You may have heard by now that Lego has come out with a new line designed specifically for girls.

And you know, I’m good with that. I think that even though the concept of Lego is universal, not every girl wants to build police cars and assault vehicles and whatnot.

But this?

This seems just a bit too genderized for me. I don’t have a problem with having things like the tree house or the pet house, but why oh why does everything have to have pink and purple? Could they have not launched the new sets with regular colors?

This is an old advertisement from the 70′s (I think) in which the girl, admittedly a bit tomboy-ish looking, is holding a creation built out of standard Lego bricks.

What happened between then and now?

I had my own Lego sets in the 70′s, and granted, it was a “house” set with a kitchen and living room, but I loved it. It wasn’t pink or purple or glittery, and yet it was one of my favorite toys.

Imagine that!

Now, I know I told you I would have the downsides to homeschooling for you today, but then I realized it was Wednesday.

Nobody wants to hear complaints on a Wednesday.

So, I bring to you the tumblr My Parents Were Awesome, and some of the awesomeness contained therein.

If you’ve cared enough to notice, there has been a distinct lack of original thought here on good old Teeny Manolo.  Go figure that this is turning out to be a busy, weird, distracting summer. 

Hopefully, maybe it is for you too and you won’t have noticed at all.

Buzzfeed has a cute article addressing 25 things kids today won’t even know about.  Here are my favorites,  and no, I couldn’t get behind the 90′s Nickelodeon cartoons, which sucked.   The only 90′s cartoons I liked were The Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain. The rest, pfffft.

Why wasn’t a rotary phone on this list?


Cursive writing. Going the way of the dodo?

Memorizing a phone number, which is a good one. I still remember my parent’s first phone number.

God, how many hours of my pre-teen and teenaged life did I spend making mix tapes? Probably too many.

Ahhh, VHS tapes, how I hated thee. My son has no idea what I mean when I say, “Be kind, rewind.” That’s probably a good thing.

I thought I was so kickass with my Walkman in high school. I used it mostly when I waited to play volleyball games, whether a regualar season match or a weekend tournament. There was a lot of waiting around, what can I say?

Go read the whole list here.

I present to you a vintage ad for a laxative that is currently making the rounds:

I’m not kidding when I say that this conversation could well have happened between my husband and me just yesterday.

Boing Boing via Sociological Images

44% of you consider the weather when deciding how long to leave leftovers out.  17% do a couple of hours no matter what, another 17% of you don’t even care, and another 17% of you REALLY don’t care.  Only 3% of you are as anal as I am, it seems.  Er, well, maybe that was just me.

On Friday I got my hair did, and as I was writing the check out to my stylist, I thought to myself that I couldn’t even remember the check I wrote before that.

Buzzfeed has a current article with pictures of 50 kids “cooler than you’ll ever be.”

I beg to differ, although some of them certainly are.  Here are the highlights.  Although it must be said there is a distinct lack of girls on the original list.

It seems that 43% of you hate housework as much as I do, but unfortunately, aren’t able to have someone come in and do it for you.  I remember when we put our home up for sale when I was six months pregnant (stupid, yes!) and for the six weeks or so it took to sell it, we had a cleaning crew come in every week because there was no way I could keep the house in good enough shape to show it.  And it was heavenly.   15% of you try not to stress out about it, 12% of you do have someone come in to clean for you, and 6% fear that “Hoarders” will be knocking on their door at any moment.  Only 3% of you actually like cleaning, and now I know why all of us get along so well!

Today I’m all about the travel plans.  Or possible lack thereof.  Some friends of ours are going on a Disney Cruise around the Mediterranean this summer, and I have to admit I’m a teensy bit jealous.

The other day on Manolo Beauty (and if you haven’t gone over there yet and checked it out, it is a rather good site, if I do say so myself) I had mentioned a lunch box I used to take to school every day.  Being the 70′s/80′s, it was of course made out of metal.  That post got me thinking about those old metal lunch boxes and how different they are to the ones kids use today.

The one my son takes to school is fantastic.  It is insulated, big enough to fit everything he needs but small enough to still fit in his backpack, has a front pocket, and just does an all around good job of keeping his drink and whatever fruit I pack in there cold until lunchtime. 

So very different from the metal ones, which did a crappy job of keeping anything warm or cold, but damn, did they look good.  We didn’t know it then, but we were toting around compact works of art.  Sure, a lot of those lunchboxes were just advertising disguising themselves as something useful, but they were so much more visually stimulating.

Today we definitely choose function over form, but I can’t help but be a bit nostalgic about those metal boxes.  And really, they were useful as weapons, too.  I love things that can do double duty.  Today’s lunch boxes are soft-sided and useless in a fight.

Join me as I take a trip down memory lane…

I would have loved to have this lunch box!

Never knew anyone with one of these, but I covet it even now.

It seems out of all the recycled 80′s characters, Holly Hobbie was totally left in the dust. Confession, I had this lunch box. And I hated it. And I hated Holly Hobbie. She stood for nothing other than her dumb patchwork clothing.

I NEVER got into Strawberry Shortcake, but I was totally in the minority. I guarantee you someone in my class had this lunchbox.

Yes, we all watched Mork & Mindy, but I don’t know anybody who liked it enough to own a lunchbox with it. Maybe I was hanging with the wrong crowd.

Yes, I owned a Cabbage Patch Kid, who was inexplicably a boy.

I can sing the theme song to this show to this day.

Anybody else think the Sleestaks were pretty lame?