Bunchland

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...

Chicago Now blogger Carrie Goldman shared this story

Goldman’s daughter Katie was eating a bowl of Special K, read on the box that eating Special K for breakfast can help you lose weight and cheerfully proclaimed she was losing weight. Katie just started second grade. Goldman writes:

“Let’s put aside the fact that Katie has already absorbed the knowledge that it is a good thing to “weigh less,” as evidenced by her reaction to reading the back of the box.  That alone is disturbing at such a young age.  My bigger concern was how completely she accepted the statement put before her, without question.”

Goldman then went to the experts to find out the best way to talk to kids about advertising and sat down with Katie, explaining that ads distort facts and use marketing tricks in order to get customers. After their talk, Goldman forgot about the issue until…  Read more...

But she’ll have to wait a few years before she enjoys the scarier ones

Last week we asked some parents whether they thought Harry Potter is for their kids’ generation as Star Wars was for theirs. But as GeekDad Ken Denmead pointed out, Star Wars is more popular than ever with young kids discovering the goings on of a galaxy far, far, away everyday. Perhaps the most well known of this new generation of Star Wars fans is Katie.

When Katie’s mom, blogger Carrie Goldman, found out her sweet first grader was being bullied for her awesome Star Wars water bottle, Goldman simply asked if any female Star Wars fans happened to read her blog, could they please comment so she could show Katie that Star Wars is not just for boys. Indeed. Goldman and Katie ended up with oodles of supportive comments, an entry in the Official Star Wars blog and a Twitter hashtag (#MayTheForceBeWithKatie). We figured Goldman was the right mom to ask about what Star Wars and Harry Potter means for kids today. Here’s what she said:  Read more...