I'm going to be gone all of next week, Saturday to Saturday.

Visiting my grandmother in California. Weekend with my mom and sister and the nieces, and the rest of the week with just the nieces.

I can only hope I can get on the plane, we've still got an ID situation here.

Probably will be able to get online there. I don't know.

A few quick articles

One on picky eating.

Let me be fair - I don't think picky eating is entirely a good parent/bad parent thing, although I do think there are probably things you can do to exacerbate it. However, I do think that until you know if your kid will be picky or not, it is wise to restrict their diet to healthy foods. If your kid is so picky that they'll only eat liver, green veggies, and persimmon, that might be annoying, but at least you can rest assured that, right or wrong, nobody will judge you the way they judge the parents of the kid who only eats fluffernutters and chicken mcnuggets.

( Read more... )

One on veggie gardening.

Our garden is kinda half-assed this year for a few reasons. Next year - fully assed! Yeah!

( Read more... )

One on city farms in Cuba

The Daily Kos piece, John McCain wants to kill me.

An article on sustainable food

Oh, and there's this:

I think I've found a new summer program for the kids!

Say, listen - while I'm already spamming myself. Does anybody have any ideas for quick craft-things that I might do (or other things I might do) with the niecelings in California? I have some ideas in my head already, of course.

Also, I'm pleased to announce that I now, officially, tolerate beets. They're not my favorite vegetable, but I can eat them. (Yay.) I need a new goal though. I think, after reading all these articles about oh-so-cool ways to tote children, that I need to learn to ride a bike. (I'm not, ever, spending good money on an expensive child-toting bike in NYC, that's insane, but a bike itself isn't too crazy, right?)

Mostly the nieces walk, though. They can both manage, easily, the trip from here to the boat, and that's about a mile and a half. And they can both do the trip from Stuy to the boat in Manhattan, and that's a little more. A few weeks ago somebody was giving me the Lecture about how They Couldn't Carry (wear) THEIR child like I do, and how the trip to the boat was just Too Long without a stroller - well, they said, pointing at Ana, "I guess she's big enough now". They said this as they strapped their own four-year-old kid in the bike carrier. I refrained from mentioning that Ana's been walking the length of Battery Park City (the whole mile-and-a-half-and-then-some I already mentioned) for the past two years... and that Evangeline's been doing it for one.

This isn't to disparage their kids, or anybody else's, but I wish they'd think! It's an easy trip for the nieces because they don't really have a choice but to make it, so they've adapted. (A while back I watched another kid for a day, and was horrified to find she couldn't walk nearly as long or as fast as Evangeline, who of course is only half her age. AND she whined. But, again, she's just not used to it. She's a perfectly wonderful child regardless.)