Teeny Manolo

We can’t keep the whole blogosphere to ourselves, and we can’t put these topics any better than these guys did, so we are simply handing you a heaping helping of links from around the parentblogosphere and instructing you to enjoy them responsibly. Post in moderation. Wait one half-hour before swimming or operating heavy machinery.

Mini-Me fashion designers from Harper’s Bazaar (Sassybella) Mini Lagerfeld? The corruption of innocence was never so fabulous, darling.

Prepare for the Monday Melee! (Fracas) Your syllabic resonant consonants will never be the same.

Rosette Nebula (Maya’s Granny) My God! It’s full of stars!

Heart-Shaped Nebula (Smoke & Mirrors) What’s at the heart of the universe?

Notes to a Stressed Past Self (Work it, Mom!) Now who do we get to deliver it?

Tadpolecast (Petite Anglaise) The Tadpole sings in tongues.

Are You Kidding Me? (WhiteTrash Mom)  St. Mary’s Academy of Stupidity

Back in My Day, a Man Was a Man and a Stroller Was a Stroller (dadsmacker) and we had to tame them ourselves, uphill in the snow

Which Celebrities are Packing a Passenger? (Celebrity Baby Scoop) And Colin Farrell has alibis for all of them

Wheel Chairs for Iraqi Kids (lilSugar) Donations accepted

Lessons from a High School Dropout (Fluttering Butterflies) Some lessons you learn too late

Bra-vo! (Kvetch Blog) Somebody’s girl has a head start on the superfantastic life

This is How New Parents Spend Friday Night (dooce) The human brain goes missing when it comes in close proximity to a chubby baby

Just a few days ago Target launched a new baby collection, a collaboration with DwellStudio.  DwellStudio is an upscale designer known for their modern, colorful graphics.  As with most designer team-ups at Target, style is offered at a low price.  And seeing how a regular crib set from the DwellStudio line runs upwards of $384.00, a discount would be deeply appreciated. 

The graphics featured at Target are simpler than the pricier ones, but that is to be expected.  But the looks are similar, and the DwellStudio imprimatur is apparent. And I like that the line is very inclusive.  From rugs to lamps to wall decals, they’ve got you covered. .

Take this Olivia 3-Pc Crib Set, featured at Target and currently on sale for $65.00!

Source

And compare it to DwellStudio’s Garden Blossom set:

Source

OK, so the more expensive one is photographed in a prettier room, but the cheaper set is not that far off! Think of how many diapers/bibs/books/whatever you could buy with the savings!

Apparently Kanye West, for whom I have an inexplicable weakness (but then, I have a thing for egomaniacs, they remind me of … me) is, apparently, quite the blogger. And good for him. Like all bloggers, sometimes he gets it right, sometimes he gets it wrong, and sometimes he splits the difference.

Like this:

Because we all know a $15,00.00 baby carriage covered with precious metals and diamonds is totally justified.

From KanyeUniverseCity, via WhatWouldJCrewDo?

Read and learn, people. Read and learn.

In the vast spectrum of parenting books available, a handful stand out as classics.

Safe Baby Handling Tips is one of them.

Seriously, seriously. You do not want to get that wrong!

Includes the wonderful “responsibility spinner,” sure to see a great deal of use at three in the morning. See also: Safe Baby Pregnancy Tips! I can’t wait for the Safe Teenager Handling Tips edition to come out. What would you use to handle a teenager safely? Tongs? Forklift? The Jaws of Life? Pentagram?

The lovely and superfantastic Mindy asks:

I’ve been knocking around the Internet over the past week or so, trying to find information about recycling car seats.  I found that the two seats left from my older kids were on the cusp of expiration. I registered for a new one, but was stuck wondering if I had to pitch the old ones into a landfill.  I would much rather do something less environmentally destructive with them, if possible.

If the car seat doesn’t have a recycling symbol on it, the best directions I received were to strip them of their straps and padding, then chop them up and throw them in the regular trash.  (The more destroyed they are, the better, in order to prevent Dumpster divers from reusing an unsafe seat.)  Really?  There’s nothing better than that, considering the number of car seats which expire or are involved in crashes every year?

Does anyone at Teeny Manolo know anything to do? 

An excellent question, Mindy! It practically boggles the mind to think of how many car seats are out there. They are so big and bulky, it seems like it wouldn’t take all that many of them to pile up to the top of a landfill in no time flat. There has to be something that can be done with them, right?

Well, sort of.

Because all child car seats have an expiration date, like those eggs you just bought, the options are fairly limited. It irritates me to think that something that looks perfectly functional is not, but we have to take the word of the manufacturers that over time, the plastics and materials in the car seats degrade. We have Space Shuttles making multiple trips into outer space and back, but can’t seem to make a car seat that works past six years. OK, a little side rant there.  Back to the question at hand.

How can we dispose of our expired car seat and still give ourselves the environmental warm fuzzies?

To find out the answer…

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I find the relation of the architect to the client in America today wonderfully eccentric, bordering on the perverse. In the past, those who commissioned and paid for palazzi, cathedrals, opera houses, libraries, universities, museums, ministries, pillared terraces, and winged villas didn’t hesitate to turn them into visions of their own glory. Napoleon wanted to turn Paris into Rome under the Caesars, only with louder music and more marble. And it was done. His architects gave him the arc de Triomphe and the Madeleine.
Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House

Now, we’re all for a healthy amount of recycling, redecorating, and re-purposing, and well aware of the (slightly muffled) ticking environmental time bomb that is disposable diapers. Indeed, we ourselves used nothing but cloth diapers when we were ourselves toilet training and later nannying and also when we were wrapping the horses’ legs for shipping to the hunt meet, for lo, we used to work for Greenpeace and are wise in the ways of reducing our trash loads and hate low-grade guilt.

But we are not sure A) why we routinely use the first-person plural, B) exactly how we feel about shopping at a Walmart that has been adorned with decorations made from the cast-off bits of disposable diapers.

From the Consumerist:

…the store features “decorative floor boards and moldings are made from the material leftover from making the leg holes in disposable diapers.”

Yes, really. We weren’t aware that producing “leg holes” resulted in a lot of waste, but we sure are happy to hear that it’s being put to good use. Here are some other features of a “green” Walmart:

• The exposed concrete floor made of waste left over from coal operations
• A new system for keeping refrigerated food cold that lowers the use of refrigerant by 90 percent and in turn reduces greenhouse gas emissions
• Motion-sensitive light-emitting diodes (LED) in refrigerator and freezer cases
• Doors in the meat and dairy refrigerated sections instead of open refrigerator shelves
• 200 skylights that allow electric lights to go down when the sun comes out.

But what do they do when the sun goes down on Architecture?

Cigars are so Twentieth Century! The next time you welcome a blessed event/accident into this world, pass around something personalized, trendy, and highly nutritious.

Rice Babies:

Japanese Yosimiya is selling bags of rice printed with a newborn’s photo, name and date of birth. The bags are shaped to resemble a swaddled baby. But the key feature is that the bags contain the baby’s exact weight in rice.

This is the very definition of a cute idea, and could, in fact, be improved only by including matching donations to the food bank. Mind you, there’s alway some killjoy who’ll hand it back, asking for something more Atkins-friendly. Oh, well. It’s good to find out who the bad fairy is before the christening, I always say.

Interestingly, at a price of $32 US (3500 Yen) this puts rice babies at an average of $4.27 per pound, whereas white rice sells for $2.52 a pound, and live human babies apparently sell to the State of Texas for around $66 per pound, although the production time is longer, giving a rather pitiful net return on investment of only $0.07 per hour of production time.

Obviously, you’d be better off convincing all your trendy friends to become pregnant and give you rice babies instead of growing real ones of your own. Lower in fat, too.

For some reason, there has been a mini baby boom over the past few years, and no less than five people I know are currently expecting.  That’s a lot of babies, which turns into a lot of baby showers to attend.  And because I love my friends, I will suck it up and grudgingly gladly play umpteen games of “Baby Bingo” and guessing how many diaper pins are in the jar.

Baby registries are highly popular, but sometimes new mothers don’t know what they need.  They think they know what they need, but they really don’t.  How do I know? Because I was one of them. 

So, that is where Glinda steps in to help to find you the best of the best.

Diaper Dekor Plus Diaper Disposal System

If the mom-to-be is using disposable diapers, this is the way to go. A bit more expensive than the Genie, it is a similar but improved version.  As an added bonus, you can operate it with one hand.

Petit Appetit Cookbook: Easy, Organic Recipes to Nurture Your Baby and Toddler

I like this book because it doesn’t stop at recipes for only babies, it continues with meals for toddlers. This greatly increases its versatility, and new moms need all the versatility they can get! 

Built NY Double Thirsty Tote

This neoprene holder allows you to strap on two feeding bottles, sippy cups, cans, or whatever onto pretty much anything, anywhere.  Also comes in black, pink, and blue.

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The cuteness a-bounds!

Stolen from Seismic Twitch
Maybe Bambi would behave better on this?

(Looking for the TeenyManolo Sweepstakes? Go here)

My friends, this is just wrong on SO MANY LEVELS.

This is an actual product sold at a very popular pet supply source.  Talk about treating your pet like a baby, there is now a “Kitty Bjorn” for you to indulge your delusional self with.

Is having to hold your cat’s ass on the entire walk worth it?  I dunno.

All I can say is that anyone who puts their cat in this thing deserves exactly what they get. 

Which may or may not include scratches to the groin. 

(Looking for the TeenyManolo Sweepstakes? Go here)