Official Portrait Blogging 050212

I’ve gotten really bad about posting pictures of the kids, but we got the official school picture proofs today, featuring a smiling SteelyKid and an insouciant Pip: Both pictures pretty accurately reflect them at this stage, which is kind of nice. SteelyKid’s kind of camera-averse at the moment, and it apparently took some doing to… Continue reading Official Portrait Blogging 050212

Gender Issues Start Sooner Than You Think

Via Joerg Heber on Twitter, a great post on gender divisions in STEM by Athene Donald: As children try to work out their personal identities, the difference between ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ is as fundamental and omnipresent as it gets – and they receive the clear messages that collectively society gives out about the attributes implicitly… Continue reading Gender Issues Start Sooner Than You Think

Necessary Cuteness

We found out yesterday that one of my great-aunts, who recently moved out of a retirement community because she wanted to live by herself, fell and banged her head badly. While she apparently seemed okay at the time, a short while later she collapsed, and is vanishingly unlikely to recover. While it seems weird to… Continue reading Necessary Cuteness

Easter 2012

Today is Easter Sunday, which we celebrated in the manner of my people, by chasing soap bubbles around the backyard: OK, that’s not an actual tradition, but it was a beautiful day today, and SteelyKid got a big bottle of bubble stuff from her great-grandmother, so it seemed like the right thing to do. So… Continue reading Easter 2012

The Story of the Three Giant Hippopotamuses

Once upon a time, there were three giant hippopotamuses… No, Daddy, it was three little pigs. This is a completely different story, honey. Once upon a time, there were three giant hippopotamuses, who lived together in a river in Africa. They lived in a house. Well, hippos spend most of their time in the water,… Continue reading The Story of the Three Giant Hippopotamuses