcolm Gladwell spoke to a conference of pychologists about precociousness, prodigies, and how bunk it is to use Mozart and even Einstein as justification for what amounts to a misguided obsession with childhood...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
October 10, 2006
Imprtant Tips For Dads #46: How To Bring Up The NFL
While there seems to be no solution as yet for the awkwardness that is a first birthday party [1], Big Daddy Drew does have some suggestions for saving the talking-with-dads-you-don't-know situation--by turning the conversation to the NFL:Bring up a game...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
September 24, 2006
Who Knew? You Can Hire A Potty Training Coach
To New York Magazine's credit, they seem to recognize at least some of the insanity behind their "It'll cost you $4 million to totally outsource your kid" article last week. [I mean come on, $1.8mm is for 14 hr/day on-call...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
September 18, 2006
You'll Know It By Its Giant Advertisers: Nickelodeon Launches ParentsConnect.com
Who'da thought? Nickelodeon not only bought GoCityKids.com last winter [$1 million, if you're keeping score at home], they've launched what the NY Times all but calls a MySpace For Parents, but what the rest of us might call a hosted...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
September 16, 2006
Ouch, That Hurts
Little did I know that while Metrodad, Laid-off Dad and I were pounding'em back, our kids were off somewhere trading notes, too. The last few weeks, the kid's been giving me the Heisman stiff-arm. A lot. Whenever my wife's around,...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
See Something? Say Blog Something!
And so we come full circle in the whorl of surveillance-media-consumer-parenting society. I Saw Your Nanny [isawyournanny.blogspot.com] wants you to send in your sightings of inappropriate nanny behavior, and "if you are able to capture a photograph of the nanny...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
Anonymous Celebrity Parent Advice, #3
DT: As a consumer in a celebrity-focused culture, I find it interesting, but as a parent, I have to say, it's really hard to see; I mean, parenting's hard enough if there's not paparazzi staked out in front of your...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
September 15, 2006
Attention Equinox Members
The afternoon nap has now been moved, in two equal parts, to 9PM and 8AM. Please plan your workouts accordingly. Thank you....
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
September 13, 2006
Pissed On, And Pissed
It's a good thing I got back from Las Vegas when I did; turns out there are too many wet pairs of underpants around the house for one parent to handle easily by herself. The kid's in a state we...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
September 7, 2006
[How] Do You Write About Other People's Kids?
So we had the first event for the kid's little class at pre-school last night, a playdate at the school playground, and it went pretty well. {Except that while rushing to cut grape clusters while taking a meeting on the...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
September 6, 2006
When What You Love Isn't Necessarily Dangerous, Just Time-Consuming
Thanks for a lot of really thoughtful comments about the "died doing what he loved" post. I have to say, a real standout came from fellow not-so-extreme skier Jon, who not only writes at length about the "other side," [i.e,...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
September 5, 2006
1,400 Chinese Nannies Can't Be Wrong, or NY Magazine Has This Country By The Parenting Shorthairs
And by "this country," I mean "Connecticut." The NY Times wades into the whole Chinese Nannies For The Children Of The Overclass thing a bit late, but don't worry, they've got a new angle: Chinese Au Pairs. See? Completely different....
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
September 1, 2006
But Does He Sing 'Some Day My Prince Will Come?"
A distraught mom wrote in to the Washington Post because their 3.5-yo son is obsessed with Disney Princesses: wants to play dress up rather than go outside, even insists on a Disney Princess birthday party. "So far, my husband and...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
August 31, 2006
Hipster To Parents: Please Curb Your Children
Angry hipster Ryan:Last weekend I was on my way to Riverside Skatepark when I very nearly walked right through a stream of urine being expelled from a toddler. I was walking down the sidewalk staring up at the trees when...
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[read the full post...]
What's In Your Hospital Dadbag?
When we went to the hospital Sunday night before the kid was born, I actually brought my laptop--and a speakerphone. See, they had just released all 5,200 designs for the WTC Memorial competition, and I was maybe gonna be interviewing...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
August 28, 2006
My Kid? She's The One Over There, In Complete Regression
Well that did not go well. We're winding up a long weekend with all the kid's cousins, ages 11, 8, 5, 2, 18 mos, and 9 mos., and the kid has been bouncing around like a ping pong ball. It's...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
The Horror, The Horror
So we're on vacation with the family, all seven cousins and assorted aunts, uncles and grandparents, and the kid's sleeping on a little blanket nest in the corner of our room. The other morning, around 5, we heard a series...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
August 23, 2006
Give The Kid A Cell Phone And We're All DOOMED
A long, rambling article about hovering, hyperattentive parents and the threat they pose to their children--and to civilization as we know it. Overprogramming; lack of unsupervised, self-directed play; parents on cell phone speed-dial from birth to age 30; finagling dubious...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
Robert Hughes Is Not Austin Powers
Now that both his son and his first wife are dead [suicide, diseases brought on by lifelong coke addiction, respectively], curmudgeonly art critic Robert Hughes decides that "promiscuous sex with many anonymous partners without protection while at the same time...
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[read the full post...]
August 20, 2006
Hey Grandpa, Er, I Mean "Dad"
Rand Richards Cooper has a great essay in the NY Times Magazine about becoming a new father late(r), in his forties:The prospect of life and death in the balance brings a metaphysical dimension to what I began calling “late-onset fatherhood.”...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
August 19, 2006
Texas 7-Month-Old Ruminates On The Parenting-Capitalist Paradox
New dad Raj publishes his socially and environmentally conscious blog, Green Parenting, from the heart of that notorious hippy enclave, Houston, Texas. Every month, he interviews his daughter, Lila for the blog. Here's an excerpt from the latest:Me:...Why is it...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
August 18, 2006
Anonymous Celebrity Parents: Except For All The Free Stuff, They're Just Like Us!
Even when I'm getting stiff-armed at the driveways of publicists' swag-filled beach houses, some aspects of my non-dadblogging life still put celebrities in my path. No so much hanging out, mind you, just running into. If they have kids, we've...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
August 15, 2006
Tonight? Tonight? L'Chaim
Maybe it's just me, but even if I was breastfeeding too long, I don't think it'd help to have my rabbi describe my breasts as "an attractive cafeteria rather than a scintillating piece of flesh." Kosher Coupling by Shmuley Boteach:...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
August 8, 2006
Sue It Out: UK Crying Expert Throws Legal Tantrum Over Parents Messageboard
You know what's funny about England? They speak English, but they still have different names for things. They have a best-selling, but controversial cry-it-out baby scheduler like Dr. Ferber, only her name is Gina Ford. And their Urbanbaby, a message...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
August 5, 2006
Gatekeeper Moms, Gatekeeper Dads
I think this is so true, except I prefer the term, "emperor-for-life":A pattern is established in childbirth and breastfeeding that can be hard to break, observes Greg Allen, author of the blog Daddytypes. The mother becomes the expert first, then...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
August 4, 2006
Scientists To Aussie Bums: Put Up AND Shut Up
A recent University of Melbourne study of new dads who work outside the home while their new mom partners do most all the "housework" and baby care, and who, while taking twice as much leisure time as their partners, still...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
August 1, 2006
Sorry, But The Daily Mail Hates Babies!
Seriously, in one week the UK's Daily Mail runs stories called Sorry, but my children bore me to death! AND Sorry, but I HATED Breastfeeding. With a beefy Irish nurse shouting, "Your baby is hungry! These are not for playing...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
Love Letters To The Immigrant Nanny, From The Desk Of Helen Kirwan-Taylor:
Helen Kirwan-Taylor is apparently Britain's answer to the NY Times' shop-and-call-it-work columnist Alex Kuczynski, if not exactly their Candace Bushnell [Oh well, everyone needs to dream]. She writes at length about everything from parties to decorating to shopping to remodelling--she...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
Non-Scientists: Whiny Parents Get People Riled Up
Students of journalism in the UK and US have proved that long articles by parents flouting their selfishness and repeatedly calling themselves "brave" for admitting how bored they are with their kids will elicit much heated, indignant response from readers....
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
July 28, 2006
Take "So He Can Date Natalie Portman" Off The List
When the topic has come up around here, we have learned that, colloquially speaking, "so they can get more play" is a not uncommon reason guys give for deciding to have their sons circumcised. Well, if one of your rationales...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
July 27, 2006
The Ghost In The Ghost In The House
Grrr. I get hyper-irritable when I read articles that reflexively namecheck Betty Friedan in their opening sentence and then proceed to discuss the dilemmas, stresses, and oft-ensuing depression that come with parenting, but that don't make a single freakin' mention...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
July 25, 2006
Safety Tips From Stick Figures In Peril Photopool
There are over 4,000 photos in the Stick Figures in Peril photopool on flickr, including the above image of an exploding pram, shot by dan in deutschland in Paris. Narrowing the pool to baby-tagged images yields a manageable number...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
July 21, 2006
Brooklyn Update: Tibetan Nannies Are The New Awesome
Finally, Amy Sohn has some useful information. [Sohn, of course, after getting herself knocked up, had to trade in her NY Mag sex columnist beat for the parenting one. It's been rough going, as you can expect--and as the whiny...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
July 19, 2006
Turn The Other Cheek So I Can Smack That One, Too
A New Zealand Christian "Guide to Smacking". Somehow, I think I got the quotes in the wrong place let me try that again. A New Zealand "Christian" "Guide to Smacking." There, that's better. Grounding, giving children 'time out', making them...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
July 17, 2006
Safety: Beware Of Falling Televisions
Let your kid watch whatever you want, but just make sure the TV is anchored to the wall. According to a single Houston-area hospital's statistics, front-heavy TV's have fallen on toddlers 11 times in the last year, causing five deaths...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
Other Daddies Typing: The Zero Boss Edition
Would you believe that I had this ready days ago, but the server went down just as I was posting it? Actually, I was waiting until Jay "The Zero Boss" Allen came back to the dadblogworld. Now here's a wildly...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
July 15, 2006
Daddy Tattoo From Flickr
Just spotted this photo in the sidebar; it's from the fathers & babies photoset on flickr, and it's of a dad with his daughter's handprints inked on his back. Reminded me of the dad tattoo post a few months...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
July 14, 2006
Stealing A Baby's Identity Seems Pretty Easy
OK, so the story's a couple of years old now, as is little Andrew, who's probably gotten into plenty of trouble with the credit card companies all by himself now, but still. This story about a 5-month-old baby having his...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
The Hand That Packs The Diaper Bag
Jessica Francis Kane's no Judith Warner, fortunately, but she does take a look at "Supermoms" of her/our generation and the bind she sees them get into when it comes to shared parenting:the woman who ultimately wants to mix work and...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
July 13, 2006
Japanese Toilet Training Animation-Palooza
We're right in the middle of toilet training--so far so good, and the only bribes we've been using are the underpants themselves, and the shopping for them, and the opening the package, and the special underwear box to put...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
July 10, 2006
Utah Anthro Prof Has Tenure, Develops Baby-Parade Theory
By analyzing the way chicks dig a guy with a baby, and comparing it to the parenting technique of the sloth in Ice Age, then performing a regression analysis on the title of a ten-year-old book on how Japanese men...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
July 7, 2006
Is It So Hard Finding Good Help These Days?
Not anymore. If you're a CEO with more money than time to spend, you're in luck. USA Today's Small Business blog mentions a couple of agencies who can place a well-qualified nanny in charge of your children's lives--or even a...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
June 29, 2006
Pregnancy And Sex: Related After All?
Since no one else in the birthing/parenting/pregnancy industrial complex was talking about it, sex writer Susie Bright goes on a long, very open, and very revealing exploration of women's actual sexual experience during pregnancy, during delivery, and after giving birth....
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
June 22, 2006
Dread Or Dreds, What's It Gonna Be?
Why does the kid seriously freak out when I wash her hair? Still? It's been like this for a long time now. From before she could even sit up, and I had to cradle her head and shoulders in the...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
Pets & Babies: Avoiding Cute-offs And Other Problems
We were not one of those couples who prepared ourselves for having a kid by getting a puppy first. And neither of us is pet people, really, so I really never gave a second thought to the potential risks and...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
June 13, 2006
Interesting Trendwatch: Dad=Discipline?
Is it a random coincidence? A lack of vision about any other meaningful role for a dad? A traditional limitation on the way a dad's role is articulated today? Is it the weird, hothouse environment of a press conference or...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
Dad-to-Dad Talk, In His Dreams
Washington, DC writer W. Ralph Eubanks talks regularly to his father--in his dreams--and has ever since his father died when Eubanks was 18:But the dreams have changed as the years have gone by. At first, I was still Daddy's little...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
June 11, 2006
A British New Dad Writes (And Writes) About The Pull Of Work And Fatherhood
There's a looong article by a new dad in today's UK Observer. I tried to find the Big Idea nuggets to quote and give a sense of the whole thing, but there's really so much in there, it's like dads...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
June 7, 2006
Other Daddies Typing: Sheer Slackitude Edition
It's this weird guy thing, I guess, where I get busy, busier, and then I cut back on surfing and checking in on all the blogs for a week, then two, then... then it's just embarassment at being out of...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
June 6, 2006
NPR: Authoritative British Accent Delivers Scientifically Tested Sleep Advice
As every documentary filmmaker knows, British accents are far more believable. So it's worth taking a listen to this NPR story from yesterday [6/5], in which UK psychologist Ian St. James-Roberts [a hyphen like that? It MUST be true!] discusses...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
Slate Writer Loves The Firm Hand Of Ferber
Slate writer Emily Bazelon was worried that cry-it-out guru Dr. Richard Ferber's new edition of his book was gonna be all backtracky and soft about co-sleeping and stuff. Apparently, she needn't have worried. The book still has charts and timetables...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
June 5, 2006
Pregnant Lady In The House Helps Your Projects Get Done Quick
Dwell Magazine has definitely been drinking from the baby bar these days; the last few issues have had more kidstuff in them than a babystyle catalogue. The June issue has a story about a Portland, OR, family's renovation of a...
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[read the full post...]
May 22, 2006
Toilet Training, Freedom, And The American Way
We've started the toilet training process, basically following Brazelton's approach. Last night my wife came across this shoutout to Brazelton in Dr. Spock [the 7th ed.], which mixes praise with a healthy dose of March of Freedom-style American Triumphalism. Guess...
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[read the full post...]
May 19, 2006
Teaching The Difference Between "Good Taste" & "Tastes Good"
The kid's been on a beautiful bender lately, calling all sorts of things "beautiful." Usually, it's the expected things that she hears [paintings, dresses, mommy]. Sometimes it's profound enough to make you scratch your head [the purple sky and skyline...
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[read the full post...]
May 15, 2006
JPMA: RTFM
One of the unanticipated lessons of last week's JPMA show: nobody reads the manuals. For anything. As I was talking to makers of everything from carseat adapters to baby carriers to infant swings to strollers to flushable diapers, I found...
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[read the full post...]
May 11, 2006
How About Doing What's Best?
Sometimes Mr. Robertson talks mothers out of enrolling a child at all. "We'll call them with a spot that's opened up and they can't do it because every single day they have two or three things. I tell them, 'I...
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[read the full post...]
April 25, 2006
The Nap Giveth, And The Nap Taketh Away
And here we thought a 3.5 hour nap yesterday was just an isolated occurrence, a gift, even, to allow us to get a little work done, to rest... At least that's what we thought until 3AM, when the kid was...
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[read the full post...]
April 1, 2006
Check With RiceDaddies Before Getting That Kanji Tattoo, OK?
Crazy days. Apparently some people get Chinese characters tattooed on them which turn out to say something different than what they intended:SHAD MAGNESS wanted to celebrate the love he felt for his young son with a grand gesture. At a...
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[read the full post...]
March 31, 2006
Question: How Many Parenting Books Do You Have/Use?
You'd think after two years of being a dad, I'd get used to surprises. I wake up thinking I have something figured out, and then I get blindsided by people's experiences which are diametrically opposite to my own. I just...
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[read the full post...]
March 30, 2006
How Do People Parent Alone??
Wow. My wife got back from her conference last night, and the kid and I headed back to DC to meet her. Another not-infrequent [for us] stint of solo parenting had ended. With our work travel, we regularly find ourselves...
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[read the full post...]
March 28, 2006
Narc-on-a-Nanny
Dear Upper West Side parents with the blue Bugaboo Cameleon with red canopy and the 6-9mo boy whose middle-aged Latina nanny was driving next to us near the Gracious Home store at 67th & Broadway at a still-chilly 9:30 in...
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[read the full post...]
Once Upon A Time, There Was A Magazine Writer...
...and his name was Adam. He was 35, which meant he was Generation-X. Now unlike Douglas Coupland, who coined the term "Generation-X," Adam had never created a neologism, even though he had written about pop cultural trends for like ten...
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[read the full post...]
Smart Ass Comment Permissibility Graph - DRAFT
If only I'd seen Garrett's graph a day ago. As readers of Daddyzine know, Garrett's got four years of parenting experience under his belt; a full 100% more than I do. And he's distilled it all into one simple...
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[read the full post...]
March 27, 2006
That's Pretty Passive Aggressive Language For The Playground
Go ahead and call me a jerk; I'll agree with you later (I already do, some) but if it takes being somewhat of an idiot to maintain my sense of humor and to be able to continue to acknowledge other...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
March 17, 2006
Looks Like The Aussies Figured Out Modern Dadhood A Couple Years Back
Just when you think you're really understanding this whole new fatherhood thing, and you're getting able to articulate pretty what it's like [and by 'you,' I mean 'i,' of course], you come across someone who crytallizes so many of the...
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[read the full post...]
March 14, 2006
Scientists Call It Baby-Ruth-In-The-Swimming-Pool-o-Phobia
Last week, the kid floated some poos in the tub, and it kind of freaked her out. At the time, she was just a little agitated, giving a bit of breathless narration as I tried to calmly scoop them...
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[read the full post...]
March 11, 2006
NYT: New Mom Is Off-The-Charts Insane, Totally Normal
As I'm reading Catherine Lloyd Burns' excerpt from her upcoming memoir in the NYT--it's all about how she and her husband deal with their new daughter, Olive, differently, and how that's fine, except that he does it totally wrong, and...
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[read the full post...]
Wow, Trixie Tracker's All Growed Up
Ben Macneill's geek-heavenly Trixie Update was a formative introduction to impending fatherhood for me. Not only did Ben transform the daunting, inscrutable cycles of a newborn's food, sleep, and poo into funny, startle-your-friends! charts and graphs, but he actually teased...
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[read the full post...]
March 9, 2006
I Really Hope This Doesn't Come Up In The Preschool Interviews
The kid has a memory like a steel trap, we already know that. Her first day back in the NYC apartment in almost two months, and she's reading all the Thomas books out loud to herself [of course, they only...
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[read the full post...]
March 5, 2006
Other Daddies Typing: Oscar-Avoiding Edition
A list of highlights from other blogging dads out there that's as comprehensive as my knowledge of parenting [*cough cough*]: You can't pick your kids, but you can pick their noses. And you can brush their teeth. Adventuredad has a...
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[read the full post...]
Cottonelle: Use Five Squares, Kids
Funny, because I grew up hearing from my grandmother who lived through the Depression that you're only supposed to use three squares of toilet paper, and you should tear that paper towel in half because you don't need a whole...
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[read the full post...]
What's A Godparent Expected To Do, And How Do You Pick One?
Godparents are not a part of the Mormon doctrine or culture, and they existed largely in books or in shadows for me. Friends had them, but it wasn't clear to me what they did besides maybe throw in an extra...
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[read the full post...]
Hey, Anything That Involves More Time, They're All For
There's a generational shift afoot, where dads are interested in being more involved in raising their kids, and are--or will be--increasingly willing to make the kinds of tough work/life balancing decisions that women have been grappling with for decades now....
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[read the full post...]
February 28, 2006
D'Oh! Dope Dad Dopes Up Kid During Daytime
So some clueless dad who apparently can't read a label inadvertently gave his daughter nighttime cold medicine after lunch, and --duh--all but knocked her out for the rest of the day. He just posted his sob story on dadcentric and...
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[read the full post...]
Rocky Mountain Cry
New dad James is one of the bloggers at Business Week's Working Parents; his daughter's three months old and has hit the dreaded "colic" stage. That's the stage where the kid cries for apparently no reason, and parents try every...
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[read the full post...]
February 16, 2006
Fatherhood And The Emo Emu
Snapped at The National Zoo:Fatherhood: Female emus leave egg-care and chick-rearing to the males. Males keep ground nests where they tend about ten dark-green egs - rarely leaving during the eight-week incubation period. Chicks stay with their father for...
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[read the full post...]
February 8, 2006
Putting The Nanny On The Books
What with tax season and all, those parents who paid their caregivers more than $1,400 last year are looking at the withholding taxes their supposed to file and pay--and deciding whether they're gonna do it. The BusinessWeek Working Parents blog...
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[read the full post...]
January 26, 2006
To A Child, There Are No "Strange, New Worlds"
After the Miss USA pageant, the flamers at Fark.com Googled up an old DT post about baby beauty pageants and creeped out, retouched glamour photos of innocent Southern children whose mothers won't face the reality that Designing Women is off...
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[read the full post...]
January 21, 2006
The Ancient Art Of Diaper Origami
At bare minimum, when you're folding a dirty diaper, you have to make sure the contents don't escape. Once that's done, though, there's a universe of artistic and aerodynamic expression available to you, as Kevin demonstrates in his recent post,...
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[read the full post...]
January 17, 2006
And It's Not Like I Tied Her To The Bumper Of The Family Truckster
Twice now in the last several months, someone has come up behind us on the street and told me to walk more slowly using the whole "give me unwelcome advice by pretending to talk to the kid" thing, and it...
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[read the full post...]
January 8, 2006
Can You Say, "Mixed Signals"?
On the walk home after church, we crossed paths with a pizza and a kid and the dad holding them. The dad was asking the kid, who must have been close to three, "Can you say 'cheese? Can you say...
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[read the full post...]
January 6, 2006
Babies & Tattoos & You
A lot of people get tattoos, and a lot of people have kids. And when someone who gets tattoos has a kid, it's not uncommon for him (or her) to commemorate the occasion with a baby-related tattoo. I am not...
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[read the full post...]
January 5, 2006
The Mid-Night Poo: Who. Does. Number Two. Work For?
It's like 11, the kid's been asleep a while, you go to check on her, and the nursery reeks; clearly, only the top end has been resting. When it comes to changing the kid's dirty diaper in the middle of...
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[read the full post...]
December 30, 2005
The World According To Matt Haughey
Like Matt, I've been catching myself saying things I'd heard before from parents, grandparents, teachers, etc. Unlike Matt, I didn't have any deeper insight into what it might actually mean. That said, I am bracing myself to be ignored by...
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[read the full post...]
Dads on NPR: Thinking Of The Children
NPR, which used to be the aural carpet to my work-at-home days, has been largely replaced by the kid's aural playmat, so to speak. But in the last 12 hours, I heard these two dads talking about the major changes...
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[read the full post...]
December 29, 2005
"Plastic Bag Is Not A Toy."
From the time she was born, I used to chant that to the kid every time I had a shopping bag in my hand, or every time I'd take out the trash or unwrap something. In case the dangers...
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[read the full post...]
We're Co-Sleeping, We're Proud, Get Used To It
The NYT reports on the growing Co-Sleeping Pride movement, in which literally several new parents who have been co-sleeping in secret shame have come out of the closet now that Dr. Richard Ferber has backtracked from his previous "cry it...
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[read the full post...]
December 27, 2005
Yes, For The Moment, I AM Chopped Liver
What is up with that? On and off for weeks now, the kid has been melting down if it's not Mommy who: - gives her a bath - puts her to bed - opens the applesauce - changes the channel...
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[read the full post...]
December 20, 2005
Dear Sir, I Have Invented A Revolutionary New [Insert Child-Related Product Here]
Here's an email I received this morning. It's not unusual for me to get 2-3 of these kinds of email each week, and most of the time, I don't mind it at all. I'm a huge fan of parent-led innovation,...
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[read the full post...]
December 11, 2005
Personally, I Blame Clement Hurd
While I was out late this afternoon, my wife called me to let me know the kid had started smoking. When asked, the kid had no words or concept of what she was doing, but she had very distinctly picked...
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[read the full post...]
December 8, 2005
The Daddy Types "MacGyver Your Own Damn Gifts" List
The holiday season doesn't usually drive me to swear this much. But I guess somewhere between the third breathless press release for the cheesy department store baby clothes, a Disney Princess catalog that's so nauseatingly pink it makes Pottery Barn's...
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[read the full post...]
Feel Guilty For Not Carrying Your Kid More Yet?
I'm all for carrying your kid, keeping her close, etc. etc. I may not be so into it that I'd get all in your face about it the way some Metafilterites have in this thread, though. Interspersed with some decent...
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[read the full post...]
December 7, 2005
Have Yourself An Indie Sonofabitchin' Christmas
I am SO behind Dutch's idea of skipping big box stores and mass manufactured crap for Christmas [&c.] and buying--IF you're buying, which I'll get to later--independent, handmade, and local stuff, which rocks a hundred times better anyway. Check out...
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[read the full post...]
December 5, 2005
What's On YOUR Christmas/Holiday List?
Yes, I've been working on a holiday gift list for the site; it's not quite ready yet, but I'll have it up in a day or so, I hope. In the mean time, I'd love to hear--and several wives and...
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[read the full post...]
November 30, 2005
Fresh From The Oven: Hot Push Present Suggestions
You think any old 4-carat diamond'll do for a push present? Maybe, just in case your wife thinks such a skating rink is a bit tacky, some selfless companies and designers out there want to help. Here's a very incomplete...
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[read the full post...]
The Push Present: Show Her You'd Impregnate Her All Over Again
OK, sorry to swamp Jason's lingerie buying guide with my somewhat skeptical take on "birth jewelry." I was wrong. Birth jewelry sounds like a lovely idea, a way to commemorate and celebrate the beauty--and hard work and sacrifice--of a woman...
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[read the full post...]
November 29, 2005
What To Get The New Mom For Christmas (&c.)
Let me tell ya, new dad, with this subject line-- "christmas, newborn, sexy nursing lingerie"--you're lucky your email got through at all. Since it did, and since it's a timely, worthwhile question, I'm throwing it out for suggestions. Here's the...
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[read the full post...]
November 22, 2005
Getting Your Kid Into The Right Kindergarten
Did I mention I'm thankful for NY Magazine? They take a break from their parenting snuff genre to do a long, remarkably sensible article on how parents should approach the private kindergarten admissions process in New York City. Well, it's...
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[read the full post...]
November 19, 2005
"But I Did It For YOU!" For Real.
Mulling over Metrodad's post and comments the other day about paying the bills and/vs. pursuing your creative dreams reminded me of a show "This American Life" host Ira Glass did once about his father. Growing up, Ira knew his father,...
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[read the full post...]
Stroller = Local?
Matt Haughey reports from his trip to Toronto:- either I look Canadian or tourists see people with a big stroller and baby and assume I live here. I've never been asked for directions so many times in a strange town.This...
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[read the full post...]
November 17, 2005
God Barney Is My Co-Pilot Teaching Assistant
We've started visiting pre-schools and daycare/pre-schools in the last couple of weeks, all with an eye to the spring/summer/fall when the kid will be old enough (2-2.5, depending on the program) to enroll. One place we visited yesterday morning seemed...
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[read the full post...]
There's Always That Danish Picture Book
My guess is, if you approach The Talk as "The Talk," you're already setting yourself up for failure. Wouldn't it be easier to tell a kid what a penis is while he's peeing on you during a diaper change? Potty...
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[read the full post...]
November 16, 2005
Work To Live or Live To Work Or Work To Parent Or--
Metrodad Metrodad Metrodad. If you read blogs through their syndicated feeds in your newsreader or My Yahoo or whatever, you miss the comments. And that sucks, especially when they're as insightful as the ones on MD's post about the challenges...
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[read the full post...]
November 15, 2005
Ferber Comforts, Sears Lets Go: Sleeping Strategies Converge in WSJ
Can't we all just get along? And get some sleep? In the new editions to their advice books on getting newborns to sleep, experts on both ends of the spectrum have made some compromises and qualifications to the techniques they--and...
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[read the full post...]
November 14, 2005
Talk To The Zebra
Saturday, the wife took the kid to the Zoo, where they kept running into a kid riding one of those tricycles-on-a-stick. I guess I forgot to tell my wife that [who knew?], the kid had developed an obsession with these...
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[read the full post...]
November 13, 2005
Other Daddies Typing, Vol X.3 - Etc
Here's the info stuff from the blog round-up: So parents [Swedish dads, New York moms] taking their kids into prison with them? wtf? [bloggingbaby] Beth of Blogging Baby flew solo with the kid and did just fine, thanks. She had...
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[read the full post...]
November 11, 2005
Light Weekend Reading: "Fatalities And the Organization of Child Care"
Sheesh. What a way to end the day. After DT reader George used it to steer the "how to evaluate child care?" post back on topic, I decided to sit down with a just-published paper by CUNY sociologists Julia Wrigley...
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[read the full post...]
November 8, 2005
Metafilterers Ask: What Should You Ask When Evaluating Childcare?
There are some good-read, government-published guidelines from places like Canada and the UK, where professional childcare is a little more widely available, but most suggestions--observe the carer/set-up all day; interview parents, not just the carer or the daycare center chief;...
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[read the full post...]
November 6, 2005
Do Caregivers Care What You Give Them? Yes
What do you give the caregiver for Christmas? For a full-time nanny/sitter, the rule of thumb I always hear is "a week's pay or equivalent." Discuss that one amongst yourselves if you like. Meanwhile, who knows what fits all the...
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[read the full post...]
October 25, 2005
Jon State, Stewart State, Red State, Blue State
"The red/blue state schism is far less severe than the schism between 'with kids' and 'without kids'...because you are now protecting someone." - Jon Stewart doing audience Q&A after a standup at George Washington University last weeekend, as reported in...
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[read the full post...]
October 22, 2005
Too Many Strollers In Art Galleries These Days?
Then this post is for you. The art world is so awesome. I love/hate it:I head to the after-party at Hiro, where I'm told that I've just missed what a colleague describes as "a classic Helene Winer moment." Winer, who...
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[read the full post...]
October 17, 2005
Tips For Talking To Your Canadian Baby
CanadianLiving.com has some useful, basic info on how the way you talk to your infant helps him develop his language skills. The article includes tips like waiting for a reply, being descriptive of the kid's surroundings, and watching for early...
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[read the full post...]
October 14, 2005
So It's Good Cop/Bad Cop In The Ritchie House?
Guess which one Madonna is. Madonna talks of her mission to be "part of the solution" by imparting her parenting wisdom to some British fashion magazine. Save your shillings, though, because the Daily Telegraph's Neil Tweedie [yes] has graciously mocked...
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[read the full post...]
October 9, 2005
Registry Advice For Buy Buy Baby Meltdown Survivors?
A pregnant New York friend emailed today seeking advice/suggestions about good registry options "for everything from a Bjorn to a cute playmat to bibs to the Dwell sheets to who knows what else?" Oh, and layette. Grandma-to-be's suggesting Lester's, an...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
October 8, 2005
Infant Potty Training: NYT Freaks Out, Brazelton Mellows
The NY Times discovered elimination communication today on the therapy-happy West Side--and promptly freaked out about it:For many parents in the United States, the idea of potty training before a baby is able to walk, or even before age 2,...
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[read the full post...]
October 7, 2005
Q: What Gift Would Impress You, Mr. VIP?
Here's the situation: You are a big swingin' D at the office; lots of direct reports, you have the CEO's ear on things that matter. You hold many peoples' livelihoods and professional fates in your hands. And yet, you're surprisingly...
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[read the full post...]
October 6, 2005
529 101: Where To Start Looking For College Savings Funds
Since 2002, state-sponsored 529 college savings plans have become a very popular way to invest money for a kid's future college education. As long as the proceeds are used to pay for college & secondary education expenses, 529's are federal...
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[read the full post...]
Danny Gregory On Impending Fatherhood
The latest installment of The Peanut Chronicle is out. The surprise baby shower didn't go well [Danny plays it down, but word to the wise on that one]. And they buy gear--big gear--but what struck me was this passage, which...
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[read the full post...]
September 30, 2005
Tips For New Parents, From The Onion
Prevent Sudden Infant Death Syndrome by screaming at baby every five minutes, "Are you okay, baby?!" Hey, if I was stuck after college with no job and no prospects and living in Milwaukee, maybe I'd become a mean-spirited, acidic comedian,...
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[read the full post...]
September 29, 2005
Is A 400 SF Apartment Big Enough For A Baby?
As part of their "Good Questions" series, a New York parent-to-be asked Apartment Therapy's readers: Can you survive living with a kid in a 400-sf East Village apartment? A lot of comments are all Therapy and no Apartment, and there's...