All right, I’m taking a poll: how many of you think you have a clean house? How many of you clean your homes (maybe not in every nook and cranny, but pretty much top to bottom) every week?
Honestly [...]
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All right, I’m taking a poll: how many of you think you have a clean house? How many of you clean your homes (maybe not in every nook and cranny, but pretty much top to bottom) every week?
Honestly [...]
Who wouldn’t want to go to Hogwarts? Receive that fateful message – by owl, no less? Catch the train at Platform 9 ¾? Be sorted by a preternatural anthropomorphic hat? Lose one’s family in a tragic paranormal double-homicide and then be conscripted by the sheer [...]
It’s that time of year again when signs start poking out of the grass all over my part of town. Yes, it’s time for cheerleading and football sign-ups. Girls get to cheer and boys get to play football and moms and dads watch eagerly from the sidelines as their daughters [...]
For the next couple of months, I'll be contributing tips to the new how-to site, PC.com. My latest piece was inspired by a Parent Hacks submission which I put into use minutes after it hit my inbox. I admit -- I'm a lazy digital [...]
I want to thank everyone for participating in our Mother’s Day Giveaway Week. It was really fun reading everyone’s comments and giving away all those prizes. Today we’re announcing the winner of our Mother and Child Portrait Session Giveaway and I wanted to share the posts that readers picked [...]
Snippets too short to make into real posts, but, there you go - the reality of my attention span right now.
Some of you probably heard all about Teleflora's "non-mom" contest category that included adoptive moms. (They got floods of complaints. Read the small print at the top of the page and you'll see their hasty apology.)
Calling adoptive moms non-moms is offensive, sure, but unfortunately, common enough. Most of us [...]
Throughout my illustrious career as a writer (go ahead and laugh now), I have been approached by many aspiring columnists/bloggers who wish to know how one actually lands a gig getting paid to give their opinions. You’ve got to admit it’s a pretty sweet deal. With the economy doing a [...]
The kids are in bed.
The Girl is having trouble sleeping. The neighbor’s dog is barking beneath her window. She’s reading and drawing with the light on. I’ll check on her in a few minutes and tuck her in and slide the paper out from under her [...]
Duane, you're a brave man to put forth a definitive argument for toilet paper direction.
I know that the direction the toilet paper should roll is a borderline religious debate in some households, but it dawned on me that if you've got a toddler running around who [...]
When the producer for NBC called me and asked if I'd be interested in flying to New York to be on a live segment of the Today show to talk about the business of mommy-blogging — okay, wait a minute, I think I should address this right here, right now, [...]
What is cool? This site. And now it's got an even cooler name: Kirtsy.
Just makes you want to dance around in a little floral twirly skirt, doesn't it?
I’m old enough to remember parenting before cell phones. That is, when the elementary school had your home number and your work number, your husband’s work number, and the always-requested never-used emergency-backup-friend-or-relative number. And that was it. Back then, if your kid was feeling a little feverish [...]
What rights do children have? Do they have the right to privacy? Do they have a right to freedom of expression? Parents, educators, and the general public all have conflicting feelings on these subjects.
From a legal perspective, children are often [...]
I am a fan of the Boston Red Sox, partly because I come from a long line of frugal, impassive New Englanders, and partly because I grew up with a deep, abiding hatred for the Evil Empire. My painful memories range from Bucky Effing Dent to Aaron Effing Boone, [...]
Being stylish is causing me hives!
I am attending a library fundraiser tonight. I tend to avoid those events, because while I enjoy the cocktails and the yummy snacks, I would rather poke my eyes out with blunt scissors than make chit-chat with socialites and wanna-be-socialites. I have a prefect dress [...]
This was another find at The Metropolitan Museum of Art store, this box of 25 gold-embossed white correspondence cards. I preferred the dragonfly design, but you can also choose from a sunburst, butterflies, a pineapple, or a sardis column. Some of you guys who sent [...]
I bet you pronounce crayon wrong. YES, YOU. I'M LOOKING AT YOU.
Someone today (hi, Yao!) challenged me to participate in the new collaborative Flickr group called Word Time which was set up to, ahem, "share the variations in our pronunciations with weekly lists of words." Which is an elaborate [...]
The text here isn't going to have anything to do with the photo other than to say that I was outside taking pictures in my neighbor's yard when I ran into another neighbor who has a 10-month-old Australian Shepherd, and that dog is so well behaved that I get the [...]
Doko! is a new trading game with a bit of a twist. You can obtain tokens by finding, trading or buying them. The tokens themselves are a heavy plastic center with a colorful design, wrapped in a metal edge. The coins have a satisfying weight, [...]
Writer James Lileks has come up with an interesting way of dealing with his daughter’s broken Nintendo:
(G)Nat dropped her Nintendo and it broke. This is a teachable moment, in which she learned an important lesson: don’t drop your Nintendo, or it will break. Also, a replacement is not immediately [...]
I have a headache from working on a desk that isn’t set up ergonomically. I did manage to find a chair that wasn’t as tippy but it’s still kinda low so my neck is hurting. Such is life.
I have whiplash from two car accidents. The first one was from a [...]
My daughter Z and I have been playing with robot-making recently. We harvest motors from disused toys - infant toys usually have great eccentric-weight motors - and have been buying motors as well.
I went on parenting podcast Jumping Monkeys this week to chat about them. You [...]
I hesitated at first, as tends to be my tendency, standing towards the
back, my old insecurities resurfacing. I wanted to dance. The music was
live and it was brilliant and I'd secretly yearned to unleash the cool
moves I'd practiced so many times in front of the mirror [...]
Another geeky cake. I know, it's something of an obsession around here, but they all look so good! And here's one pretty enough for Jonathan Coulton to write a song about. The story of the cake, from Geekologie:
A guy who goes by N III sent [...]
Tricia! You just saved me some $!
Don’t have the money to go out and buy summer PJs for the kids and the winter ones still fit? Cut the arms and legs off the jammies and make them into shorts and short-sleeved shirts. We do this every Spring [...]
It's bathing suit season and I'm not ready. Not for me (although really, I'm not ready) but for my three year old daughter who, if this year's crop of kids suits are any indication, is supposed to be wearing a string bikini, a flirty tankini that says "hula [...]
Despite my husband and my efforts to foist sidewalk chalk and softball bats on my daughter, she prefers the sparkly, the frilly, and the delicate. I've often changed the words to fairy tales while reading them to her because they seem so dang sexist.
Fact: Moms like cookies.
Saw this over at Instructables the other day, and thought it was just the kind of GeekDad project our readers would love: how to make a Naruto-style headband for your kids to wear and play ninja with.
What you need
My friend Sue (or more officially Susan E. Goodman) is the author of a large bookshelf of impressive children’s non-fiction books. She’s written about poop and pee and skyscrapers and cookies and 5 different books about the craziest field-trips ever [...]
So let's talk a little bit about an Ask Moxie book.
I'm not into the idea of just taking the stuff I've already written and packaging it up. I don't think this site is about my sparkling prose or poignant turn of phrase, so I'm not sure that that's the kind [...]
One year ago, you were reading this, by Dave Hinerman:
"Dad? How did people find geocaches before GPSes were invented?" A retro-GeekDad like me longs for a teachable moment like that. The short answer to my son's question was, “We didn't have geocaches back then - we just had buried [...]
The experience of fathering a five-year-old girl compares favorably to the experience of trying to put your pants on over your head. It’s impossible. Not only that, it’s stupid even to try. Certainly there’s a contortionist at a seedy, backwoods county fair who can do it, but I’m not that [...]
My daughter is begging to take ballet classes.
While yes, I took them once upon a time too…I really would rather she play a sport.
Go ahead…yell at me for saying that because you think dancing is a sport-not going to argue. I am just thinking a more ‘traditional’ sport like soccer [...]
Every day I receive reports in my email box about various autism biomed treatments or the latest cases involving vaccine-injury. CBS Evening News has an exclusive story on the second round of cases
that went to court today alleging a causal relationship between child
vaccination and [...]
There are many things I don't understand about my child.
I don't understand why she insists on going outside during monsoon season, but when the sun is out for the first time in two months she wants to lock us all inside for a Zingo [...]
