While men across cultures prefer women with “some baby-like features,” they also look for high cheekbones and narrow jaws in their partners, because while youth equates with health, too much youth could indicate that a mother lacks the necessary maturity to adequately care for a child.
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The nice people at Lottie Dolls are holding a superhero outfit design competition in order to get girls believing that they can be superheroes, too! #girlsuperhero
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danah boyd’s nuanced treatise on teens use of social media was 8 years and 160 interviews in the making–and something every parent should read.
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When asking see it, stream it, or forget it, Muppets Most Wanted is an emphatic “see it”!
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This week on the Colbert Report, Brian Greene announced a new series of free, online science classes that will be collected at WorldScienceU.com.
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This year, as something of a rite-of-passage, the high school senior and his best friend attended Comic Con NY, sans parentals.
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GeekMom Andrea goes ziplining.
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Which is all to say that, despite GeekMom Kelly’s charming review of the recent release My Little Pony: Equestria Girls, I am going to suggest that parents steer clear of this franchise. In a country where women are increasingly primary wage earners for their families, I say: Give girls the skills they need to get stable, lucrative jobs. America, put that Equestria Girl back on its pink shelf! Instead, I offer this short selection of fun, empowering, alternative gifts for little girls.
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Despite damage caused by Hurricane Sandy, a successful Kickstarter campaign ensure the Coney Island Mermaid Parade would go on. Check out the photos from last weekend!
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I came home from Book Expo, the publishing industry’s annual trade show, with a suitcase full of books–including a raft of personally-inscribed future bestsellers from Anne Burrell, Kate DiCamillo, Neil Gaiman, and Jon Scieszka.
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This past weekend, my 14-year-old woke up deciding to create a new Dungeons & Dragons-inspired board game. Over cereal he printed out an image of a map, divided the map’s islands and waterways into territories with a black pencil, and populated each region with indigenous people and creatures. After this, he scripted out a list of quests and adventures based on what he’d laid out. By lunch he was meticulously rendering on paper the dozens of wyverns, warriors, royals, and adventurers that would inhabit this game.
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For years now, Coney Island’s Mermaid Parade has functioned as my own personal Rumspringa. For the rest of each year I might have seemed like nothing more than a mom, a homeschooler, a cub scout leader, a Sunday school teacher, an advocate–let’s face it, not the stuff of myth and legend. But one day each June, miles from the “Mom…Mom…Mom…” of home, I got to revel along with 750,000 like-minded, beach-bound souls at the largest, friendliest art parade in the country. Heaven.
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Me to Firstborn Son: Um. You need to sit next to me. Immediately. Him (sitting next to me immediately): I sense this is important. Me: I need to show you the trailer for the new Cuaron movie: Gravity. Him: Cuaron? The director of Children of Men as well as Harry Potter and the Prisoner of […]
Continue ReadingI realized when I got off the phone with the school psychologist recently that we’re heading into my older son’s last CSE (committee on special education) meeting. Yes, sure: there will be some sort of transition meeting next year where we set up the IEP (individualized education plan) that he will bring to community college […]
Continue ReadingNot long after my children returned to public school after two-and-a-half years of homeschooling, it started. At this point, my older son was in 8th grade and so gym meant changing in a locker room with the other kids in his class. A couple of his peers developed a habit of coming up behind my […]
Continue ReadingIt is ironic that I am the one writing the introduction to GeekMom’s “Health and Fitness Week,” because with all of the things that I can claim legitimate geek cred for, “health geek” is not one of them. I regularly indulge my salt and chocolate cravings, often drink half a carafe of coffee before […]
Continue ReadingFact: Relationships are challenging. Particularly when one of you is made of snow. Before Florence Welch and Tori Amos, before Bjork and Madonna, there was Kate Bush. Not that this is a contest. But Bush, a 2002 Ivor Novello Award recipient who has landed an album on the United Kingdom’s “Top 5” charts in each […]
Continue ReadingA couple of years ago our local elementary school principal invited a nutritionist from a nearby university to come speak at our monthly PTA meeting. The speaker showed the video embedded above, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention map that graphed obesity rates in the United States from 1985 to the present. It is […]
Continue ReadingBack in our preschool years of parenting, my family spent a great deal of time with Walter Wick’s books. To be truthful, we spent a great deal of time with a great many books–almost universally those that created anthropomorphized-machine worlds filled with earnest steam engines, recalcitrant backhoes, or steam shovels of derring-do. Mr. Wick’s I […]
Continue ReadingI don’t fly very often–in fact, I think that I’ve been on three flights in the past 10 years. The last flight was a family trip to Orlando out of JFK in New York–and I can still recall how humorless our airport experience was. “This doesn’t feel like the start of a family vacation,” I […]
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