Bunchland

What the cool parents are reading today:

1. Want your kid to step in line? Try public shaming! Wait, maybe not. No, definitely do not change your kid’s cover photo on Facebook to some PSA about how she misbehaved and wasn’t allowed on Facebook for a while.

2. Or maybe presumptive, judgmental, racist people are the worst. A woman writes Dear Prudence that she was trying to befriend a mom at her daughter’s dance class, but the woman stormed off saying she was anti-adoption… and her daughter’s not adopted, but she is mixed-race.

3. A vegan book for kids. Do you think the author was banking on controversy selling their book?

4. Peaches Geldof has named her son Astala, and Bob Geldof wants his daughter to change his grandson’s ridiculous name immediately. Yes, the man whose kids are Peaches, Pixie and Fifi Trixibelle is annoyed that his daughter chose an old and obscure name from a baby name book.  Read more...

What we’re reading today:

1. One woman’s road to adoption and how infertility made her and her husband better communicators.

2. The unexpected joys of travelling with kids.

3. Have more people in your family than bedrooms? No problem, sharing a room is good for kids.

4. Does your kid snore? Is he/she hyperactive? There might be a link in there somewhere.

5. Iranian teen covers Adele’s “Someone like you.” Awesome.

Photo by mr brown via Flickr

What we’re reading today:

1. Earlier this week, we read that more young moms are single moms. Here’s one 30-year-old on why she’d prefer to be a single mom and not share her kid with another parent.

2. One couple are trying, so far unsuccessfully, to have a baby. The woman says she’s desperate to have one, but they’ve already ruled out adoption.

3. Have innate differences between boys and girls been exaggerated? Are the experts creating a great gap in the gender divide?

4. This sounds painful and unpleasant for everyone involved: the link between colic and migraines.

5. Who’s your favourite silly political pundit? Stephen Colbert? And who’s your favourite curmudgeon of an author? Maurice Sendak? Well, have you seen the Colbert-Sendak interivew?

Photo by sean dreilinger via Flickr

What we’re reading today:

1. How to get your kid excited about an extra-curricular: Tell them it was invented by the samurai.

2. Jezebel is right, these sequined kiddie hot pants are just not practical.

3. Daylight Savings — Yes, the early morning sunshine is awesome, but darkness at 5:00 and 6:00 pm is kinda brutal. Should daylight savings accommodate kids’ afterschool playing?

4. Parents of adopted kids: will/did you look up your kid’s birth parents?

5. Yes, this has nothing to do with families or parenting or whatever, but we’re just enjoying it so darn much we had to share!

Photo by jimthompson via Flickr

Shedding light on the many different brushstrokes that make up a family portrait

In honour of National Adoption Month, Carrie Goldman’s Portrait of an Adoption is running a series of bog posts designed to give a voice to different perspectives on adoption. This series will feature a guest posts for each day of November, and will include contributions by adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, and foster parents turned adoptive parents. Each story is personal, candid, and offers a deeper understanding of what adoption means.

For one writer, adoption was a five-year process that involved buying “enough baby clothes to make Suri look like a vagrant”, subscribing and withdrawing from message boards, and screaming inside her head every time someone asked why the process was taking so long. Then, after the long haul of burying her “huge, intangible hope” deep down inside her for five years, she all of a sudden found herself  a “Parent. Of a toddler. Just like that”, and was elated to find that she had the mom thing on lockdown from the first time she held her son.  Read more...

What we’re reading today:

1. Are lesbian moms doing a better job of parenting their kids than straight families? Here’s what they’re doing right.

2. Speaking of lesbian moms raising kids that are all right, HBO is turning the Oscar-nominated movie into a TV series. It’ll be written by Lisa Cholodenko, but we doubt we’d be so lucky as to get Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo. But will the TV show get right what the movie got wrong, namely, the “lesbian movie involving hot man-woman sex and yucky lesbian sex” part?

3. And those lesbian moms who moved to the suburbs 30 years ago? Pioneers.

4. Now that pioneer parents cleared the way, adoptions by gay and lesbian parents are up, way up.

5. And then there’s Florida, where “lesbian” is apparently a bad word. Oh, Florida.  Read more...

What we’re reading today:

1. A new collector Barbie has pink hair and a sweet chest plate of a tattoo. Is this inappropriate for kids, or is it merely reflective of the women a young kid might come across? We can think of quite a few awesome moms and dads with a whole lot of ink. Mary Elizabeth Williams made a good point in saying that while this doll isn’t specifically meant for little kids, it’s ‘s not a bad way to promote the idea that blond and All-American isn’t the be-all and end-all of beauty.

2. Adoption: Giving a child up, or placing a child with a family that can care for it better than you? Prudie FTW.

3. Shy kid? Relax, it’s not a social phobia.

4. We linked to some sort of discussion earlier this week, but that babies and screen time conversation just doesn’t go away.  Read more...