Baby Expo

Back when I was preggo with Primo, I would have killed - or at least, maimed- someone to get to attend a Baby Expo. Of course, six years ago, in Brooklyn, such a thing did not exist. But now, thanks to A Child Grows in Brooklyn, it does, and its happening this Sunday.

From bra fittings to seminars on sleep trainings, its one stop shopping for new parents in Brooklyn. There is TONS of stuff going on:

Learn about:

Sleep training, choosing gear, hiring a nanny, finding day care, school testing and zoning, greening your home.

Try out:

Strollers, carriers, baby yoga, stroller fitness, bra fittings, laser therapy

Get:

Manicures, blow-outs, maternity and post-baby clothes, toys, prizes

Watch demos of

cloth diapering, baby food making, CPR, installing a car seat

Sunday March 13th
11-4pm
Toren Condo, 150 Myrtle Ave, Brooklyn NY 11201
$35 admission/ $60 for two
register: achildgrows.com

first 250 to register get a free gift bag

SEMINARS:

Raising a Good Sleeper
Speaker: Janet K. Kennedy, PhD, NYC Sleep Doctor

• Best baby gear gurus.... tell all!
Speakers: Jamie Grayson (the Baby Guy NYC) & Jennifer Link (Sweet Pea Baby Planners)

• Parenting Partnerships: How to work together
Speakers: Soho Parenting and Family Matters NY

• Greening Your Home
Speaker: Alexandra Zissu

EXHIBITORS:
Babeland
Baby Angels
Baby Be Safe
Baby Bodyguards
Baby Brezza
Birth Day Presence
boon
Britax
Brooklyn Acupuncture
Brooklyn Public Library
Brownstone Nannies
Bump Brooklyn
Caribou Baby
Diaperkind
Dr. Browns
Family Matters NY
FasTrackKids
Gaggle of Chicks
giggle
Genius Organizing
GoGo Babies
Hank and JoJo
Happy Baby Food
Heights Pediatrics
Iris Clarke Lingerie
Lulu’s Cuts and Toys
Mabel’s Labels
MDK Productions
Mini Jake
Mini Max Toys and Cuts
NY City Explorers
NY Kids Club
NYC School Help
Park Slope Pediatric Dental
Perfect Capture
Red Moon Massage Therapy
Renew Physical Therapy
Ruckus Mobile Media
Salon 718
Soho Parenting
Stroller Strides
Tribeca Parenting
UPPAbaby
Urban Clarity
Wooly Boo

Storing this sex talk for later

I was just talking to a Mommy friend about the fact that one day, not too many years from now, we will need to have the sex talk with the kids. I guess the experts would probably say it will be a series of sex talks but just thinking about the inaugural one has me quaking in my boots. We were trying to think of what we'd say, how we'd make a justifiable case to wait. Then last night, I was watching Glee - not usually my go-to source for parenting advice and inspiration -- and I heard THE BEST EVER sex talk, given by a dad to his gay, virgin son.

And he said:

"When you're intimate with someone in that way you are exposing yourself - you are never going to be more vulnerable. You gotta know that it means something - it is doing something to you, to your heart, to your self esteem, even if it feels like you are just having fun. I want you to use it as a way to connect to another person. Don't throw yourself around like you don't matter. Because you matter."

Spot-on. Totally writing this on an index card and saving it til I need it.

Mom Watson

One of the best things about my son is his sense of humor. Both my kids, in fact, are super high- maintenance and hard to manage, but the upside is, they're fucking hilarious. And I'm the kind of girl that can forgive a lot when I'm laughing.

Recently, Primo has created what I think is my all-time favorite Primo expression.

"Wow honey, how'd you make that tower so fast?"

"Elementary, my dear Mommy."

"How will you do your homework and play video games, too, before bed?"

"Elementary, my dear Mommy."

"How are you going to make a real, live clone with my hair strand?"

"Elementary, my dear Mommy."

Never gets old.

If I knew where to get one, I'd totally buy him a pipe and woolen cap, just for my own diversion.

Snow White Adventure Birthday

When I asked Sec what kind of a birthday party she wanted, the answer did not surprise me. It would be a Snow White Birthday. But I dared to dream that there was a way to throw a Snow White Birthday that didn't make me feel like I was Disney's bitch.I'm not sure I succeeded, but I did manage to nearly die trying, and to throw a pretty pretentious princess party. So for that, I do deserve credit.

Thus the "Snow White Adventure Party" was born.

First, we gave the kids feral animal masks, to pretend they were the wild beasts who nearly tore SW to pieces in the Enchanted Forest:

Then I invited children to consult, if they were so inclined, our library of Snow White tales from around the world (they were NOT so inclined):

Then I cracked open the craft box and things started hopping. I don't have pictures of this stuff because I was too frantic running around and making sure the children had enough adhesive rhinestones and the like. But I will tell you what I learned: the only thing four and five year old girls want at a party is more and more surfaces on which to spread glitter glue. I handed them each a magic mirror to decorate, some string on which to put Fruit Loops for an edible necklace, and then, I handed over the crowns made out of poster board which I had spent LITERALLY hours drawing and cutting out by hand. The reason it took hours is that I am nota very talented artist and I don't have a very good sense of perspective. So it took going through several sheets of poster board - all the while, worrying about how I'm murdering trees with each artistic failure - before I got a decent crown to use as a template. So I cut out exactly enough crowns for each kid and basically had to tell them, as I handed them out, "This will be your one and only shot at this. Don't fuck it up, now."

We did some games:

Duck Duck Dwarf
Pass the Poison Apple
Potato Sack Race (yeah, that one wasn't themed but I has the sacks, so what the hell?)
And of course. . .
Pin the crown on Snow White.

Then it was time for party bags, in which I placed a printed copy of the original Grimm's fairytale (I'm shocked I didn't get more emails from irate parents whose kids woke in the wee hours with nightmares). I then gave the kids the materials to act out their own AUTHENTIC Snow White tale - with laces to suffocate each other with, apple to choke on, and a "poison" hair comb. At first, I didn't include parentheses around the word "Poison" but then I panicked that parents might think it was actually poison and try to sue me or something. Candy bracelets and pixie sticks need no justification, ever.




But no party would be complete without a cake that took me half the night to create but looked as if a child had done it. This time, I was fixated on making a special glass coffin cake with Snow White lying dead on top, and the dwarves keeping guard. Finally, I thought of the perfect way to do it -- the butter dish:


And so, another overblown theme party is behind me. Next year, I swear I'm putting on a movie and serving popcorn. End of story.

Read this and you'll never use the word again

We’ve probably all used the word “retarded” before, particularly in those teen years where our vocabulary gets boiled down to 100 words or less, all of them crass and unimaginative. But, I assure you, after you’ve read this post on the blog Love That Max, you never will again.

Thanks to Ellen, for so eloquently and powerfully bringing her story to light and for making me think, for once, that Twitter might be a force of good and not just something invented to annoy and elude me.

Its just a homemade pinata, whatevs . . .

I am not a crafty person, at least not in the good-with-a-glue-stick sense. In the sly and clever sense, I do qualify but that's a different blog post. Though I am not arts-and-crafty by nature, a few times a year, I strive to be. These are typically Christmas-time (refer to Time to Make the Stockings for evidence) and birthday party time.

Sec just turned four, which means it is party time again. And this year, I decided to make a pinata. A poison apple pinata, naturally, to fit the theme of her Snow White Adventure party. I knew this would be a long shot for us but as Sec's party was at the end of Mid-Winter Break, where we holed up in New Jersey doing nothing for nearly a week, I figured we'd have plenty of down-time to work on it. Plus, it wasn't a pirate or a castle or a double helix or anything - how hard cold it be to make an apple out of paper mache?

I figured it would be a fun, multi-sensory activity for the children and I to do together. The kind of activity I imagine myself doing with the kids in my daydreams where I am Mother Superior. As I set up the materials, and the children waited eagerly, with their sleeves rolled, I found myself wondering why I didn't undertake this kind of activity more often.

In the first minute of two of the activity, as Primo dipped his hands in the flour/ water mixture and a feeling of Earth Mother-ness suffused the scene, I resolved to be more adventurous about crafts

And then four minutes later, I took it all back. After laying on about three strips of newspaper, the kids decided it was a total borefest and I found myself alone, looking at a good hour or two worth of work. The worst part was, the kids had made such an infernal mess and fought so bitterly in those five minutes, that I actually felt RELIEVED that they ran off.


It didn't turn out half bad though:


I know it doesn't look like a poison apple, but it does, you must admit, look strikingly like a poison pear, could pears ever be blood-red. In any event, you get the idea. And it was operational and managed to hold the weight of Whoppers, Lemon Drops, Sour Straws and the other junk I found at the Dollar Tree to fill it with.

You could say, mission accomplished. Or you could say, that's a great idea I'll never do again.

Bob Marley’s on the Tangled soundtrack. Sure, why not?

Like many four year-old girls, Seconda is newly obsessed with Tangled, the new Disney movie about Rapunzel. It has even overtaken her Snow White obsession, and for the most part that’s not a bad thing. I mean, Tangled isn’t really any less offensive from a feminist point of view – sure, Rapunzel's not a total moron like Snow White, and she knows how to knock a guy unconscious with a frying pan – but a dashing stranger still ends up rescuing the damsel in distress, and in the process, wins her hand in marriage. So its not like some big improvement to have replaced one Disney fairytale with another, There is, however, one way in which Tangled is a real improvement and that is in terms of the music. Look, no one’s going to deny "Heigh-Ho" and "Whistle While you Work" are catchy ditties but those are two out of a dozen songs on the soundtrack which Sec has been insisting we listen to for months. The soundtrack is mainly background music, with lots of villainous swells and string instruments chirping away frantically like the bids of the forest. There's one ballad thrown in, sung in Snow White’s I-just-sucked-helium voice, which goes "I’m wishing/ I’m wishing/ for the one I love/ to find me/ to find me/today.” Not the kind of lyric or melodic complexity to sustain repeat listening. That's a nice way to say after you hear it three times in a row, you start fantasizing about a bear happening into the scene and attacking that pale, puny princess.

The Tangled soundtrack, featuring the vocal stylings of Mandy Moore, is pretty much pop crap, yes, but its nice-sounding pop crap, with creative rhymes. The best part is litening to Seconda belt out those ballads full on American Idol-style, with her vibratto shaking the walls of the car and her soft whisper quavering at all the right emotional places: ‘And at LAAAAAAAST I see the liiiiiights and the fog has somehow (whisper) lifted/ and its WAAARM and rel and BRIIIIIIGHT!" If Star Search was still on the air, Sec would be THERE.

But even Seconda accompanying Mandy Moore gets old after about two hours. So last weekend, when we were driving home from New Jersey, after we’d heard “At Last I see the Lights” at least five times, I surreptitiously selected Legend by Bob Marley on the iTouch, and “Is This Love?” started playing.

"Hey! This isn't TANGLED!" she observed.

"It isn't?" I asked.

"No, its not!"

"Are you sure?"

"Yes," But she didn't seem convinced. So rapacious is her love for the soundtrack that I could tell she was falling prey to the powers of wishful thinking, allowing herself to believe it was possible.

"Maybe its the bonus tracks!" I suggested.

"This doesn't sound like Tangled," she noted, but she was listening, now, with interest.

"But its about love!" I said, really selling it now. "Maybe its about how Flynn Rider and Rapunzel are wondering if its love that they are feeling."

She considered, quietly. The song finished, and “No Woman, No Cry” came on.

"Is this from Tangled too?" she asked.

"Could be," I said, "Maybe its Flynn telling Rapunzel not to cry, because she can bring him back to life with her golden tears."

And in thi way, we listened to half of Legend. Is there a better testament to how universal Bob Marley's lyrics are, that you can connect each of the songs to the 2010 Disney remake of Rapunzel?

By hook or by crook, baby.