fortytworoads's Profile

The magazine Marie Claire Idees is exactly this. It's in French, but has gorgeous photos that don't really need the text to make sense. We have it in Barnes and Nobles here.

ok, not to be a pedant or anything, but that has got to be the funniest dangling modifier i've ever seen. was john really handcrafted from hardwoods? that's pretty impressive!

oh i would love this!

oh, those colors are really delicious. i want the orange one!

I'd cut up all the veggies we throw into our almost daily lunch quesadillas! Those are really gorgeous cutting boards.

there's no way i would have taken the test without my husband there! i don't really get the surprise announcement aspect of this - unless this is not a planned pregnancy i guess. anyway, at my house, we walked into the bathroom together after the three minute mark to see that plus sign on the pee stick. wait for him and do it together!

A tip for the hard peaches - put a couple of apples in a brown paper bag, and then put the peaches on top of them and roll the top of the bag closed. The apples release a ripening gas (or you know, something. I'm a little vague on the science of this) as they sit there and they will ripen the peaches in a few days. We do it all the time with all sorts of fruit (works for nectarines, apricots, etc.) - works like a charm, and you can reuse the paper bag for each new batch of fruit.

Wow, that's a pretty obnoxious party the NYT wrote about! It's pretty bad to expect people to bring presents to anything in the first place (you're inviting them for their company, not their wallet - otherwise, it's called a fundraiser), but to dictate what other people buy? This is the natural offshoot of the people who enclosed detailed registry information in their wedding invitations - now they are doing the same thing for their children's events. Sheesh.

I just got a Waldoft doll for my 20 month old daughter from the Peruvian Q'ewar project (http://qewar.com/), an organization creating economic empowerment for Andean women. The doll is really extraodinarily well-made, and my daughter really likes it (although I have to say she was not that into the native wool clothing the doll came with and I had to make it a little cotton dress for my daughter to really start playing with it. But I would recommend them - soft, poseable, and as anti-Bratz as at all possible.

We also have a groovy girl (Analise), and she is not nearly as popular with my daughter.

this seems well-meaning, but why does the article pretend that there is an either/or at work - "either you do nvc or you hit your children until they suffer". um, yeah, clearly there is a pretty wide spectrum in between those extremes. children need calm and patient parents, for sure, and should never be hit, but they also need to know that their world has actual limits and that those limits are unbreakable even when tested. so, yeah, it might not be entirely fair that mommy gets to tell you to eat vegetables with dinner and go to sleep at a decent hour, but that doesn't mean you get to negate those things with a "well-reasoned" counter-argument. it is a pretty well-proven fact of neurological development that until late adolescence children do not have the ability (really, the cognitive development) to be able to fully envision the consequences of their actions or to see the "big picture" of their life. this is as it should be - but it is absolutely the job of their parents to explain to them repeatedly (and of course kindly and with understanding) that although today you "might not enjoy the fact that your bedtime falls at a set time every time" or whatever the terminology the article used, that is not something you get to argue with. the article mentions "protective force" as just the immediate intervention in pulling a child away from a busy street, but i would argue that mild coersion to get a toddler to eat right or go to bed also falls into the protective force category. they don't know that not getting their vitamins will stunt their development - but you do. a lot of this nvc seems to point to parents wanting to let go of their necessary authoritative responsibilities (perhaps because they confuse an authoritative style with an authoritarian one). you - hopefully - know more than your kid, and that knowledge needs to be imparted.