Surfing the internet: horror and delight

Surfing around on the internet yesterday, I found two things of interest:

1) It seems that you can now buy fake lower back tattoos for young girls out of a vending machine at Toys R Us. For serious. I am sitting here trying to imagine what kind of parent would fork over that 50 cents and say, “Sure, pumpkin! Want a Red Bull and vodka while you’re at it?”

But then, I was raised very conservatively as a kid. As in, I was never allowed to own Garbage Pail Kids cards, purchase candy cigarettes, or say “cooties” (my mother showed me a full-color medical textbook illustration of said cootie and told me to get my science straight). So maybe I’m out of date on these things. I mean, look, do what you want with your skin if you’re an adult, but I’m not quite sure this is the right look for an 8-year-old. Is this really that heinous, or am I just old-fashioned?

2) The Sprog and I are huge fans of Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart pop-up books (we have the dinosaur one, the medieval castle one, the Noah’s Ark one, and The Wizard of Oz), but here’s a nifty alphabet pop-up book that has stolen my affection:

WANT. Of course, it doesn’t come out until October. But I know a certain Sprog who might be getting Star Wars: A Pop-Up Guide to the Galaxy for his birthday next month.

A mighty duck

I took the Sprog ice skating today, and I feel like I have been beaten with a hockey stick.

He was so excited though, it was all worth it. I rented him the little double bladed skates that strap onto his sneakers with buckles, and while he was tromping around the lobby in his nifty new footgear, I was struggling to get my own skates on.

I did not realize this, but my feet have really gotten a lot wider since I had two kids. I used to work there at the Ice Center, what, 10 years ago?, and their rental skates usually felt okay. Not great, because they’re rentals, but good enough to get around without pain when I was the skate guard. But today, man, it felt like I was wearing skates from Torquemada’s designer label.

So the Sprog and I set out around the rink, hugging close to the wall. We had gotten from the rental counter a funny little thing to help him balance; it looks like a walker that an elderly person might use, but with no wheels—just smooth metal bars on the bottom and a padded bar up top to hold onto. The Sprog held onto the walker, I stood behind him and put my hands over his hands, and we inched our way across the ice like some kind of sad crippled moose. It was hilarious to watch the way his feet moved—he looked like Snagglepuss getting ready to exit stage left or something.

About halfway around the rink, my feet felt like they were going to fall off, so we clackered back to the rental counter and I traded my figure skates for hockey skates. I thought it might be harder to hold the Sprog up if he slipped, since hockey skates don’t have a burr on the toe to grab the ice, but I just couldn’t keep going on the figure skates. And for $15, you’d better believe I wasn’t about to quit.

So, now with Skates 2.0, I took the Sprog back out on the ice, but this time he refused to use the walker. Which was great and all for him being brave and independent, but he just kept falling on his butt. Or would have, if I hadn’t held him up. My wrists took the brunt of that activity, and now they are really hurting. So is my lower back, because I spent the entire time hunched over like Quasimodo so I could hold his hands.

I was trying to keep him from falling because I was so afraid he was going to smack his head on the ice. I thought about bringing his little Batman bicycle helmet, but if I had done that, I might as well have written “Helicopter Mom” on my forehead with a Sharpie.

Anyhow, the Sprog had a great time, and he now cherishes a burning desire to be a professional zamboni driver when he grows up. As long as he makes enough money to pay for my wrist surgery, fine by me.

Booster seat bill a no-brainer…right? RIGHT?!?!

Well I’ll be dipped. A week ago I would have said the booster seat law was dead in the water, since (with a few exceptions) our bickering state congress clearly could not pass a bill if they ate the pages for fiber.

But now it looks like the Senate has passed a weaker version of the House’s booster seat bill. If House members can restrain themselves from amending it, it might have a shot at getting signed into law.

The sponsor of the more stringent House bill, Tom Burch, D-Louisville, has been massively sore about the weaker Senate bill, and has even intimated that he’d be willing to let the whole thing die rather than compromise. Okay, Burch, on the off-chance that you’re reading a mommy blog, please listen to me:

I know the Senate bill isn’t as good as the House bill. I know it’s embarrassing for Kentucky. I know. But please look at the shipwrecked hulls of the five bills that came before yours and remember that the state Senate is the Bermuda Triangle for booster seat bills. Republican state senators pogo away like skittish gazelles on the veldt when they think they sense an encroaching Nanny State. But passing their version of the booster seat bill is better than nothing, which is what we currently have.

And though the House bill would impose tougher penalties on those who don’t put their kids in booster seats, the difference between the two bills is still not that huge: the House bill requires booster seats for children who are under age 8 and stand between 40-57 inches tall. The Senate bill requires booster seats for children under age 7 who stand 40-50 inches tall. One year and seven inches of height. And you’re telling me that you all cannot possibly compromise on this? Let go of the bruised ego and help get this signed into law. Work on a tougher measure later after critics see that it’s not the end of the world, okay? Okay.

And now, to state senators who favor a weaker bill or none at all:

Get a grip. Requiring a basic, thoroughly-proven safety measure for young children is not the first slide down the slippery slope to socialism. Sure, parents ought to be able to make decisions for their children, but helpless children deserve protection under the law from parental decisions that could get them hurt or killed. It is a simple fact that young children who ride in cars without booster seats are at much greater risk of serious injury or death in a wreck. One of our recent articles said that 12 children in Kentucky died in 2006 because they weren’t in booster seats. Who knows how many more were seriously injured?

If you can be concerned enough for children’s welfare to pass that totally useless abortion ultrasound bill, then surely you are concerned enough to help keep the already-born children safe with a booster seat bill. Or does your concern for children’s rights end at birth?

Baby cardigan: 4, Heather: 0

I must have been crazy when I decided that one week was plenty of time to knit a cardigan to go with my daughter’s wee and very prosh Easter dress.

Because (Strike 1) I have had like five hours total to work on it this week, and seeing as I have only ever made a scarf before, it took me a little time to decipher the pattern. Strike 2: the gauge was somewhere between teeny and squinty. Then, last night, Strike 3: I was laughing so hard at The Daily Show that I became somewhat inattentive and screwed the whole thing up beyond recognition. I did not know it was possible for a competent knitter to mess up stockinette that badly, but you’ll just have to take my word for it. A frenzy of frogging ensued.

So, at this point I could do one of two things:

1) Admit defeat and buy the baby a sweater already. This is clearly the only sane option, which obviously means that I will not do it.

2) Go buy some really fat yarn and make a cardigan with huge stitches. YES.

I cast on for that second sweater today, and the reason I am listing the sweater’s score as 4 to my 0 is that I totally messed up the k2, p2 rib for the bottom and had to, again, frog the whole thing. I’ll start again when I get home.

In the meantime, I’m toying with running for public office. I mean, if my knitting is any indication of my overall productivity, then I figure I’m at least qualified to serve in our state legislature, right?

(Oh, and by the way? Dear state congress: Pull it together and get something done, because you all are acting like a bunch of slap-fighting girls on Jerry Springer. I am not impressed.) *cough* Sorry, had something bitter in my throat there.

Anyhow, I’ll let you all know on Monday how the SweaterFest of 2008 went, assuming I can still type after knitting my fingers down to nubs.

How do you explain Easter to a kid?

My husband has been having chest pains, so he went to a cardiologist yesterday and was fitted with a Holter monitor for the next 24 hours. When he came home, the Sprog was of course all agog with questions. Weirdest one: Are you dead, Daddy? he asked. The husband laughed and assured the Sprog that he was very much alive and that the monitor was listening to his heart.

Kids ask some weird questions when they don’t quite understand what death is. The Sprog’s only concrete example of death is PJ, and all he really knows about that is that the dog went to the vet and never came back (though we explained to him that PJ’s body didn’t work anymore).

All of which got me thinking: today is Good Friday, and Sunday is Easter. We’ll dye Easter eggs and have candy of course, but I’m wondering how much and when to explain to the Sprog about the death and resurrection of Jesus. Thus far, he’s aware that Jesus was God’s son, but I’ve been struggling with teaching him the concept of atonement.

The closest I have been able to get to it is by asking him if he would be willing to go to time-out for something his friend did wrong. He, of course, said no. I followed up by telling him that someone did do that for him; that Jesus loved us so much that he volunteered to get in trouble so we wouldn’t be in trouble with God. He asked how he would get in trouble with God, so I reminded him about the 10 Commandments (which he already knows about), and that he would be in trouble with God if he broke those rules when he was old enough to know better and to control himself. Because Jesus got in trouble for him, I said, all he had to do to get out of trouble with God was to say he was sorry and try hard to be good. He has indicated that he understands this.

I know, it’s the best I could come up with for his young ears, but at least he knows the principle of the thing. Will probably need reminding several times to get even that down. But I don’t know how to tell him the particulars. I honestly don’t think he’s ready for that yet.

And this goes beyond Christianity, too; he can’t help but overhear disturbing things on the news or out in public sometimes, and though I try to shelter him from that, he still has questions. I always try to be honest in my answers, but there’s a lot of latitude in the details, and I often wonder how much is appropriate for him at this age.

We’ve lately begun discussing “God’s rules” (i.e., the 10 Commandments) with him in tandem with his discovery of certain behaviors such as lying and taking things that don’t belong to him. But he’s still so innocent of the terrible potential of the human heart; I guess I just want to keep him in Eden for a little while longer.

Discuss: How and when do you plan to explain Easter to your children? What about other complicated issues with adult themes?

These are the good old days. Sort of.

Baby Girl was six months old yesterday. And to celebrate, she sat up on her own for the first time. I sat her up on the changing table to pull her onesie over her head, and after the onesie came off, even as I was moving to grab her shoulder, I realized she had just stayed sitting up, all on her own. It was a very Bill and Ted moment. Whoa. Dude.

Then Baby Girl grinned enormously, and was was so excited that she started flapping her arms up and down and pounding her palms on the changing table like Gus!Gus!Gus! the mouse, and all that hand-slapping made her flip top over teakettle back onto the changing pad with her legs sticking up in the air. She was silent for a second, legs still sticking up, then she crowed victoriously and started sucking on one of her feet. The breakfast of champions.

Then she peed all over the changing table.

Lordy, what a day.

Imagine how it would feel if you drank a bottle of Nyquil and had to wade all day through a river of maple syrup. That’s about what I felt like yesterday. I got about two and a half hours of sleep Monday night because Baby de Sade is teething and woke up four or five times after I got home from work at 1 a.m. The husband had to work yesterday and I didn’t want him doing stupid things with patients who need fiddly meds, so I got up to tend to the baby. Besides, he’d already gotten up with her three times before I got home, the dear man.

6 a.m. found a thoroughly miserable family. Baby Girl was crying—again—over the monitor, and I was crying into my husband’s scrubs in total despair. He had to go to work, was probably late because of it, but he got major brownie points for staying to comfort me.

And. More brownie points: he scrounged around at work and found someone who will switch days with him. So he’s home today, and he told me that he expects me to sleep as much as humanly possible. FYI for the men reading? Giving your wife the gift of sleep is like ten times better than roses after you have kids. Verrah sexah.

IKEEEEEEEEEA

Well, it’s been real, folks. But now I’m off to IKEA for the day, where I will improve each shining hour by admiring furniture with excessively umlauted names. And thanks to an unexpected financial windfall, I will be vigorously stimulating the economy with my purchases.

Oh, don’t worry—I’ll be mostly good; stuff there is so cheap that going on a shopping spree at IKEA is like going on a bender with lite American beer. I might spend $100. Or so.

Is a good teacher worth $125,000?

I came across an interesting article in The New York Times yesterday:

A New York City charter school set to open in 2009 in Washington Heights will test one of the most fundamental questions in education: Whether significantly higher pay for teachers is the key to improving schools.

The school, which will run from fifth to eighth grades, is promising to pay teachers $125,000, plus a potential bonus based on schoolwide performance. That is nearly twice as much as the average New York City public school teacher earns, roughly two and a half times the national average teacher salary and higher than the base salary of all but the most senior teachers in the most generous districts nationwide.

The article goes on to say that prospective hires will go through a rigorous screening process, and that some of the applicants are veritable rock stars of education. In return for the huge salary, the teachers will teach larger classes and take on more responsibilities so the school can save money.

I’m not sure what I think about it. I certainly believe that teachers deserve a better shake than they get now, because it’s absurd to expect any professional with a masters degree to work 50+ hour weeks for little respect and horrible pay.

Believe me, I know; my husband was an English teacher for years in middle and high schools, both rural and urban. No matter where he went, the pay was crap, the stress was high, and the bureaucracy was oppressive. He came home every day with an armload of papers to grade (on his own time) and a heavy heart because it was so discouraging when students came to school high, couldn’t care less about their education, didn’t get the encouragement they needed from home.

At one middle school where he taught, he told me that he overheard 11- and 12-year-old girls talking about how they’d had oral or anal sex so they wouldn’t get pregnant. At a different school, he was subtly pressured to pass student athletes who were nearly illiterate. Parents regularly skipped parent/teacher conferences, but they were really attentive when it came to telling my husband off for giving their special snowflake a detention or a Zero on a paper. It was just insane. He finally decided to go back to school to become an R.N. because, whatever horror stories he’d heard about nursing, teaching was so much worse.

So that makes me wonder: is pay enough to ensure a successful school? Sure, it’ll attract some great teachers, and that’s no small thing. But a lot of the problems my husband had as a teacher stemmed from students and their home lives. Would schools really need to find miracle worker teachers if students and parents were more invested in getting a good education?

And there aren’t enough miracle workers to go around for the whole country anyway, which is why the TEP Charter model might work as a targeted effort at best. But there are plenty of teachers who are still pretty good at what they do, nonetheless, and they would do just fine if they were given the respect and tools they need in the classroom.

And parents’ concerns should be addressed too: I’m in favor of teacher’s unions, but school administrators need to be able to fire abusive or incompetent teachers (even tenured ones) without worrying about the union bringing down the hammer.

There are so many facets to this, and no easy answers. But at least the creator of this innovative new charter school is trying to find a solution—can’t have enough of that, can we? Good luck to him, and I’ll be watching with interest.

Discuss: What do you think is the biggest problem in education today? What do you think we can do to fix it in the short term? Long term?

Fun things to do with snow

Well, it’s a Saturday and it’s dumping snow on us so I bet you all are hanging out at home too. In that spirit, here’s a quick list of fun things to do in the snow with your kids (or with some fellow kids at heart):

–fill medicine droppers and spray bottles with food coloring and water, then paint the snow. Bonus points if you paint a snowman!

–Catch snow flakes. Put a piece of black paper in the freezer until it’s good and cold, then take it outside and look at the snowflakes that fall on it. More fun if you use a magnifying glass.

–Build snow forts and have a snowball war (this will take a lot of snow). Link goes to old Boy Scout tutorial on everything from fort-building, aluminum foil armor making, and the rules of snowball warfare. Tip: pour water on your fort after it’s done so it’ll freeze into an impenetrable Fortress of Solitude Butt-kicking.

–play hockey with a ball and some brooms

–Make a bird feeder and put it near a window so you can watch the birds chow down.

–Go sledding. Don’t have a sled? Look around the house and improvise–a big garbage bag works very well. Last year we used the lid to a Tupperware bin. Click here for a tutorial on the art of sledding.

–Make a snow lantern (this looks so cool).

–Staying inside? Make a snowglobe.

–Cut out paper snowflakes. For the advanced paper-cutters, try a 3-D paper snowflake.

–Play table hockey with real ice.

–Make maple syrup candy. (Only do this if you live where the snow is pretty clean.)

–Make snow ice cream. (Ditto about the clean snow.)

Go forth and have fun!

I need a yarn intervention

If you’re a regular reader, you may have noticed a few mentions of my knitting project lately. So, breaking news: I’ve just learned to knit. Again. Only this time I’m kinda sorta competent, which means that friends and family are going to be getting a lot of knitty sort of things for Christmas this year. Oh yes. Be afraid.

The first time I learned to knit, I taught myself from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Knitting and Crocheting. Trouble was, the book just made me feel like a Complete Idiot. I managed to turn out a foot-long swatch of stockinette with some of the crustiest, squeakiest acrylic yarn ever made, and maaaaan, it was ugly. Dropped, twisted stitches. Uneven gauge. It looked like two spiders got really drunk and became incontinent with Red Heart Super Saver as they waltzed.

So I gave it up as a bad job until recently. I remembered how miserable it was the first time, but I couldn’t stop staring lustfully at lovely thin drapey knitted things. I’ve been crocheting since I was 10, and crochet makes for good lace and thick scarves, but it’s rubbish for most garments. Very stiff and heavy.

A woman on a mission, I hit the Stitch n Bitch books this time, and found that their instructions were much better—they helped me discover that I’m a Continental knitter, which is often more comfortable for crocheters. But my real secret weapon was news researcher Lu-Ann Farrar.

Friends, Lu-Ann is the woman you want to hang out with if you’re a novice knitter (or if you’re about to have a baby). The woman is scary good, and she’s also a great teacher and cheerleader. I cannot be held responsible for following her around the newsroom and trying to cop a feel from her newest scarf. And not just her, either—turns out the Herald-Leader newsroom is lousy with knitters and crocheters.

So at our knitting group in January, I humbly asked someone to show me what to do, then went home to try it on my own. With a few false starts and some timely coaching from Lu-Ann, I’ve made most of a rib-knit scarf and a mammoth knitting bag. The bag is plain stockinette on circular needles, and I will probably knit on it until my fingers wear down to stumps.

The scarf would have been finished already, but I was Really Dumb and didn’t buy enough yarn. I suspected that I’d need more, but I figured I’d just run back to Michael’s if I needed another skein. Please learn from my mistake. In the week that it took me to knit to the end of the first skein, Michael’s had clearanced and sold out of the yarn I needed. Of course they did. So I had to go on eBay and pay out the nose for the one skein I need, and as cheap as I am, that really burns. As yarn coming out the nose will.

And after the scarf and bag are done? I’m determined—though terrified— to try sock-making. And some baby stuff. I bought a bunch of soft soy-blend yarn so I can make a cardigan for Baby Girl. Well, sort of. The truth is, the soy yarn was on clearance for $2 and it wasn’t until I walked out of Michael’s with 15 skeins that I began to consider what I’d actually do with it.

That may be my biggest problem as a crafter: I can’t stop buying yarn. It’s becoming a space issue. I have several huge Rubbermaid bins devoted solely to yarn, and when I say “huge”, I mean Paulie Walnuts could hide bodies in them. And they’re overflowing. Fortunately, the husband’s drums take up a great deal of space, so he can’t say much. Also, if things really get dire, drums are hollow. I wonder how many skeins of Blue Sky alpaca I could fit in a floor tom.

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For the crafters among you, give me a shout-out so I’ll know I’m not alone in my obsession. Also, please to be clicking on the cut for links to local crafting sources, great crafting websites, and bizarre knitted items, including—no kidding—two knitted music videos. You read that right.