Beyonce As Inspiration

I'm in a particularly bad way this week, looking for a little levity. I stumbled upon a cluster of toddlers dancing to Beyonce's 'Single Ladies'. Apparently a hit with the sippy cup crowd. My favorites:





And the truly amazing Arianna:

Lovely Boy

Photo credit: flickr.com, Queen of the Camera

Park Slope Moms

I'm about to move to >cringe< Park Slope. It's a neighborhood known for its precious moms -- women who used fertility treatments to home birth the twins, Ava and Dash, who are treated like royalty. The joke (or not) is that these babies are spoonfed organic smashed potatoes with rosemary and pomegranate, unless they're not in the mood, and then they watch Baby Einstein videos while being massaged with lavendar oil.

I used to think that was a terribly unfair, terribly misogynistic take on Brookln motherhood. After all, I'm moving in. And I have my own princess I want to take to the park. But it's all fun and games until you're neighbors.

We're doing renovations in our apartment, and our co-op neighbor has a young child. Apparently, he's quite sickly: any sound wakes him up, any dust gives him nosebleeds. As you can imagine, it's difficult to renovate an apartment without making sound or dust. We're doing our best, but it's not good enough -- to satisfy her, we've had to hire a lead expert and a dust and air expert, and respond to numerous passive-aggressive emails about his "naptime".

So when do we call it? When do gear up for a fight? We want to have a good experience in our new apartment, but right now we're terrified of making a peep, and we haven't even moved in yet. Ah, moving in. Sounds like heaven. (Gulp.)

Kid Logic

setting: the neighborhood play center, in front of a little, rocking book.

(A child sits in the boat. Her mom sings "Row, row, row your boat..." A three-year-old boy approaches.)

Mom: Would you like to row with us?
Boy: I can't. Because I'm a race car. I can only zoom.

(The boy walks away.)

Reason #64 Redheads Rock

They like beer.

Look! Over There!

Childhood studies always need to be taken with a grain of salt, but this one seems pretty common sense. University of Chicago researchers determined that parents who gesture more have children with bigger vocabularies. As a parent of a 17-month-old toddler, I can attest that figuring out how to communicate with a non-speaker involves hand gestures, exaggeraged facial expressions, even mime and commedia dell'arte. Thank god for my clown training. It's rewarding when you can both agree that "splash splash" involves waving your arms up and down in front of you and refers to any body of water.

That reminds me of a scene on the subway the other day. A Chinese-speaking woman was sitting with her daughter, the same age as mine, on her lap. The little girl pointed suddenly and exclaimed, "Bow! Bow!" I looked to where the girl was pointing, but couldn't figure out what she meant. I figured it must be Chinese. The mother looked around, confused, then looked her daughter in the face. "Bao?" "Boo?"

Oh well. We try.