Facebook How-To

I'm really late to the Facebook game (I just joined a few weeks ago. I know, I know, I'm a dinosaur.) But my biggest worry was how to keep my home/work/high school lives separate. Frankly, I don't want old photos from prom visible to my coworkers.

So file this article under things-I-meant-to-figure-out-but-hadn't-yet-so-thank-you-so-much-for-spelling-it-out-for-me.

How to Friend Mom, Dad and the Boss on Facebook -- Safely.
Thanks, New York Times.

Ginger Baby

My daughter's a redhead, so I'm obsessed. How awesome is this sweet girl?
Thanks to UK's Mail Online, which has lots of photos of other unusually-follicled children.

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.

A Little Friday Fun

I love this guy.

This Breaks My Heart

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

Hat tip to this woman's work.

Doing Our Part For the Economy

I loved Chuck Todd's question to President Obama in the February 9 press conference:
"...if your plan works the way you want it to work, it's going to increase consumer spending. But isn't consumer spending or overspending how we got into this mess? And if people get money back into their pockets, do you not want them saving it or paying down debt first before they start spending money into the economy?"

Thank you, Chuck! I've been trying to figure this one out, too.

I don't carry any credit card debt anymore, but it was a pretty herculean task to get rid of it, and I know most Americans carry thousands of dollars of debt on multiple cards. We've also been hearing that personal savings have just picked up after being nearly nonexistent for years. So why would we go spend more money instead of paying down our debt? Don't we need some breathing room to weather a layoff or an illness?

David Leonhardt at the New York Times finally answers these questions in a way that makes sense to me: investment spending. And now that I think of it, I AM doing my part -- I'm buying a house. So if I get a $15,000 tax credit, I'll put some toward debt, some toward savings, and some toward buying an energy-efficient fridge.

But I'm still going to cross my fingers I don't get laid off.

Keep 'Em Home? Nah.

No need to feel guilty. Even doctors take their sick kids to daycare.