Baby-fish-mouth is Sweeping the Nation

Yeah, I quoted from "When Harry Met Sally." Whatcha gonna do?

Anyway, a word to the wise while you're "babytalking" to your child...take note of who is in the room with you. For example, it is not appropriate to say to your daughter: "who's my favorite girl?" while you're in the room with your wife, sister and mother.

Book Report: The Runaway Bunny

The back cover of "Goodnight Moon" has a picture of this book, "The Runaway Bunny," another of Margaret Wise Brown's classics. Bud enjoys Goodnight Moon, so I thought I'd give this one a try...and I just don't get it.

Here's the plot: there's a bunny who wants to run away. He tells his mother, and his mother says, "I will run after you." The bunny threatens to become a fish and swim away from her; whereupon the mother threatens to become a fisherman. This goes on for the remainder of the book: the kid wants to become a rock; the mother becomes a mountain climber, etc.

First of all, why does this bunny want to run away? Brown never explains that, but one can only assume that it's because of the mother bunny's overbearing nature. Imagine growing up in that household.

"Mom, I want to go to join the school's baseball team."
"Well, if you do, I'll turn into A-Rod and make your team lose so that you never travel away for post-season games."

"Mom, I want to go to college in California."
"Well, if you do, I'll join the Department of Homeland Security and make air travel restrictions so rigid that you'd never want to get on the plane to leave!"

Second, someone should teach this mother a thing or two about compassion. On the first page of the book, the little bunny says, "I am running away." If Bud said that to me, I would ask, "why do you want to run away?" and then try to talk the issue out. Instead, the mother gets right on the defensive and says "If you run away, I will run after you." The mother then gets on the phone with her friends and declares, "if that little bunny goes to Indochina, I want a rabbit hidin' in a bowl of rice waitin' to pop a cap in his ass."

At the end of the book, the mother says, "Don't you ever leave me...'cause I'd find you...."

Psycho.

Bud's Four-month Birthday

I am amazed at how fast Bud is developing. She seems completely different from even two weeks ago: then, she was just beginning to discover how her hands work, now, she is grabbing things "purposefully." (Apparently, the grab reflex should give way to "purposeful" grabbing.)

Another funny development is that Bud's discovering her voice (and her lungs). She makes these high-pitched squeal/laughs/screams. I do think these are social-laughs, as she does it at the appropriate times (for funny faces, funny sounds and when we play peek-a-boo).

Happy Birthday Bud!

A kid's sense of humor...

So shoot me. I'm walking through Buy-Buy Baby and spot this book.

Huh, huh....it says "Balls."

Anyway...can someone explain to me who Elmo is? Yeah, I realize he's been around for a while, I remember the "tickle me Elmo" fad about ten years ago. My "Sesame Street" era was the late '70s/early '80s, and I don't think Elmo was a part of the cast back then. Neither was "Prairie Dawn" whose mother seems like your stereotypical neurotic Jewish mother. "I need to pack a diaper bag, oh, and I need wipes..."

Prairie Dawn's mom needs some lessons in parenting. First, she named her daughter after a shooter made with Tabasco....no wait, that's a prairie fire...whatever, it's still a stupid name. But what really takes the cake is her failure to control her daughter. In one of the "Sesame Beginnings" DVDs that Bud's been into recently, Prairie Dawn is begging to finger paint, but it's time to get dressed. The mother comes up with a great idea to play "peek-a-boo" while getting dressed, and sings a whole song about it. Then, at the end of the song, after the little monster gets dressed, she sneaks into the finger paints and makes a big mess, clearly against her mother's wishes. All the mother says is "Oh, Prairie...peek-a-boo, I love you."

Terrible, terrible parenting.

Taking Breastfeeding to a Whole New Level

Billboard on Route 4 in New Jersey for the Hooters in Hackensack:

"Kids Eat Free on Tuesdays. Mom and Dad: $5 pitchers!"

I realize that being a father makes you see the world completely differently. It's like going to law school...after three years of law school, I read every contract before agreeing to them (yes, including the ones on the back of tickets for sporting events), I see potential lawsuits wherever I go, and, as my paralegals tell me, I have lost my sense of humor in place of jokes about SEC filings and misspellings in legal documents (in all fairness, sometimes they can be very funny).

But, do you really need to be a dad to find something wrong with this billboard? Should you really be taking your kids to Hooters? And if you are, should mom and dad be downing $5 pitchers?

The billboard made me think of this.