No nanny this week! I suppose there's a blog post in there about free time and energy for the enterprise and who gets to blog about kid stuff and who might if she had the leisure but, um, I don't have time. 

We never really used a baby monitor, not so much out of any sort of conviction that baby monitors are bad and wrong and only bad and wrong parents use them, but because we live in an apartment. Figuring out a way to hear the babies was never as much of an issue as figuring out how to not hear them. We got a nearly-broken one for free and use it if we're staying somewhere bigger or more treacherous than our little place in town. So this cautionary tale* is not mine; it's my friend Kim's. But it's too good.

To the left there is an item listed (accurately) as a "toddler leisure suit" on a generally pretty cute site called Babywit. It pisses me off. There is such a thing as just too goddamned  air-quotey and cool and statement-making, especially at the expense of an innocent preschooler. Nobody wants to wear that, and it's not fair if you're too little to get the joke.

                                                       This is a toddler dress from Baby Gap. 

Having kids does weird things to your sense of perspective. Not only have I become more risk-averse and less able to enjoy the kinds of books or movies usually described as "harrowing" (because they so often rely on child-in-peril plots to engage the audience's emotions and those are no longer fun), I've also discovered a hearty dislike for kid things I used to think were dandy. We'll get to Babar later, but right now I'm looking at you, Curious George. 

I'm not a huge fan of monkeys, to be honest, but one tries not to prejudge. As monkeys go, George is OK, I guess. It's the books I don't like.

I honestly had no idea how dull they are, so dreadfully dull I can't imagine how I ever thought they were interesting.  I guess what you remember, looking back fondly on read-aloud sessions with a parent and a sibling or two and the monkey books, are the illustrations, which really are that good. I especially loved the one where George has transformed the horrid Margaret Dumontlike lady's living room into a jungle, complete with slipper-chair cheetahs and a broom-and-ladder giraffe. Reading that scene now, though, I'm less enchanted than irritated: if the lady wanted a normal paint job, why did she supply the painters with dozens of very small pots of varicolored paint?? Why not a gallon of eggshell? And why was George looking for work, anyway? Don't they feed him at the zoo?

OK, it's a kid's book. It doesn't have to make sense. but must it bore on multiple levels at once? Sentence to sentence, the Reys bring the dull by constantly de-emphasizing the interesting details in favor of the tedious ones. Do 3-year-olds care that the stuff you drink before an X-Ray is called barium? No, but if you said it tastes yucky you might at least get a laugh out of them. 

On the macro level the authors bore by writing the same book, already on the dull side, over and over and then dying and leaving it to their successors to keep writing it again. I can't do a better summation of the sameness than Alice at Finslippy, so why try?

I had a thing or too to say about how much worse the new ones are than the already-pretty-bad originals but I got scooped there too, by my invisible friend Mimi Smartypants, years back. Mimi sorta liked the original George  because he was a fuck-up, but "In these books CG's fuckups are presented quite differently":

In almost every case, the fuckup actually turns out to be a good thing. If CG hadn't wandered away during a camping trip, he never would have seen and been able to put out the forest fire. If CG hadn't let all the puppies out of their cages, the missing one would never have been found. The minor characters in these newer books always end up elaborately thanking CG and his yellow-hatted handler for obliquely saving the day through the magic of simian curiosity. I think this signifies some weird, Hollywood-ized narrative shift, where every thread has to have an overtly feel-good ending, and where child (or monkey) behaviors cannot be undesirable or even morally neutral. 

What she said. 

I can't imagine these constitute infringement, since they are horrible underlit iPhone shots nobody could ever mistake for the real thing, so here is Olivia, star of page and (small) screen, experimenting with appropriation and homage  (here, referencing late-period Pollack) on her bedroom wall:

I'm giving up writing anything topical right now. Here is my daughter, in a rare somber moment, posing with my longtime companion-animal, Trout, this past weekend. Trout died Saturday after keeping me company for more than twenty years. There won't be another like her. 

These people (don't click, It only encourages them) have been flooding my inbox with come-ons for their "babies can read" program persistently enough to make me miss  "is your equipage capacious enough for the lassies?" (What happened to those? I don't think I've seen one in months.)  They are filling me with mini-rage.

I think it's actually entirely possible that babies can read- I haven't asked them-- but why the hell should they? Don't they have enough stuff, baby stuff, to accomplish during the dizzyingly short baby years already? 

What really pisses me off about these people, though, is that they commit the sin of pseudo-science while attempting to shake $199.99 out of parents worried that they are not doing enough to ensure their children's college and workplace success while the little slackers are still in diapers. "The most natural time to learn any aspect of language is during the infant and toddler years" is vaguely truthy, but I'd be surprised if there turned out to be any research proving that forcing them to take on an age-inappropriate skill set at that natural time does anything to promote "enhanced learning ability," let alone "future success, " as the ad goes on to claim. "If that's a hat," a very funny local-to-me writer once memorably wrote, "I'll eat my head."

Don't believe the hype! Free the babies!

My "blog ideas" page currently contains a complaint about overly gendered towels and a public confession of intention to make two cakes (fire truck and princess ballerina) for my kids' upcoming birthday, and more or less always has. People's weirdness (my own included) around children's sex and gender was a big part of what got me blogging here in the first place. So, rummaging around for something to post quickity-quick this morning (the morning after a long distracting no-time weekend), I found this, the second post I ever wrote and never got around to slapping up here: 

I think my son has been watching too much television lately. Specifically, I think he's been watching too much of the PBS Kids show "SuperWhy!" (It's a show about a team of reading superheroes, fronted by a boy who calls himself SuperWhy.)

Why (ha), you might ask, would I think such a thing? Because when I get in the shower, I find myself singing the theme song. I could choose any other song in the world to bellow within the amplifying walls of my shower stall, and I'm singing, "Who's got the power, the power to read? To answer the call of friends in need?….SuperWhy! SuuuuuperWhy. He's the guy, heeee's (beat) SuperWhy!"

And I always thought the Pina Colada song was the most annoying earworm ever.

What gets stuck in your head, causing you to sing under your breath against your will?

A year ago yesterday, about a week into GGYJ's infancy, I posted this monkey dress, which, improbably enough, still (sort of) fits my daughter (she is not what you'd call an ambitious grower). I loved that dress and was pleased to see that H&M has a new version out this spring, and will be all heartbroken next year when she finally sizes out of their cutest stuff. But if I really want monkeys for next summer, all I have to do is go in anywhere-- Baby Gap, Gymboree, fancy online boutiques, The Children's Place-- honestly, anywhere, and there will be monkey things galore in next year's sizes. I can outfit them in monkeywear enough to see them into middle school, although they would hate me for it. 

So, monkeys, monkeys everywhere. Can it be a coincidence? Of course not. If there is a not-so-secret color cabal that decided over a year ago that there would be altogether too much yellow on the market this summer, and there is, what makes you think that all these monkeys were not entirely premeditated? 

There are trend houses galore out there, all eager to sell you a very expensive report detailing exactly what will be replacing those monkeys on next year's racks, but why buy into the dominant paradigm, especially at those prices? Let's do it ourselves! I'll start. Let's see... this year there were butterflies, surfers, Earth-loving naturals, zebra stripes, rockers, monkeys, and a pop-y late 60s vibe, so next year? More organics, lions and tigers, reptiles but not dinosaurs, and a step back a decade or so from this year's Carnaby Street, to gingham and embroidered daisies and Li'l Davy Crocket, but minus the BB gun. 

What say you? And don't forget to come back in a year to see how we did.

Well, maybe toys R us, but Toys R Us is not us, or not me, and I decided this weekend that you can't make me go there ever again.

It was hot and the girl was sickish and we couldn't go to the beach, so we decided to make a field trip to the far suburbs and do some birthday reconnaissance and get some doo-dads to raise everyone's spirits. But once there and wandering the aisles I decided that TRU is just not going to work for me. I swear I'm not a "little and funky and inefficient is always better" person (often yes, but not always) but the monolithic brandedness and characterness (even a small pack of pencils is so encrusted with Disney princesses there could be anything in there: lipsticks, glue, vibrators...)  and the unrelenting sameness just sucks the joy right out of toys for me. I have two little kids and get so much pleasure out of procuring cool stuff for them that I have a blog dedicated to the project and yet I go in there and I just don't even want to buy anything. That can't be right.

But the prices, it has to be worth it for the prices, right?  Eh. I have the sales slip here and compared most of what we got and it's exactly the same on Amazon, so here's the new plan: if it's mass market and we know what it is and have determined the kids should have one, we order it. If we think it would be fun to go look at toys and maybe buy a few trinkets to brighten a dull Saturday afternoon, we go the local/independent/inefficient route, not that there's anything particularly inefficient about an independent toy store. Maybe there's no parking lot the size of North Dakota, baking in the South Bay sun, but that's a plus in my book. We park on the street, or we take the train.

I never thought it would take the pursuit of a PlayMobile fireman set and a plastic tiara to finally turn me into a hippie, but you never do see these things coming. And I still love Target, and hippies don't shop at Target, right?

I don't know if anyone but me (and my mom) remembers this but it seriously bugged me. I even made a desultory search one afternoon for the CEO's name so I could complain, didn't find it, and wandered off to do something else. I really did mind, though-- what kind of a message is that to send to kids, or to anyone, that boys will save the world and girls will... wear pink?. And we really did buy one for each twin.

What I didn't admit at the time, though, was that the girl-child never wore hers, and I never even tried to make her, probably for the same reason they didn't try to sell undyed organic cotton to girls in the first place: she would never have cared for the color, or lack of one. So my message shirt (I am usually against these, and rather surprised myself by being so taken with this one, but I guess I really do believe the world needs saving) languished in my daughter's drawer, along with its message. Until yesterday.

I was rummaging around in the artsy-crafts store and noticed these handy little packs of toss-in-the-washing-machine dye* and thought, a-ha!. Easy, and done, and she loves her new shirt, and now I really do need to find that email address so I can show the Gymboree folks that I fixed their stupid mistake for them.

*No, it's not made from fair-trade organic beets, shut up. 

An open letter to any company that makes bubble machines (because we've tried products from all of you, and you're all guilty):

Dear Bubble Machine Manufacturer:

You'd think I'd have learned my lesson by now. Each spring, I drop ten bucks or so on one of your nifty little products: the bubble machines. Lured in by the promise of hundreds and hundreds of bubbles per minute, I plop down my credit card for one your brightly colored plastic jobbies and eagerly take it home to my child.

We load the batteries, pour in the bubble solution and yes, enjoy hundreds and hundreds of bubbles. Once. The next time we'd like to enjoy hundreds and hundreds of bubbles, however, we are always, without fail, disappointed. The machine refuses to work. My child's normally sunny face darkens in disappointment. I grumble as I fiddle with the screwdriver, thinking that maybe it's just that the machine is an obnoxious battery-eater, and that a fresh set will restore the fun and joviality that we had previously experienced.

It has never happened. Your machines suck. I don't know what you do to them, but we have yet to be pleasantly surprised. I'm never spending money on your products again. Shame on you. Shame shame shame.

Sincerely,

Jennifer

Every year there's some Mother's Day come-on or other that irritates me more than the others. This year I've been too busy or too monkey-minded to read magazines, and I pretty much never see TV commercials anymore thanks to the magic of TiVo, so that leaves email as my major annoyance conduit. And that brings us to this, from FTD:

Funny/not funny? Besides the Comic Sans, I mean, which is never funny.

The frozen vaguely sherbetish "push up"  treat thing seems, at first look, pretty clever. The sleeve/cup contains the mess, and the nominally edible frozen slurry is accessed at the child's own pace. Having seen my kid attempt to  get a reasonable proportion of his ice cream cone into himself on a hot day before it suffered complete structural failure,, dumping a river of chocolate down his front to pool dispiritingly in his lap, I can see both the inspiration and the appeal. In practice, though, they are hilariously bad, their mere existence a triumph of wishful thinking over physics.

I can't believe I missed this post last year. What could possibly be more enjoyable than a collection of soul-destroying Soviet public sculptures for children, now gone to slow decay? Nothing, that's what. 

How did I manage to have a bookish, English-history obsessed childhood, with all its associated "Mother Goose" iterations, and miss the fact that the "see-saw" rhyme actually goes like this? 

Of course, Dorothy The Dinosaur's cruel giggle at the end there (she's enjoying Jacky's misery!) isn't helping, but the word-picture here of the nasty, brutish, and short life of the industrial revolution-era child laborer is rather too vivid to allow for any kind of literary or chronological distance. Don't you want to throw a wooden shoe into whatever machine that child is chained to?

I've never been too sold on the idea that every one of these rhymes is a veiled reference to some scandal of the day, the Minister's mistress's poxy decollatege or that embarrassing incident with the Knights of the Privy Chamber (although some, like Georgie Porgie, clearly are). I'm thinking this is not in fact an early version of the labor-movement protest song. I'm willing to go, in Margery's case, with the prevailing explanation that the "see-saw" rhymes are sawyer's work songs, But that little slice of soul-destroying, inescapable, class-bound poverty is just... not fun. And then I looked up "Margery Daw" and found this variant:

See Saw, Margery Daw,

Sold her bed and lay on straw;

Was not she a dirty slut

To sell her bed and lie in the dirt.

Even allowing for the fact that "slut" has changed meanings (from "slattern" to, well,

 "slut,") in the intervening years, this one is a bit raw, what? I can see why Jacky's plight, grim as it is to contemplate,has survived it in the popular children's editions. 

So here's a new one for other folks with boy/girl twins or close-in-age gender discordant sibs. What do I do with the fact that girlchild only really wants pink pants and has rejected other contenders for any number of perceived faults, but, more than anything, for being (or even looking like they might have been) her brother's. Since she's a half-size smaller I am regularly tempted to at least try to pass his things down to her, but with the occasional exception (like cah shoes) she isn't having any. And yet simultaneously, both kids want what the other one is having (they express it just so: "Mommy, I want what Avi's having!")