Bunchland

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...

What we’re reading today:

1. New mom Pink wrote an excellent rant on her site directed towards the paps who are stalking her family. They’ve got a new family photo shoot in People because she and husband Carey Hart want to be able to control the media’s access to their daughter. “We are so appreciative that people are interested in seeing our daughter. We WANT to share our joys with you, but as parents (and new parents), we should be able to govern these decisions, shouldn’t we?” Yes.

2. So we all know a bunch of Emma and Sarahs and Julias, right? All those Victorian names that started really coming back into fashion a couple decades ago are now on their way down again. Also on the list of names trending down are Grace and Ella, but we thought those names only super took off in the last five-10 years? The New York Times article suggests perhaps the lack of Jane Austen movies in theatres these days has something to do with it. (So bring on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies! The world needs more Elizabeths!)  Read more...

What we’re reading today:

1. Does the Ontario government need to support adoptive parents more?

2. Are schools just uptight these days or are they acting in everyone’s best interests? The New York Times Motherlode blog reported that kids have been suspended recently for taping up cardboard letters to ask a girl to the prom and passing gas in sync on the bus.

3. The Washington Post editors polled its writers on what parents should get rid of during spring cleaning. Top offenders: crib bumpers, snack time, computers in the library and virtual reality video games. What would you get rid of?

4. Former Arkansas governor and a likely candidate to run for the Republican presidential nomination Mike Huckabee has come out with a line of educational animated history videos. Because he doesn’t think the schools are doing a good job.  Read more...

Meri Perra blogs about the challenges she and her partner face in trying to raise their girls with feminist values

Warts and all, it’s an ok deal to be a queer parent in Canada these days. It’s not perfect, but it’s ok. Look South. A recent study found that queer parents living in states with limited gay rights experience more anxiety and depression than those who live in states with rights. No kidding.

But it doesn’t mean we have everything over here. In other areas of the world, there are some cool things for queer parents that we don’t have in Canada. … yet. Maybe this list will inspire someone!

5 cool things we don’t have in Canada … yet:  Read more...