Go Get Your Jacket

Looking for Mr. Goodbyn

When I tell people what I blog about I usually find myself instantly assuring them, over-eagerly and probably unnecessarily (they don't care!) that GGYJ isn't one of those kid-stuff shopping blogs, you know the ones. It's, um, a different kind. We talk about how we feel about children's products, what needs particular products seem to set out to fulfill, how things used to be and where they are going... you know. It's not just about buying things. And it's often, specifically, about not buying things.

Until my kids started school, apparently.  Kenton and I do like some good gear. We like a tool that works, and one that looks good while it's at it is even better. I know this about us, and I did sort of see it coming, but I'm still a little ashamed to admit just how much gorgeous, unnecessary, and obviously aimed at design-conscious, eco-conscious, gear-conscious Bobos ( like we aren't but could easily be mistaken for)) stuff I want to kit them out with now that there is at least a passable excuse for doing so. There were the expensive (but really nifty and the object of envy at the preschool) labels. There were the backpacks. There were the heretofore unblogged darling oilcloth lunchbags from Mimi The Sardine:

 

And now there is this, the Goodbyn all-in-one lunchbox:

We'd bought a bunch of teensy sub-bento boxes, little Japanese containers meant to hold pickled radish or eggs shaped like rabbits or whatever, and after only one day I was wondering how long I'd be willing (we'll give up on "eager") to wash them all every night and keep track of all the lids and make sure they all went back in the right bin to be found again to refill , and so on. And then an online aquaintance with two school-age kids plus triplets posted the same problem, and I was going to go look for a solution (I was going to start with the bento lady) but another invisible friend beat me to it. Let's look at it again:

I think I want to marry it. 

Thirty bucks. Adorable, sturdy. Customizable. Easier to wash. Purports to keep the sandwich unbesmirched by apple sauce and the crunchy snack crunchy. Sold out everywhere, but on re-order. Talk me down.

Her hair in an Alice Blue Bland

It's a hair band:

   

No, I guess not. It's a headband:

Or possibly an Alice band:

 

Whatever it is, it's the perfect (and perfectly obvious) answer to a recently vexing question: how to  fix her hair and get her to school on the same morning. It looks darling (although doesn't she look a bit like a movie star fake-candid posing for Photoplay with a caption about how she likes to relax by painting water-colors in her garden?), It's cheap, it's easy, she likes it. 

If only the phrase "hair band" didn't send off a cascade of word-associations, a domino effect of interlocking ear-worms: hairband -> headband -> Alice Band -> Alice blue gown-> [Bobby Blue Bland] -> "Black Velvet Band."  

 "Black Velvet Band" is (should be) a scurrilous chanty (done here ,iconically, by The Dropkick Murphys) in which the innocent, although likely very drunk, hero falls under the spell of a black-eyed wench who frames him for pick-pocketing and gets him transported, cursing, to Tasmania. This is, oddly, the same song, more or less, as the one murdered here by The Wiggles. And so we come full circle.

In the WIggles version, sickly sweet as a treacle tart, the girl with the eponymous hairdo is not a felonious wench but a princessy type swanning around the town until a prince notices her and immediately proposes. Ick. She's kind of a treacle tart herself, that maiden fair-- she hardly even knows that prince, and yet off she goes, chasing after the crown jewels. Not a lesson I want my daughter to learn, but I do like the hairbands headbands. 

 

I dreamed I saved the world in my Maidenform bra

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. 

Into the box with you

Kenton (I think about writing "the husband" or "hubby" or "DH" or "the kids' dad" and I can't quite imagine being married to any of those people) sent this thing on to me yesterday.

Lego sorter! Definitely the kind of thing Alton Brown would damn as a single tasker and then go on to build out of clay flower-pots and aluminum foil. We already own 3 sizes of Legos, though, which comes to slightly more than one size per each year of the children's lives, and I can see how this might get out of hand.

I'd kind of like one giant box on the same model to sort everything, wouldn't that be good? 

Come fly with me

This is a pretty good "traveling with tots"  post. I didn't bother reading the suggestions for infants, since infants are a totally captive audience and they get they get, and I didn't bother reading the older kids section either, since a seven-year-old ought to be able to figure some of that stuff out her herself, plus they can read. The preschooler's list is good, though. I was especially entertained to see "blue painter's tape" on anyone's must-take list but ours. We've been carrying painter's tape since the earliest days of child-proofing, since you can use if to tape up cabinets and cordon off dangerous areas and, in a pinch, keep a small child in his chair, I suppose. Now that they're too smart and too big to be kept in line by a merely suggested barrier like a piece of tape, we still carry it because it's diverting and harmless. Just don't give them the whole roll at once. Seriously.

Missing from the list is my kids' current favorite not-running-around-making-noise toy: my iPhone. It's annoying as hell to have people constantly stealing your phone when you want to use it, but since you can't use it on the plane anyway load it up with kid-friendly apps, put it in airplane mode, and let 'em go crazy. Also, give them snacks that are bad for them (thus rare and valued) and take a long time to eat, A snack-sized bag of potato chips, doled out chip by chip, buys a half hour of contented munching, plus many opportunities to practice "please?' and "thank you."

Toddler-having friends and I all note the lack of a magic slate/Magnadoodle/Aquadoodle/dwawing thing. You need one of those. Everyone likes the idea of the pipe cleaners and the Colorforms, most of us bring little boxes or bags filled with small surprises which can then be refilled with whatever as long as unpacking them gives the kids something to do, everyone relies heavily on sticker books, and it's probably not a good idea to bring a large inflatable ball on an airplane. 

Well, actually, I think it's a great idea, but nobody around us would agree.

A mystery semi-solved

I'm sure it was mean of me to poke fun at uncle Jerry (actually Gerry, as it turns out), but since I now know who he is I should take this opportunity to clarify that I was talking about the character, not the singer who plays him on the Music Together CDs. I knew nothing about the real guy when I wrote that. I only know now because some helpful commenters followed up and did my work for me. Courtney wrote:

I too have been driven crazy trying to find out who John, Lynn, etc. really are. As a musician myself, it really bothers me when performers are not credited for work they do on a CD. I was not much more successful than your husband, however, I did manage to uncover who Lynn is. Her name is Lynn Lobban and she is a Broadway singer (or at least she was; she ought to be a lot older now) and has done some commercials and I think movies. The only other thing I could uncover is that it's not Uncle Jerry with a J, but Uncle Gerry. My husband and I guess he's some sort of ethnomusicologist since he tends to be featured on the tunes that come from Spanish, Irish, Jewish (and so on) culture. Hope this helps a little!

And then recently Linda followed up with this:

This link takes you to the web page for "Uncle Gerry" from Music Together--I too wondered about all the performers and I did find this info.

I'm indebted to Linda, especially. Without her inteprid googling I would not now know these things about Gerry Dignan, who is not an ethnomusicologist but may be Stuart Smalley:

Gerry Dignan has been called a troubadour for our times. He is an acclaimed singer, retreat leader, composer, and evocateur of universal song for all ages.

and...

He has been referred to as a mix of John Denver, Andrea Bocelli, Kenny Loggins and Francis of Assisi.

There is nothing I could have made up about some putative funny uncle that could possibly compete with that. I'm in awe, frankly. 

Be Gone, You Evil Binky

Sometimes I’m just amazed by what’s out there on the Interwebs to gull the gullible, especially the gullible parent. 

Here's the latest. For a mere $54.99, you can purchase the loving and magical Pacifier B Gone system to rid your child of that pesky binky forever.

Pacifier B Gone touts itself as “the nurturing answer on the market today that will remove the pacifier from your child's life in a loving and magical way.”

Got that, kids? It’s loving and magical. Completely the opposite of the “it’s a hard-knock life, kid” method that my husband and I scarred our son with when he was 18 months old.

They go on to note that the creators couldn’t get their minds around a heartless method that allows a child to cry for up to five days. “We love our children too much to let that happen,” the site says, implying of course that we don't, and also, we're mean.

But the funny thing is…the actual kit itself is really not crazy. It’s just a bunch of stuff that most parents of stubbornly be-binked kids already use: the wall chart with stickers, the lovey, the book with the sweetly compelling story about the “big kid” who gives up her paci. It’s just all packaged conveniently together at a big mark-up. 

I’m actually not opposed to a kindler-and-gentler method of binky cessation. My husband and I like to talk big, but we didn’t really make our son go cold-turkey when we decided it was time for him to debinkify.

Over the course of a few months, we began limiting the binky use to rides in the car, naptime and bedtime, then naptime and bedtime, and finally just bedtime. We also strongly encouraged his attachment to a stuffed frog. We talked up the whole “big boy” aspect. And what do you know, by the time my husband took the last handful of binkies out of the crib, our son was pretty much okay with it.

We managed to accomplish this just fine on our own, without spending nearly $60. And with this recession on, unless you’re doing a lot better than I am, I bet you can stumble along on your own, too.

BKBs!

We've got two kids and one not overly spacious room, so how is this not the perfect solution?  

 

We removed the ladder, got a trundle mattress (the big drawer could be storage if you didn't have to stash a second twin somewhere), and turned the upper bunk into a storage loft until the kids can be trusted:

Adorable IKEA bedding and friends:

 

We all have a little Martha or Pottery Barn Kids catalogue stylist in us. Sometimes it has to come out:

I just couldn't bring myself to spell out the word "balls" in bright childish stick-on felt letters, though:

It's a small town after all

I've been taking pictures of sad lost lovies and de-mated baby booties and trampled gummy bears all year, and if I'm not the only mommy in San Francisco with a camera and a vague yen for artistic expression, someone else may have photographed Lilah's  Elmo doll yesterday as it lay splay-legged on the sidewalk after taking an unremarked tumble off the back of the stroller.

The kids were out with their dad, and while Kenton would have noticed it eventually and had to do a Knuffle Bunny -style dash through downtown attempting to retrieve it, he was spared by his own forethought. It was Kenton who thought to order the children their own "Live Strong" -type silicone bracelets printed with our cell numbers , and although the children themselves usually refuse or shuck theirs, Elmo has been slower to form or express an opinion, and wears his as an anklet when the family is on the move. He was found; the number was called. "I have a two-year-old myself," said the woman on the other end. "I know how important this is."

When they arrived at her workplace (she owns shoeshine stands, of all things) the caller turned out to be not a mere helpful stranger who'd saved the day but a  kiddie-gym friend of mine who greeted the children by name. Yesterday the part of San Francisco was played by Mayberry  U.S.A. 

Not a handbasket, exactly, but....

We went to the swankier-than-usual grocery store and saw the folllowing wonder, right there in the entryway: shopping carts with TVs in them.

Here's the story from the people who make them:

Everyone knows parents of pre-school children have limited time and energy, let alone face what many have come to regard as a necessary evil - grocery shopping.

Here is where Cabco comes to the rescue with TV Kart™, which helps parents and caregivers to have a relaxed shopping experience while their children enjoy the magic and fun of 'driving' their TV Kart™ and watching their favorite TV programs.

TV Kart™ delivers powerful mobile advertising and interactive touch point messaging to be presented directly to shoppers as they make their product decisions. These messages are played from a 7-inch shopper-facing monitor while children are happily entertained by their own 7-inch movie monitor, located inside the TV Kart™. In addition to product advertising messages, shoppers will receive an exciting range of alternative services and information from store specials to helpful shopping tips!

Children are entertained with child friendly shows such as: Wonder Pets, Dora The Explorer, Blues Clues, The BackYardigans, Thomas & Friends, Barney, and Bob the Builder.

No ads are played on the children's screen!!!

Bold italic three exclamation points! Whew! And here I was worried that my precious child might be exposed to advertising.

Now if only they could do something about the TV-free time our poor children must experience during the long walk between the minivan and the grocery store.