“Children should get Pfizer stock options for each pill they swallow. That might help the moodiness.”
“Get Your War On” by David Rees (in Rolling Stone), referring to the fact that drug use to “treat” kids increased fivefold 1993-2002.
Category: Kids & Cute Stories
Best advice of the day, so far
“If there’s a fire, get out of house.”
2-year-old Aidan on the phone without prompting. He also advised not to go back in for any toys.
A Ring Tone Meant to Fall on Deaf Ears
From an article in Monday’s New York Times:
In that old battle of the wills between young people and their keepers, the young have found a new weapon that could change the balance of power on the cellphone front: a ring tone that many adults cannot hear.
In settings where cellphone use is forbidden — in class, for example — it is perfect for signaling the arrival of a text message without being detected by an elder of the species.
“When I heard about it I didn’t believe it at first,” said Donna Lewis, a technology teacher at the Trinity School in Manhattan. “But one of the kids gave me a copy, and I sent it to a colleague. She played it for her first graders. All of them could hear it, and neither she nor I could.”
The Times has the sound file. Can you hear it?
Can’t leave out the sixth Sweetie just because she lives in the other direction
9½ weeks
Bound to make a big splash
More birthday cake, please
Able, or at least willing, to leap off of tall buildings
Sorry ladies, he’s only five
Tools of Ignorance
Guess whose 5-year-old grandson has put on the “tools of ignorance”? That’s what they call the catcher’s gear. His mom says he loves the position because “he realized the catcher gets to put a hurtin’ on people.”
Five. He’s five.
A Primer on Parental Cruelty
Baby’s Named a Bad, Bad Thing.
Funny (though at some level desperately sad).
Recommended despite the bogus apostrophe.
Thanks to LM for the suggestion.
And if It’s a Boy, Will It Be Lleh?
In 1999, there were only eight newborn American girls named Nevaeh. Last year, it was the 70th-most-popular name for baby girls, ahead of Sara, Vanessa and Amanda.
The spectacular rise of Nevaeh (commonly pronounced nah-VAY-uh) has little precedent, name experts say. They watched it break into the top 1,000 of girls’ names in 2001 at No. 266, the third-highest debut ever. Four years later it cracked the top 100 with 4,457 newborn Nevaehs, having made the fastest climb among all names in more than a century, the entire period for which the Social Security Administration has such records.
Nevaeh is not in the Bible or any religious text. It is not from a foreign language. It is not the name of a celebrity, real or fictional.
Nevaeh is Heaven spelled backward.
Give me some more of that damn discipline, please
Jill, official eldest daughter of NewMexiKen, reports another example of how parenting never quite works out in practice like it does in theory. In her words:
Mack was going through a swearing phase and it got pretty bad. So I decided to go Old School with the discipline. We told him that from now on, he got one warning a day, and on his second swear word he would have his mouth washed out. He asked what that entailed, and I explained that we would put soap in his mouth.
This is a child who cannot have even no-tears baby shampoo go near his head before he is equipped with a bath visor and a washcloth handy for any accidental drips on his face. The idea of having to EAT soap was horrifying to him.
The threat actually worked. Yes! Discipline that worked on Mack!
Until Sunday, when he said “ass” for the second time that day. I said, “Now, you have to have your mouth washed out.” His father brought Mack into the bathroom and squirted some hand soap on his tongue.
My “warm vanilla sugar” hand soap from Bath & Body Works.
Mack asked for seconds.
Wrong-Way Baby
MALIBU, Calif. – When it comes to driving with her baby, Britney Spears just can’t get it right. After causing an international uproar by driving with her infant unsecured in her lap, Spears, sporting curlers in her hair, is snapped here driving in Malibu with the baby strapped in the back seat – but facing the wrong way.
The kid isn’t two yet, but there is this from a Freakonomics column last summer:
Even a quick look at the FARS data reveals a striking result: among children 2 and older, the death rate is no lower for those traveling in any kind of car seat than for those wearing seat belts. There are many reasons, of course, that this raw data might be misleading. Perhaps kids in car seats are, on average, in worse wrecks. Or maybe their parents drive smaller cars, which might provide less protection.
Popular baby names
From the Social Security Administration last year’s most popular baby names.
| Rank | Male name | Female name | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jacob | Emily | ||
| 2 | Michael | Emma | ||
| 3 | Joshua | Madison | ||
| 4 | Matthew | Abigail | ||
| 5 | Ethan | Olivia | ||
| 6 | Andrew | Isabella | ||
| 7 | Daniel | Hannah | ||
| 8 | Anthony | Samantha | ||
| 9 | Christopher | Ava | ||
| 10 | Joseph | Ashley | ||
| Note: Rank 1 is the most popular, rank 2 is the next most popular, and so forth. | ||||
In New Mexico the top 5 names for boys were Joshua, Isaiah, Jacob, Daniel and Elijah. For girls Alyssa, Emily, Madison, Isabella and Destiny.
Thanks to Jill (not in the top 1000 most popular girl’s names last year) for the link.
Mother Lion
Youngest Sweetie, Reid, just six weeks old, had some hardness and swelling in his chest when his mother gave him his bath Saturday evening. Here’s part of her story:
We headed to the emergency room, where we spent the next eight hours. It turned out he had a bacterial infection in his chest, a development that is not uncommon in infants, but still a major concern, obviously. …
Reid handled it very well. I handled it slightly less well, but did my best. The ER doctors had an extremely difficult time getting the IV in place, and actually tried about seven or eight times. It was torture for both Reid and me. I don’t know who cried harder. After the umpteenth failure, over several hours, I actually picked Reid up off the table, as they were looking for another place to stick, and told them that we were done. (In the end, after we were transferred [by ambulance], the children’s hospital brought in a neonatalogist, who put in the IV with no problem.)
At the time it was an emotional response more than anything else, because I felt I literally could not stand to see Reid get hurt one more time. I was actually somewhat embarrassed by my outburst. But looking back, I’m so glad I did it. Doctors can be so intimidating, even when they aren’t actively trying to patronize you. We hate to question them, and they hate it too! But I think sometimes they need to be reminded that they are treating people — in this case a little teeny people — not just solving puzzles.
Reid responded well to the antibiotics in the pediatric unit and was home by Monday night. He’s recovering nicely.
So is his mom — who wishes only that she’d spoken up after two or three tries, rather than waiting as long as she did.
Tiny Eyes
Ever wondered how your baby sees the world—or how they see you?
In the first few months of life your child sees the world very differently to you. For the first time ever, using the Tiny Eyes engine, you can see the world through their eyes!
Try it at Tiny Eyes.
Now pitching, Nolan Ryan
NewMexiKen posted this a year ago today, but it seems timely in light of the new season.
From Science Daily, Slow Balls Take The Swing Out Of Young Ball Players:
Exasperated parents practicing throw-and-connect skills with their young children will be relieved to know that their child’s inability to hit a slow-moving ball has a scientific explanation: Children cannot hit slow balls because their brains are not wired to handle slow motion.
“When you throw something slowly to a child, you think you’re doing them a favour by trying to be helpful,” said Terri Lewis, professor of psychology at McMaster University. “Slow balls actually appear stationary to a child.”
This explains why a young child holding a bat or a catcher’s mitt will often not react to a ball thrown toward her, prompting flummoxed parents to continue throwing the ball even slower. By adding a little speed to the pitch, Lewis and her team found that children were able to judge speed more accurately. There are several reasons for the phenomenon.
Before there was Mr. Spock, there was Dr. Spock
Benjamin Spock was born on this date in 1903. His handbook on child care, “Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care,” sold nearly 50 million copies in 42 languages before his death in 1998. The following is from The New York Times obituary:
Dr. Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician who gently coached anxious postwar parents to trust their “own common sense,” only to be blamed by some critics for the self-indulgence of those parents’ children, the 60’s generation, died on Sunday at his home in San Diego. He was 94.
…Dr. Spock also became well known as an antiwar demonstrator in the 1960’s, as he campaigned for nuclear disarmament and against the war in Vietnam and was arrested in protest demonstrations. ”There’s no point in raising children if they’re going to be burned alive,” was how he made the connection between parents, pediatricians and politics.
Dr. Spock had already broken with authority in his child-rearing handbook, which he saw as giving ”practical application” to the ideas propounded by two early 20th-century sages, Sigmund Freud and John Dewey, the American philosopher and educator.
“John Dewey and Freud said that kids don’t have to be disciplined into adulthood but can direct themselves toward adulthood by following their own will,” he observed in 1972.
And so in the opening chapter of the book, first published in hardcover in 1946 with the title “The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care,” Dr. Spock counseled his readers not to “take too seriously all that the neighbors say.”
“Don’t be afraid to trust your own common sense,” he wrote. “What good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is usually best.”
Such relaxed advice, given in the easy, practical, reassuring way that he had with parents, was light-years from the stern dictums of earlier standard works, like the 1928 book “Psychological Care of Infant and Child” by Dr. John B. Watson. “Never, never kiss your child,” Dr. Watson commanded. “Never hold it in your lap. Never rock its carriage.”
Natural born leader
NewMexiKen’s oldest Sweetie, five-year-old Mack, is tall for his age, a non-stop talker, and 100% alpha-male. When he first began pre-school his mother called him The Godfather, the other kids flocked around him so. Now he’s simply The Mayor. Jill sends along this story from Tee Ball:
Mack isn’t concerned…. He’s far too busy being the mayor of tee ball. Whenever he gets to first he has a whole routine with the first-base coach that involves high fives and knuckle bumps, etc. (no other kid seems to even notice the coach).
At the end of the top of the first, after the last of the other team batted, Mack gave a huge whoop and ran off the field, yelling, “Come on! Come on!” All but one kid followed him, and it was so cute to watch the team following Mack, and actually running and acting like a team for once.
Yes, Mack led them all to the visitor’s dugout, and they were the home team. Yes, this led to a minute or so of confused milling about before they all found their way over to the proper side of the field. So he’s the mayor, but he’s a Republican mayor.
This video quacks me up
From ABC News. You’ll have to watch a commercial first, but the video will warm your heart’s cockles.
Kids and Baseball Cards
The SportsProf has an affectionate essay about — as the title says — Kids and Baseball Cards. Recommended.
Baby Baby Sweet Baby
The ten-month-old in front of me screamed for most of the two hour flight from San Francisco to Albuquerque last night (Thank you, Bose!). NewMexiKen felt sorry for the child, who I was told was simply exhausted, and I felt for the mother who was, no doubt, exhausted herself — and frustrated and embarassed.
Next time she should just administer drugs. No, of course not to the baby. To the rest of us.
Who is that masked man?
Newest Sweetie Reid, like his brothers, has positive blood. His mother, Jill, official older daughter of NewMexiKen, has her father’s negative blood. Not good. The mother’s blood forms anti-bodies to fight the invasion of the baby’s positive blood. Some of those anti-bodies enter the baby’s bloodstream and attack the baby.
Fortunately, Reid has as little of that as could be hoped. Even so, in the days following his birth last Thursday, he was a little jaundiced and had to go “under the lights” as you see here. His brothers were told he was getting infused with super powers.
Baby and mother are doing fine. In fact, baby and mother attended older brother Mack’s soccer practice Monday evening, just four days after the birth by C-section. Now that’s a Soccer Mom!
Newest Sweetie
Grandpa has a brand new Sweetie today — Reid Fisher, third son of Jill and Byron. Reid and Fisher are both fifth generation family names.
The little guy was two weeks early, but weighed in at 7 pounds 3 ounces, and is 19 inches long. He and his mother are both doing fine.
Photo taken about three hours after Reid’s birth.
Each of the six of Grandpa’s Sweeties have, oddly enough, been born on days of the month that are prime numbers: 7, 13, 13, 19, 23 and 31. Thought you’d want to know.