I have very little to say on the Octomom reality show.
Read for yourself.
Actually: this was probably my favourite line in the entire article:
It was like something from a Greek tragedy, or at least something horrible, traumatic and if not antiwoman then campily celebratory of femininity gone awry, along the lines of “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” or perhaps more aptly, “Aliens.”
Today, a great talk by Helene Gayle at the Council on Global Affairs, urging her audience to appreciate the significance of girls and women on development.
My next project: to pick up a copy of Half the Sky.
I am a huge-huge fan of the Duck Duck Moose applications: previously, the Wheels on the Bus, and now featuring, for the very first time: the Itsy Bitsy Spider and Old MacDonald.
I can’t say enough great things: the music is fabulous, the animation is superb, and the fact that you can pick your options for each song (violin, piano, french, spanish, german) means the applications aren’t just interactive, they are completely customizable. For those of us that are working on languages that may not be included, we can record our own voices, which admittedly, spooks my children a wee bit.
These are age-appropriate for pretty much every age (my 18-month old started fiddling around early and by now is an adept user, my four year enjoys them too). In fact, I find the fun fairly limitless.
Check out the beautiful images:
And, click here to purchase.
You’ll LOVE it! (I have these both on my iPhone and iPod).
Here’s something from last year, I had forgotten but not quite.
Click below to watch.
This may be *your* chance to get your questions answered.
The Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at Harvard College, William R. Fitzsimmons is fielding comments at the New York Times.
Click for details, and of course write in.
Welcome, and a happy back-to-school start to you with an important message from the President:
And if you missed the media circus and outraged reaction from some quarters (an outcry against ‘liberal propaganda’ for asking students how they can help the President) and widespread speculation that policy issues would be highlighted (they weren’t).
But really, it was all about personal responsibility and effort. Some excerpts below (lengthy but direct).
As always, here’s wishing our children clarity, purpose and focus.
“You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math
to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and
protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain
in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and
discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the
creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that
will create new jobs and boost our economy.
We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you
can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that – if you quit on school
– you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.
Now I know it’s not always easy to do well in school. I know a lot of you have
challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork.
I get it. I know what that’s like. My father left my family when I was two years old,
and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t
always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed
having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn’t fit
in.
So I wasn’t always as focused as I should have been. I did some things I’m not proud
of, and got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a
turn for the worse.
But I was fortunate. I got a lot of second chances and had the opportunity to go to
college, and law school, and follow my dreams. My wife, our First Lady Michelle
Obama, has a similar story. Neither of her parents had gone to college, and they didn’t
have much. But they worked hard, and she worked hard, so that she could go to the
best schools in this country.
Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don’t have adults in your
life who give you the support that you need.
Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there’s not enough money to go
around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe, or have friends
who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right.
But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where
you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home –
that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That’s no
excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of
school. That’s no excuse for not trying.
Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s
written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make
your own future.
That’s why today, I’m calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education
– and to do everything you can to meet them.
Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention
in class, or spending time each day reading a book.
Maybe you’ll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your
community. Maybe you’ll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied
because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all kids
deserve a safe environment to study and learn. Maybe you’ll decide to take better care
of yourself so you can be more ready to learn. And along those lines, I hope you’ll all
wash your hands a lot, and stay home from school when you don’t feel well, so we
can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.
Whatever you resolve to do, I want you to commit to it. I want you to really work at
it.
I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful
without any hard work — that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball
or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those
things.
But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you
study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will
seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily
succeed at everything the first time you try.
That’s OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had
the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times
before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school
basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during
his career. But he once said, “I have failed over and over and over again in my
life. And that is why I succeed.”
These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures
define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to
do differently next time.
If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to
try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just
means you need to spend more time studying.
No one’s born being good at things, you become good at things through hard
work. You’re not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don’t hit
every note the first time you sing a song. You’ve got to practice. It’s the same with
your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it
right, or read something a few times before you understand it, or do a few drafts of a
paper before it’s good enough to hand in.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do
that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. It
shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and to learn
something new. So find an adult you trust – a parent, grandparent or teacher; a coach
or counselor – and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals.
And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like
other people have given up on you – don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when
you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.
I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from
each of you. So don’t let us down – don’t let your family or your country or yourself
down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.”
Three common mistakes parents make when sending their children off to school – straight from Babble.com:
“1. Forgetting to Prepare
“A few weeks before school starts, visit the school, drive by it a few times. Talk about it. Play on the playground. Meet the teacher so your child knows he or she is a trusted adult, someone they can count on. Most parents are good about those points. But you should also do some other homework, like familiarizing your child with their routine. For instance, if your child is attending school in the morning and they’re still hanging out in their PJs until 10 am, start waking them up around the time they’ll be eating breakfast. Also find out what type of activities and games your child’s going to play at school or if they’re going to sit in circle time, so they know what to expect on the first day. Another good idea: Have your child talk to other kids in your neighborhood who attend the same school; older kids are the best salesmen!”
2. Focusing on the negative
“Many parents inadvertently say things like ‘You might miss Mommy when you’re at school,’ or ‘Don’t let kids pick on you,’ and even go so far as to warn kids about strangers or germs. While it’s important to address issues as they come up, like if your child’s being picked on, it’s not the way to prep kids for school. You want your kids to see you as confident and feel as though you see their school as a positive place; a place where they’re going to learn a lot and where there are fun things to do. Say things like, ‘There will be really nice teachers,’ or ‘You’re going to make lots of friends,’ or ‘They have a really neat playground.’ You don’t have to overhype it, but don’t plant seeds of negativity before their first day.”
3. Not transitioning well
“This is the biggest mistakes parents make, and I hear it all the time from teachers. It’s imperative that you arrive on time, so kids get in the right routine. Coming in late when other kids are already settled is discombobulating. Another tip: Follow the teacher’s lead when it comes to separating. Teachers will often say, ‘Give Mommy a kiss and a hug and then Mommy’s going to go.’ After that, don’t linger and don’t walk in and out of the classroom; be short and sweet. Also, stick to a schedule. Arrive and pick up your kids at the same time every day. Let them know in advance if Mommy or Daddy won’t be picking them up. Kids get very anxious if you schedule a last-minute playdate without their knowledge, and suddenly another Mom is taking them home. And if you have a babysitter or nanny, let your kids know what days to expect them.”"
And my favourite tennis champ debuts his beautiful twin girls on facebook:
According to the New York Times, Federer is already back on tour, with babies in tow. And if you ever felt nervous about traveling with babes, this should reassure you (plus or minus a private jet):
“It was a few hours before the Federers’ first flight as a family. The new father, Roger, was sounding surprisingly relaxed as he sat on a terrace with a panoramic view of Lake Zurich and talked about crossing a much more imposing body of water — the Atlantic — with his wife, Mirka, and their identical twins, Charlene and Myla.
The girls were born July 23 in Zurich; they were checked out of the hospital Tuesday. They already have traveling papers, and the first international stop of their very young, presumably peripatetic lives will be Montreal. Federer will return to competition earlier than he expected, for the Rogers Cup, after one of the best runs of his or any tennis player’s life.
“I was obviously only going to do this if everything was safe and good,” Federer said Friday morning, in his first interview since he won Wimbledon last month. “Mirka went through a check yesterday. The babies have been at the hospital for 10 days, and everything is perfect. So we’re doing it. Big family. Big trip. On the bandwagon. I’m really excited to see how we’re going to manage it.”
For most of the world’s new parents, the idea of taking infant twins on a long-haul journey before they were three weeks old would not be cause for rejoicing. Not with baby carriers, economy-class seating and dread-filled seatmates to manage.
But Federer, for all his down-to-earth appeal, does enjoy his privileges. Although he often crosses oceans on commercial airplanes, he made Friday’s trans-Atlantic flight in a private jet, with a baby nurse on board to help Mirka and Roger negotiate the trip and the jet-lagged nights to come.
“That’s a big help,” Federer said. “But Mirka is really hands-on. It’s great to have the help, but I think it’s all been working well since we came home for three or four days. Mirka doesn’t mind getting up in the night, doesn’t mind feeding the babies at whatever time, changing the nappies. For her, if she can’t do it, it’s like she’s missing out on something.”
Federer has done his best not to miss much himself. With impeccable Swiss timing, Mirka gave birth in the fallow tennis stretch between Wimbledon, where Federer broke the record for Grand Slam singles victories, and the United States Open, where he will be trying to win his sixth straight men’s singles title.
“We didn’t completely just aim for a certain window, so for it to happen during this period of time, we got lucky,” Federer said of the twins’ arrival date. “Because I was scared. You know how it is. After Week 25, you never know when a baby can come, so at the beginning of the French Open, I was thinking that we have to get through two Grand Slams, and Mirka has to be there. We’re not in Switzerland. It could happen anytime really.”
The Federers found out Mirka was pregnant in January, during a tournament in Doha, Qatar, and learned that she was expecting twins after a doctor’s appointment during the Australian Open that month. Federer said he was thrilled at the prospect, but uncertain what such momentous news might do to his tennis game.
In his next match, he overwhelmed Juan Martín del Potro of Argentina, 6-3, 6-0, 6-0, in the quarterfinals. “It was like, O.K., seems like it’s not affecting me,” Federer said with a laugh. “That was a good start. It gave me confidence.”
Federer publicly announced Mirka’s pregnancy at the Indian Wells tournament in California in March. He decided, on medical advice, not to mention at first that they were expecting twins, although they did inform family and close friends.
“The next thing you know, I’m seven months through the year and at the end, nobody’s really asking me questions about if it’s twins or not,” Federer said. “And then I said, All right, I’ll just play along until the very, very end.”
That meant Federer continued to refer to the impending arrival of “the baby” through the many interviews and news conferences in Paris and London. And on Friday, as if out of habit, he lapsed into the singular on occasion, too.
“I had to really battle myself,” he said. “I had a couple where I said, ‘We’re really excited to have some babies,’ and I was thinking, Is that already giving it away?” But after delivery (by Caesarean section), the tennis world has its latest set of identical twins to go with the world’s top-ranked doubles team, Bob and Mike Bryan of the United States.
“I was thinking that they’re going to be playing tricks on us like crazy,” Federer said of his girls. “But they don’t look the same at the moment. I thought right away I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, but you know, one is a bit lighter than the other one, so it’s not automatically the same right away. I can tell them apart very easily now, and Mirka, too.”
Federer said he spent nearly three weeks at the hospital, sleeping in the same room with Mirka, who had checked in early; later, he was sleeping in the same room with Mirka and the twins. He still found time last week to practice for six straight days near the hospital with the Austrian player Stefan Koubek.
“I was sometimes very tired,” he said. “Don’t know if it was more from practice or from not getting the sleep you usually get.”“
That’s a tricky one.
Frank Bruni, my much favoured food critic from the New York Times, writes in this week, with a horrifyingly honest analysis of his eating issues that emerged even as he was just a wee mite.
“Maybe not baby — toddler bulimic is more like it, though I didn’t so much toddle as wobble, given the roundness of my expanding form. I was a plump infant and was on my way to becoming an even plumper child, a ravenous machine determined to devour anything in its sights. My parents would later tell me, my friends and anyone else willing to listen that they’d never seen a kid eat the way I ate or react the way I reacted whenever I was denied more food. What I did in those circumstances was throw up.
I have no independent memory of this. But according to my mother, it began when I was about 18 months old. It went on for no more than a year. And I’d congratulate myself here for stopping such an evidently compulsive behavior without the benefit of an intervention or the ability to read a self-help book except that I wasn’t so much stopping as pausing. But I’m getting ahead of the story.
A hamburger dinner sounded the first alarm. My mother had cooked and served me one big burger, which would be enough for most carnivores still in diapers. I polished it off and pleaded for a second. So she cooked and served me another big burger, confident that I’d never get through it. It was the last time she underestimated my appetite.
The way Mom told the tale, I plowed through that second burger as quickly as I had the first. Then I looked up from my highchair with lips covered in hamburger juice, a chin flecked with hamburger bun and hamburger ecstasy in my wide brown eyes. I started banging my balled little fists on the highchair’s tray.
I wanted a third.
Mom thought about giving it to me. She was tempted. For her it was a point of pride to cook and serve more food than anybody could eat, and the normal course of things was to shove food at people, not to withhold it.
But she looked at me then, with my balloon cheeks and ham-hock legs, and thought: Enough. No way. He can’t fit in another six ounces of ground chuck. He shouldn’t fit in another six ounces of ground chuck. A third burger isn’t good mothering. A third burger is child abuse.
I cried. I cried so hard that my face turned the color of a vine-ripened tomato and my breathing grew labored and a pitiful strangled noise escaped my lips, along with something else. Up came the remnants of Burger No. 2, and up came the remnants of Burger No. 1. Mom figured she had witnessed an unusually histrionic tantrum with an unusually messy aftermath. But I’ve always wondered, in retrospect and not entirely in jest, if what she had witnessed was the beginning of a cunning strategy, an intuitive design for gluttonous living. Maybe I was making room for more burger. Look, Ma, empty stomach!
It became a pattern. No fourth cookie? I threw up. No midafternoon meal between lunch and dinner? Same deal. I had a bizarre facility for it, and Mom had a sponge or paper towels at hand whenever she was about to disappoint me.“
Frightened, yet?
Read on. Incredible, how food can define our youngest.
For myself, I am done with disguising the undesireable (deceptively delicious, buh-bye) and seeking to instil curiousity and imagination (hello, gastrokid).
Join me, anyone?
From Vanity Fair:
“All her life, Khadijah has lived out of garbage bags, shelters, motels, and armories stretching from Los Angeles to San Diego and San Francisco to Orange County. She attended 12 schools in 12 years while she lived with her mother and younger sister among pimps, prostitutes, and drug dealers who told her that she’d never escape skid row. Even though Khadijah never stayed in one place for more than a few months until her junior year of high school, she somehow managed to channel her off-the-charts smarts, navigating her way through her secondary education by relying on a network of mentors. Last June, she graduated number four in her class from Jefferson High School in Los Angeles, and after being accepted to 20 colleges, she chose to attend Harvard on a full scholarship.
Khadijah did all this without revealing to her peers that she was homeless—she never wanted people to think that she got the easy way out because of her situation.“
In light of today’s New York Times article on the pitfalls of fashionista/uber-aspirational college counselors and privilege begetting privilege (click here), this homeless-to-Harvard feature is a breath of fresh air.
From the very first feature on this brave and remarkable young woman:
“When shelters closed, money ran out or her mother didn’t feel safe, they packed what little they carried and boarded buses to find housing in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Ventura, San Diego, San Bernardino and Orange County, staying for months, at most, in one place.
She finished only half of fourth grade, half of fifth and skipped sixth. Seventh grade was split between Los Angeles and San Diego. Eighth grade consisted of two weeks in San Bernardino.
At every stop, Khadijah pushed to keep herself in each school’s gifted program. She read nutrition charts, newspapers and four to five books a month, anything to transport her mind away from the chaos and the sour smell.
At school, she was the outsider. At the shelter, she was often bullied. “You ain’t college-bound,” the pimps barked. “You live in skid row!”
In 10th grade, Khadijah realized that if she wanted to succeed, she couldn’t do it alone. She began to reach out to organizations and mentors: the Upward Bound Program, Higher Edge L.A., Experience Berkeley and South Central Scholars; teachers, counselors and college alumni networks. They helped her enroll in summer community college classes, gave her access to computers and scholarship applications and taught her about networking.“
Proving the point that help, in real and meaningful ways, is invaluable.
