Evangeline is FOUR today!

We're the most lucky people in existence. No terrible twos, and her therrible threes consisted of occasionally getting out of naptime before I came to fetch her, and then hopping back into her hammock with a doll. Seriously. I'm even looking forward to four! (Sorta. I don't want her to grow up!)

The other day, I asked her to get her PJs from off the box holding the bookcase in the hallway. And she told me she couldn't and she told me she couldn't, and finally she went up to it to DEMONSTRATE that she couldn't. "SEE?" she said, raising her arm above her head, "I can't... oh! I can reach! I didn't know I could reach up here!"

Articles!

Here's one on the intelligence of fishies

Now, we all hear a lot about goldfish. People get goldfish for their kids because "they're easy to take care of, and die soon anyway". They put them in bare bowls because "well, they don't need more, and they die soon anyway, and they're not that bright". They don't do anything about stimulation because "well, they're not that bright, and they die soon anyway". These statements would be troubling, except that the premises are totally flawed to begin with! When properly cared for, goldfish live decades - so all those fish that "died soon anyway" did so because they were killed by incompetent owners. And given that you can teach a goldfish to do a variety of tricks, I'm not so sure they're as unintelligent as all that. It's cruelty to have an animal and not give it any form of stimulation at all, it's like locking them in solitary for their whole life!

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Two articles on two different kindergartens.

One on a charter school that "justifies" its trip to the farm by calling it "test prep".

Some of the comments are disgusting, blaming parents for kids not going "to the zoo". When are they supposed to go to the zoo? On a weekday, when it closes at 5? On the weekend, when it costs $12 per person and is crowded besides and you have to do your shopping and your cleaning and visit family and go to church? Uncool, guys.

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And one about an absurdly expensive private school for gifted kids

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An article on zero waste facilities and communities

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And finally, one on problems faced by African immigrants in the Bronx

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Interesting comment on the charter school article, btw...

As an Army psychologist in the late Sixties, one of my jobs was administering standardized IQ tests to pre-school children from military families. One question: "Where would you go to buy milk?". The kids invariably answered, "The commissary". That's what the Army called its on-post supermarket, but it wasn't on the list of correct answers. We were powerless to apply logic to the test protocol, so who knows how many lives have been negatively affected by this and other examples of one culture imposing its view of reality on another?

I thought this wasn't supposed to happen...?

My nieces are so bright and special to me :)

We were reading The Talking Eggs the other day.

Great story. The first girl (the nice one) goes and follows the instructions that the old woman (kinda like Baba Yaga, but without the chickenfooted house) gives her, and is rewarded both then and later. And the second girl, predictably, doesn't and isn't.

As we were reading, and we got to the second girl entering the hen house after stealing the old woman's head (she really isn't very nice, this girl), I asked if the old woman had told her the truth. I wasn't paying much attention, and assumed she had - if the girl had just taken the plain eggs like her sister, she would have been rewarded just the same, even though she WAS a nasty piece of work.

And Ana said "No, because last time she said to throw them over your right shoulder, and this time she said to throw them over your left!" I knew as soon as she said it that she was correct. In all these old stories, nobody says to do anything on the left side unless the RIGHT side is the correct one. I know this because I've read many fairy tales and also because I'm a lefty and as a kid that sort of detail irked me a lot more than it does today. (Of course, it's very hard to throw anything over your right shoulder unless you use your left hand. Try it!) But Ana hasn't read nearly as many fairy tales as I have, or even as I had at her age, and she's never had any reason to notice handedness at all except that I occasionally sit on the wrong side of her when writing or eating and have to move so we don't bump elbows. She only noticed because she paid attention to this one detail in a book she was reading with me for the second time ever.

As for Evangeline, she said something yesterday that made me think "LOL, like on BSG", but for the life of me I can't remember what on earth she said! VERY annoying. But it was cute.

WHAT THE EVERLASTING FUCK?????????

Toyota is running one of the most disgusting and ill-chosen "promotions" ever in the history of bad ideas.

What the FUCK they were thinking, I don't know.