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Strollerderby
You are surely familiar with Eric Carle, the American illusrator nominee to the International Board on Books for Young People‘s 2010 Hans Christian Andersen awards for lifetime contribution to children’s literature. But how about the rest of the list?
There’s an author and illustrator each from 33 countries with overall winners to be announced next March. I’m sure winning is prestigious, but it seems like the list of nominees is far more valuable—though possibly just a total tease. A quick Amazon peruse showed that some of them have one or two works available in English, but others have none. Anyone got recommendations?
Lars von Trier’s gothic horror film Antichrist sounds, to put it put it mildly, like a miserable story—a couple trying, and utterly failing, to get over the accidental death of their young son descend into mutilating each other and themselves. And that’s the delicate description.
But how to interpret that story has got some critics in a debate over motherhood, sex, guilt, and misogyny.
I’ll admit that when I saw the Onoin News Network video for the “BabySafe Ball” (“New BabySafe Ball Makes Shaking Your Infant Guilt and Injury Free!”) I wasn’t sure it was funny. I’m still not.
It felt like it wanted to be, in good old outrageous, offensive Onion style, but I think the problem was it didn’t have a good target to make fun of. Caregivers who get to the point of wanting to shake their babies? That’s all of us at some point. Not much of a point to make. People who actually do? Not so funny. Over-the-top baby safety devices? It’s an area ripe for satire, but this doesn’t quite hit home—usually those are protecting kids from something not all that likely or dangerous, not encouraging you to do something awful by making it supposedly safe.
Somehow I ended up in charge of the games for my sister-in-law’s baby shower last weekend. I remembered her being amused by the mad libs someone had dug up for her bridal shower and figured such silliness would be more fun than sniffing crushed up chocolate candy in diapers (um, ew).
But the only baby shower mad libs I could find online, did not, shall we say, suit her style—I wasn’t going to orchestrate the telling of a story about hospitals and doctors and pain meds for the woman who interviewed her home-birth midwives by saying she was looking for the “most hands off midwife in the world.”
So of course I wrote my own. If you find yourself planning a shower for someone similar, here it is:
Who says you have to be a caterer or a print-shop to make in-kind donations? Funagain, a board game retailer, gives away—what else?—board games, and a few $100 cash grants to be used for board games, to more than a dozen U.S. military servicemembers, schools, and libraries per month, based on a brief e-mailed essay about how potential recipients would use the games.
Although this is a small program in the grand scheme of philanthropy, and a brilliant PR move, I can’t help but be charmed. In a time when computer time seems to be the be-all-end-all of children’s “enrichment” planning (except when we’re desperately trying to get them away from a screen and moving around), it’s nice to hear about places that want to encourage the social interaction and skills that come with good old board games—following rules, taking turns, dealing with the frustration of random chance, developing strategic thinking, etc.
Yes, clearly I have some fond memories of family board games and card games. On the other hand, I’ve recently spent a lot of time playing Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders with my daughter and wow they are boring. It’s funny how in hindsight these games I remember playing are so clearly designed to introduce the concept of game playing itself and not much more. Our rounds of War were doing an OK job of that, but three-year-olds deserve diversity too, I suppose. Time to arrange for some board game playdates.
I also have to note that grants of board games would be less necessary—or go farther—if the basic message of the sadly in-hibernation CheapAss Games were taken to heart: The only unique parts of most games are the board, the cards, and the instructions. Play pieces, timers, pencils, pads of paper, dice, and money (a pile of loose change will do) can be interchangable, and it’s rather silly to keep shelling out for them over and over. If we all had one set of gaming paraphernalia (we use play pieces from a Monopoly game), getting new games could be a lot cheaper, a lot easier to store, and a lot less wasteful.
Unfortunately, the taste of CheapAss Games’ designers tended toward complex rules and not so young-child friendly themes, and of course for intellectual property reasons they couldn’t just make the pared down versions of the classic games. So I’m stuck, for now, with the full-sized Candy Land, complete with mostly empty box and four cheap plastic gingerbread people to move around, until I have kids ready to handle Unexploded Cow.
Photo CC NathanReed, via Flickr.
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Why stop with Transformers and G.I. Joe? The folks at Atom have a look at what else may be coming down the pike. (My favorite may be Care Bears versus My Little Pony: The Wreckoning, but the Smurfs is great too.)
Photo CC Koonisutra.
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On one of her earlier trips out with our daughter in a bike seat, my wife got roundly told off by a stranger in a car for daring to do something so dangerous with a child.
I wish it were feasible to print up little copies of this post over at ChildWild and toss them into the windows of cars with drivers like that.
Short and sweet, and more polite than I would be, even in theory, the writer points out that taking your attention off the road to “startle, alarm, and anger” the bicycle rider vastly increases the danger of the situation.
Some great follow up comments note that the more people who bike, the safer it is (i.e., if you’re concerned about how safe it is, get on a bike yourself), and that regular biking is modeling healthy, active behavior for your kids, which we certainly need more of.
If I were actually making such an informative flyer, I would add “Oh, and by the way, it’s illegal for me to ride on the sidewalk, as I am over 10 years old, even though I do so sometimes anyway when I feel unsafe on the roads due to jerks like you. I like to follow the law. I’d appreciate it if you did the same, which in your case includes sharing the road with other vehicles.” Then I would give said informative flyer to the police among others.
It’s not that everyone with any experience in urban cycling isn’t constantly aware of how defensively they need to ride, especially with kids in tow. The point is not that it’s risk free. But it is amazing how many drivers who would never yell at parents for doing other less safe, less legal, less otherwise beneficial things feel OK letting loose at parents who cycle with their kids.
Photo CC by Howard N2GOT.
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