We just had this for lunch:
It was a simple recipe (from this excellent cookbook):
Septuagint lovers (all seven of you), don’t worry–this will not turn into a cooking blog. But my more frequent presence in the kitchen has been requested, so I’ll consider this a small start.
Her name is Bunmi Laditan. As recently as a week ago, the author of the forthcoming Honest Toddler: A Child’s Guide to Parenting was “anonymous.” But now the book cover (above, from Amazon) shows that HT is “written under the supervision of Bunmi Laditan.” Awesome. I’ve been curious about this since reading HT, as have hundreds of thousands of others. Here is her bio from the HT Google Books page:
BUNMI LADITAN started her first media company at age eighteen. Soon after, she launched and sold a social networking site geared toward moms and began a social media agency, working with Fortune 500 companies. She is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post, Mothering and iVillage.com, where her satirical pieces on parenting and politics have often gone viral. In May 2012, she created The Honest Toddler, a character based on her youngest child. She lives with her family near Montreal.
Love it. It looks like she’s just started her own blog, too, which I plan to read regularly. See, too, if you notice another difference in the cover above compared to what was on Amazon when I posted here.
I’ll be reviewing the book as soon as it comes out. Read much more about it (including the table of contents) here at HT’s blog.
Bunmi, thank you. Thank you for HT and for the laughter that little toddler has brought. You live far away, but if you ever want to bring HT over for a play-date, our 2-year-old will be happy to lead an expedition to the beach… or to the fridge.
UPDATE 5/6/13: Go here for a chance to win a free copy of Honest Toddler.
UPDATE 2: I review Honest Toddler here.
Within minutes of each other I had Facebook connections posting on Google Glass and linking to Luci Shaw’s poem “Knitting in the Wild.”
First I watched the trailer for a new Google-pioneered technology. It’s sort of like having a smartphone on your face, which is perhaps best experienced through this clip rather than described:
The technology is astounding. To be able to see where I’m supposed to drive without having to touch or click on anything? I’d benefit from that. But I got a little sad at 0:36 when I saw a special moment between father and daughter recorded by Glass. Not because I don’t value taking photos and videos of my kids (I do it a lot here and on Facebook), but because there was something about Google Glass–a physical and technological object standing between, recording, mediating–that seemed to interrupt the here-ness of that moment, the now-ness of it.
Having flight info show up in my glasses when I’m at the airport would be cool, but this feels a little too much like the apocalyptic Overbrain my friends David and Tim keep warning us about. (I.e., when all of our thoughts, actions, and moments are connected to and subsumed by one giant Cloud.)
Minutes earlier someone in my news feed had posted a link to Luci Shaw’s “Knitting in the Wild”:
The pale bits—twigs, fibers,
pine needles—sun-struck,
fall through the lazy air
as if yearning to be embodied in
my knitting, like gold flecks woven into
a ceremonial robe.Then surprise—a new marvel!
Like a parachutist, a very small beetle
lands on the greeny stitch I have just
passed from left needle to right;
the creature’s burnished carapace
mirrors precisely the loop of glowing,
silky yarn that he has chosen.When this shawl ends up
warming someone’s shoulders,
will she sense the unexpected—
this glance, this gleam,
this life spark?
I don’t know how to knit. But, amazing as Google’s new technology is, I imagine that I will pick up a pair of single-point needles long before I put on Google Glass.
…is homemade pizza and a movie. The kids love it, and so do we parents.
So far we’ve watched: Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Mr. Rogers (Season 1!), and Wall-E. And the pizza is delicious.
Last week our Friday night “movie” was a friend’s fireplace and a blizzard, a nice substitution.
It’s a good way to wrap up a week.
How my 5-year-old son responds to the blizzard:
What my 2-year-old son does:
What our car looks like:
You’ve heard of the royal We? It’s all too present in seminarian papers with just a single author:
Careful consideration of the textual data leads us to conclude….
Or:
We read with the majority of scholars in this case that….
And then there is simply, “We are not amused.”
For some time now my wife and I have had the materials in hand to make a star chart for our five-year-old son. Through this chart we (actual We) seek to motivate him to do what is right (treat us with respect, pee when he has to instead of holding it) and not what is wrong (tell his younger brother to “Go to jail!”, get the Gorilla glue out without asking). Good behavior earns stars, and multiple stars earn a new Wild Kratts DVD, or (better yet) a trip out for coffee with Dad or Mom. (The no longer jail-threatened brother stays at home.)
But we still haven’t made the chart. So tonight at dinner I said to my wife, “Can we make our son’s star chart this weekend?”
To which she replied, “Can you make the star chart this weekend?”
I actually had meant We literally in this case, but I can see why she thought I was using the 2nd person We, asking her to do the chart. It’s a special grammatical usage that often crops up around here:
See? It’s softer, gentler, more effective. In #1 above, my wife sees right through my alleged effort at mutual janitorial cooperation. In #2, I know that she’s really trying for some cleanliness equity. In #3, well… if I expect our kids to clear their dishes, I ought to do the same. As for #4? Please expect a future post to address the merits of keeping separate the towels you use to dry clean dishes versus dirty hands.
But enough blogging about it. We’ve got a chart to make for Our son.
It went like this:
Me: These Duplos have eyes all over them. It’s like a creature from Revelation.
He: What’s Revelation?
Me: It’s a book in the Bible. There are all sorts of creatures in it. Dragons, too. It will be a great book for you to read sometime, maybe when you are older.
He: Why?
Me: It’s a little bit scary.
He: Is there a movie?
Well, yes, son, there is a movie. Quite a lot of them, in fact. But we’ll start with the book first.
He’s started on chapter books with us, though, so we’ve been able to begin tackling some fun stories, like this. Revelation, perhaps, later.
Words on the Word 