conuly

Those of you with kids, or who teach kids, or who have ever been around kids, or who have ever even been kids may know that children like to imitate adults. It's a big part of childhood, and an important part of the learning process.

Evangeline likes to pick up discarded Metrocards and "swipe" them before ducking the turnstile. She'll even do it on the bus (putting the card at the dispenser, beeping, and then going to sit down) if there's no line and I let her. Ana used to do that too. The nieces both enjoy putting things in containers and declaring that it's soup, or cake.

This desire to imitate grown-ups and bigger children permeates everything. Evangeline is desperate to read why? Because Ana reads, and I read, and her parents and Nanen read. Ana likes to flip pancakes and head to the corner store by herself why? Because these are GROWN-UP tasks.

And of course, as they're young children, one important part of being grown-up, from their perspective, is taking care of young children. They ask me to put their dolls and stuffed animals "up" in various carriers. They buckle them into the toy carseat. They give them time-outs, and naps, and meals. They catch adults and ask *them* to play the baby as well if they can! And of course, they breastfeed their toys. Sometimes they bottlefeed, and sometimes they clarify that they're using cups, but quite often they put the doll to the chest and make lipsmacking noises to indicate that the baby is having milk.

It's really cute, too.

A breastfeeding-friendly hospital in England put up a poster that features, among other things, a toddler pretending to nurse her doll. Well, why not? It's cute! Awwwww! Who could possibly object to a picture of a kid pretending to be a mom like her own Mommy?

Why I even ask that question, I don't know.

It's offensive. It's unnecessary. It's wrong, disgusting, not normal. NOT NORMAL??? What could be more normal than a kid acting like a kid? What could be more normal than babies nursing - the same way the vast majority of babies that have ever lived have been fed? What could be more normal than any of this?

To my knowledge, breastfeeders don't go en masse to the toystore and take all the dolls with all their toy bottles and then throw hissy fits about how "disgusting" it is. So can the rest of you show them a little... if not respect, at least common sense?

So if you happen to think that the subject matter of the poster is totally okay (for crying out loud, the shirt isn't even lifted!), there's information on how you can write to the hospital to lend your support here.

Gotta love that nursery rhyme.

Unfortunately, somebody afterwards pulled out the story about "Ring around the Rosie" being about the Plague.

And again, I say, that's just an urban legend. I haven't done any firsthand research, and I don't intend to, because every last reference I've seen has scads of information of it's own, starting with the "nope, didn't see it written until centuries after the plague was gone" bit, through the "well, the older versions are very unlike the one we're used to now, and don't mention ashes at all, many of them also don't mention falling down in any sense whatsoever" information, with various versions collected both historically and from modern oral tradition.

No evidence for the plague story whatsoever.

The only interesting thing about it is that people do insist on telling their children about the plague story. That would make for an interesting study: why do we do this to our kids? It's bad enough we sing them songs about death (rock-a-bye-baby) and eyes being gouged out (hush-a-bye, don't you cry), but we turn honest-to-god innocent nursery rhymes into epidemics. I don't get it.

500 years from now, they'll be saying that the Hokey-Pokey (with slightly changed lyrics, of course) is obviously all about autism from that "horrible epidemic", see if they don't. Or maybe they'll pick epilipsy, but that's not quite common, is it? Bit of nonsense, when it's clearly all about sex.