Category: Kids & Cute Stories

Free US Sex Offender Registry Mapping System

It names them, has a photo and their address, and puts a point on the map to show you where they live.

This is too spooky for words — in so many ways.

From an article in The New York Times, At Center of a Clash, Rowdy Children in Coffee Shops:

“I love people who don’t have children who tell you how to parent,” said Alison Miller, 35, a psychologist, corporate coach and mother of two. “I’d love for him to be responsible for three children for the next year and see if he can control the volume of their voices every minute of the day.”

Mr. McCauley, 44, said the protesting parents were “former cheerleaders and beauty queens” who “have a very strong sense of entitlement.” In an open letter he handed out at the bakery, he warned of an “epidemic” of antisocial behavior.

“Part of parenting skills is teaching kids they behave differently in a restaurant than they do on the playground,” Mr. McCauley said in an interview. “If you send out positive energy, positive energy returns to you. If you send out energy that says I’m the only one that matters, it’s going to be a pretty chaotic world.”

And so simmers another skirmish between the childless and the child-centered, a culture clash increasingly common in restaurants and other public spaces as a new generation of busy, older, well-off parents ferry little ones with them.

An online petition urging child-free sections in North Carolina restaurants drew hundreds of signers, including Janelle Funk, who wrote, “Whenever a hostess asks me ‘smoking or non-smoking?’ I respond, ‘No kids!’ ”

At Mendo Bistro in Fort Bragg, Calif., the owners declare “Well-behaved children and parents welcome” to try to stop unmonitored youngsters from tap-dancing on the 100-year-old wood floors.

Menus at Zumbro Cafe in Minneapolis say: “We love children, especially when they’re tucked into chairs and behaving,” which Barbara Daenzer said she read as an invitation to cease her weekly breakfast visits after her son was born.

Even at the Full Moon in Cambridge, Mass., a cafe created for families, with a train table, a dollhouse and a plastic kitchen in a carpeted play area, there are rules about inside voices and a “No lifeguard on duty” sign to remind parents to take responsibility.

There’s more.

… and already missing the little ones (and their parents). Seems like a good time to visit Heather (aka dooce): Monthly Newsletter: Month Twenty-one.

Thanks for the pointer, Jill.

Sometimes when you’re two you just don’t want your picture taken on your birthday.

Four-fifths of Grandpa’s Sweeties did Halloween as Wizard of Oz characters.

SAN FRANCISCO – A nine-year-old boy has just finished a pretty tough morning swim — from Alcatraz to San Francisco.

Johnny Wilson, from Hillsborough, made the 1.4-mile swim in under two hours, braving choppy morning waters and rough winds in a portion of the San Francisco bay known to have sharks as well.

Wilson’s classmates were waiting for him on shore, cheering as he made it all the way to Aquatic Park.

His effort raised about $30,000 for the Red Cross Katrina Hurricane Victims Fund.

Wilson said the toughest part of the swim was the beginning, because it was cold and windy.

Yahoo! News

Calvin and Hobbes is all around because of the publication of “The Complete Calvin and Hobbes” (available at Costco for $80.99 I noted the other day). The link is to today’s strip (October 9) from 1994.

“More than 50 percent of the world’s children are toilet trained by the time they turn 1, according to Contemporary Pediatrics magazine.”

From an article in The New York Times

Dear Abby,

I recently read your column advising grandparents on “tough love” for grandparents to give misbehaving grandchildren, whose own parents let them run wild. I have followed your advice, and enclosed a picture demonstrating my technique when my grandson just won’t behave while I’m babysitting for his parents. They have told me not to spank him, so I just take him for a ride, and he usually calms down afterward.

Sign me,

Tough Love Grandpa

[Originally posted by NewMexiKen on September 29, 2003.]

France announced financial incentives Thursday for parents to have a third child, hoping to boost its fertility rate by helping people to better juggle the demands of work and family life.

A new measure will award $916 a month to parents who take one year’s unpaid leave from work after the birth of a third child …

Yahoo! News

From an article in The New York Times:

In the last several years, New York City has had more baby girls named Fatoumata than Lisa, more Aaliyahs than Melissas, more Chayas than Christinas. There have been more baby boys named Moshe than Peter, more Miguels than Jeffreys, more Ahmeds than Stanleys. …

But the reverse also happens. Jose and Luis were the top two names for Hispanic baby boys in 1980. But today they have slipped out of the Top 10, behind names like Brandon, Kevin and Christopher. The top Hispanic baby name today is Justin.

… it seemed like a good time to re-post these observations on family vacations written by Jill, official older daughter of NewMexiKen.

Every summer our family took a long vacation across country. The destinations we visited, and the routes we took, varied from year to year. However, one thing never changed: we always went by car. I suppose that a family of six really had no choice, considering the prohibitive cost of air travel. But we kids held out hope, year after year, that this summer would be the one where we’d finally get to see the inside of one of those shiny metal flying machines. (Planes held the same mystical fascination for us that space ships must hold for other children.) Alas, that rosy day never came and, well into our teens, we spent our summers strapped into a beat-up station wagon topped with a car top carrier.

On the bright side, traveling provided many special opportunities for our parents to teach us lessons that were not necessarily apparent in daily life. Some examples:

Leave the house spotless
Before leaving for any trip, my parents would clean our house until it squeaked. Every bed had to be made, every dish washed and put away, every trash can empty, and every item of clothing laundered. For some reason, we also had to close the doors to all the rooms. My mother firmly believed that the worst possible thing in the world was returning home from vacation to a messy house. So we always left it in a sterilized state. As an adult, I still find myself rushing around the kitchen, placing freshly washed pots in cupboards, as my husband impatiently honks at me from the driver’s seat of our fully packed car.

Depart on car trips at 4:00 am
Many is the morning that we kids remember being awakened while it was still dark outside, quickly bundled into clothes, and limply escorted into the station wagon. My parents always liked to hit the road before the morning paper arrived. The theory was twofold. First, you could get one last night of sleep at home, without having to drive through the night or pay for a hotel room. Secondly, you got an early start, avoided all the morning traffic, and could get a couple hundred miles from home before the kids fully gained consciousness.

Television shows are a measure of time
As anyone who has traveled a long distance by car knows, time begins to have no meaning after a certain number of miles are logged. This is especially true for small children, since their grasp of time is tenuous to begin with. To combat this, my parents developed a foolproof way of telling us how much time stood between our next stop and us. When one of us would offer up the inevitable plaint from the backseat, “How much longerrrrrrrr?” my parents would reply using units we could understand. “Two Sesame Streets and one Mister Rogers,” they would respond. This, as any fan of educational television knows, is equivalent to two-and-a-half hours. Using this child-friendly estimator, even a three-year old could figure out whether lunch was only 15 minutes away, or whether we weren’t going to even slow down for another half day.

Never stop unless you absolutely must stop
Perhaps because we took such long and involved trips, or perhaps just because my parents were masochists, a typical day’s drive for us usually involved about 1,000 miles. With so much ground to cover, stops of any kind became a prized and rare commodity. Generally, my parents liked to use one stop and one stop only to take care of: lunch, a fresh tank of gas, six bathroom breaks, souvenir buying, stretching of legs, repacking the car top carrier, separating any bickering children, changing diapers, any necessary medical attention, relevant phone calls, sightseeing, mechanical repairs, and hugs. Sometimes they’d work a second, similar stop into the evening, then continue to drive straight through the night. This was not a car for whiners.

If you do make a “frivolous” stop, make it count
One thing that my parents were always willing to go out of the way to see, on these jaunts, was a place of natural or historical significance. Yes, I grew up in a family of National Park junkies. Before every trip, my father would spend weeks with his maps and his pads of yellow, lined paper, plotting the route that would take us by the greatest number of national treasures. As children, we hiked the Grand Canyon, toured Native American ruins, discussed whether Mount Rushmore was a “gyp,” timed the geysers at Yellowstone, and ran among the great Sequoias. Whenever possible, we camped overnight at the parks, enjoying the thrills of bear warnings, ranger campfire talks, and carry-along casserole heated over our miniature propane grill. The love of these parks has never left any of us. If anything, we kids are even bigger park addicts now than we were as children.

When checking into a hotel, never admit the true occupancy
Most of the time, on the vacations we took early in my life, my family camped at night. But as we got older, more often we would stay overnight at a Holiday Inn or some comparable motor lodge. My parents would invariably tell the desk clerk that only four of us would be staying in the room, in order to save money on extra occupant fees. Thus, two children were always forced to stay in the car while my parents filled out the necessary paperwork. Then, as we traveled to our room, those unacknowledged children would have to keep their heads down in the car and scurry into the room. Hey, ten bucks is ten bucks.

Do not take the cap off the radiator when the car overheats
Our cars generally performed well on these extremely long journeys across the country. But, inevitably, something would go wrong at some point on the trip. We had many memorable breakdowns. Once we came out of McDonalds, in a bad part of town near Washington, DC, to find a poorly timed flat tire. We had one car that intermittently got the shakes and started doing a back and forth chugging motion. But, most often, our car would simply overheat. When that happened, we would generally just pull over and let it cool down. Once, however, my father made the horrible mistake of unscrewing the radiator cap, to investigate the problem. He was rewarded with a scalding stream of water directly into his face. It is safe to say that no member of my family will ever, and I mean ever, unscrew a radiator cap again. That pained shriek still rings in my ears.

Veronica, official daughter-in-law of NewMexiKen, on what it’s really like being a mom.

When I was pregnant, I read about a dozen books on raising infants and toddlers. Most of these had at least one chapter about how to soothe your child when she’s fussy. Most of these books with said chapter recommended that you sing to your child when she’s fussy in order to calm her down. And most of these books that recommended that you sing to your child to soothe her also made the claim (in the body of the book no less, and not in say, a footnote), that there is nothing more soothing to a baby than the sound of her mother’s voice. So, the books said, don’t worry if you can’t sing or carry a tune. It doesn’t matter to the baby. Go ahead! Make up a silly song! Sing it off key! Just do it.

Well, obviously, they were all quite wrong. Example: Today, Sofie was having a tantrum about something or other while we were at the library. To soothe her, I did what I’ve been doing for the entire 22 months that she’s been alive — I sang her some silly song about who knows what in my rather horrible voice. For a moment, she completely stopped screaming and totally dead pan, looked me in the eye and pleaded: “Mama, no singing, no more.”

Photo courtesy Tech Gadgets Blog – LiewCF.com

From Bananas, Maybe. Peas and Kale? Dream On in The New York Times:

Picky eating among toddlers and preschoolers appears to be widespread. Experts say that about half of all 2-year-olds are picky eaters, and some research suggests that the pattern continues into childhood, findings that seem well supported by the collective whine of frustrated mothers.

Many nutritionists and public health scientists say eating a high-fiber diet rich in fruits and vegetables in childhood is important in preventing diseases like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity and osteoporosis, a position that other experts question. The research on the developmental and long-term health effects of poor diet in young children is scant.

…

Researchers say that as onerous as it sounds, parents should expose a child to a food at least 10 times before giving up. Most parents give up after five attempts.

If the battle is staked over vegetables, experts say, give it a rest.

is certainly demanding.

 

Photos taken at 2PM.