Teeny Manolo

It seems there is a new children’s retailer on the scene, called Crazy 8, which is owned by the same company that manufactures Gymboree.  I would equate them with The Children’s Place as far as target pricing.  They’ve got a good selection of clothing for newborns up to tweens.  And, for a limited time due to the launch of their new internet site, all shipping is free.  They’ve got a really good sale going on right now as well. The clothes are fairly stylish for the price, so get going!

Here are some of my favorites.

For girls:

 This double-breasted terry jacket is on sale for $16.99.

For boys:

This barn jacket with corduroy collar is on sale for only $23.99

For baby girls:

A smocked terry hoodie on sale for $11.99

For baby boys:

A zip front cardigan on sale for $12.99

Happy shopping! Because I know if there is anything we love more than our kids, it just might be a good sale and free shipping!

Who says Britney Spears is a bad mom? Why, she’s already got the boys’s Halloween costumes sorted! That’s what I call being involved!

Every now and again our mysterious overlord The Manolo descends from his Chilean ski lodge, jets over from his villa on Lago de Como, or pries himself out of the greedy Parisian grasp of that notorious publicity hound Yves Saint Laurent to visit upon us the linkie lurve, as his dear Texan friend Jerry pronounces it.
And this pleases us, it do. It makes us feel all tingly inside, like the Angels, sitting in the hot tub with Bosley, listening to Charlie sing their praises. And we look to once again do our best for him.

In particular, by stealing from him.

Oh, don’t look at me like that. Don’t you tell me that Sabrina, Jill and Kelly never took home a stapler. I only know they didn’t take home a pad of Post-its because they hadn’t been released to the public yet. But, come to think of it, Charlie would have had some anyway. Charlie was probably sleeping with Miss Moneypenny and getting all the cream James Bond was too high and mighty to skim off, the fool!

Right, the stealing. That brings us back to stealing. It’s a blog post about stealing.

Well, as you can imagine, a well-connected guy like The Big M knows a lot of people. Heck, I can’t count the times he’s told me to “take a message” when tiresome old Madonna, George Clooney, or Bono is on the line. He gets around. To places you and I have never heard of. Without paying the cover. And he brings back things like this…click on to see the Secret Files of the Manolo… (more…)

As a collectivist denizen of darkest Canuckistan myself, I totally heart these. We should make them standard uniform in our military; it would make peacekeeping duties in former Soviet republics just that much more lively, don’t you think? I certainly hope a portion of the proceeds from sales are going to support urban renewal projects in Havana, yet somehow one doubts. They were, after all, hanging up next to the Pink Panther socks, and the Pink Panther is a well-known right-wing Libertarian.

Does his agent know about this?

Stolen from Houseplant Picture Studio, via Nag on the Lake.

And of course, no guerrilla fashion ensemble would be complete without:

As the Manolo says, patent leather is one of fall’s hottest trends. These patent leather Mary Janes from Iacovelli are expensive, but so very adorable! I love the heart buckles and embroidered flowers. And talk about attention to detail- they even made the bottom all purty! That way your little darling can leave a path of flowers wherever she treads. At least in theory, anyway. We all know the trail that young children leave behind, and unless they are at a wedding, it is rarely floral in nature.

Developing an appreciation for Nine Inch Nails before you’ve even outgrown the car seat? This kid is shockingly precocious, and no doubt destined to intimidate entire classrooms with his effortless cool!

As the YouTube commenter said, I just hope nobody catches him singing the words to Closer on the playground!

Speaking of food, I think one of the most important skills you can teach your child is how to cook for themselves.

When your kid is finally able to move out of the house, is it your wish that they subsist solely on EasyMac and frozen burritos? And when they really feel like living it up, some bagel bites?

If not, then you have to bring them into the kitchen. Make no mistake, it is messy. Flour will be spilled all over the counters and the floor. Eggshell pieces will undoubtedly fall into the bowl due to overenthusiastic cracking, necessitating patience and a spoon to fish them out. Not that anything like that has happened in my kitchen. Nope, nosirree.  However, a little bird told me that the key thing to do when something along those lines occurs is to purposely add something crunchy to the recipe.  But I personally have no firsthand knowledge of this.

Bringing children into the kitchen means they need to be protected from themselves, and the most efficient way to do this is with an apron.

Aren’t these adorable? You can’t tell from the picture, but they also have pockets on the front.

And even if your kitchen doesn’t quite escape from the destruction, at least your kids will have an apron-shaped area of cleanliness on their bodies.                 

Our own version of BoingBoing’s patented Unicorn Chaser.

We’ve had some complaints about the post below this (and it is indeed strong stuff if you came here looking for tips on back to school shopping), so we are offering, in lieu of smelling salts, recourse to our #1 favorite mindwash of all time: the ever-popular, mindless, yet irresistible force of nature that is We Like tha Moon, by the Spongmonkeys (and no, that’s not a spelling mistake). This is so strange, yet so cute in a Terry Gilliam Was My Babysitter kind of way, that it gets both the “That’s Just Wrong” tag and the “The Cuteness Abounds” tag.

Toddlers like this song even better than stoners do. Not that I know any stoners. Oh, perish the thought!

And lookie: here’s the lyrics.

We like the moon
coz it is close to us.
We like the MOOOOOON!
But not as much as a spoon
coz that’s more use for eating soup
and a fork isn’t very useful for that
unless it has got many vegetables
and then you might be better off with a chopstick.
Unlike the moon
It is up in the sky
It’s up there very high
but not as high as maybe dirigibles or zeppelins
or lightbulbs
and maybe clouds
and puffins also I think maybe they go quite high too
maybe not as high as the moon.
Coz the moon is very high.
We like tha moon
Tha moon is very useful everyone.
Everybody like the moon.
Because it light up the sky as night and it lovely and it make the tide go
and we like it
but not as much as cheese.
We really like cheese
we like zeppelins
We really like them
and we like kelp
and we like moose
and we like deer
and we like marmots
and we like all the fluffy animals.
We really like tha moon.

I had always marveled at Mariska Hargitay’s cheekbones, and then when I found out her mother was Jayne Mansfield, it all made sense.

And look at her son, so cute with his blankie!

They are sensibly pushing him around in a McClaren Quest Sport stroller. Mariska has excellent taste, because this is exactly the same stroller I bought for my son when we were ready to move him out of his infant system. She joins Gwen Stefani and Sarah Jessica Parker in sharing my stroller preference. I am such the trendsetter, I know!

I can’t say too many good things about this stroller. It is an umbrella stroller with heft, but not added weight. It has an all aluminum frame construction so it won’t fall apart in a year, and which makes it easy to push around without feeling like you are trying to steer a bus. It turns on a dime, and it is very comfortable for the young ones. It folds up very compactly and have I said already that it weighs practically nothing? I have been known to lug it around by the shoulder strap. With no complaint. At Disneyland no less! And I think I only clipped maybe one or two people with it. Because they weren’t paying attention, of course.

Also, my husband loves it because he is 6′2′ and McClaren strollers were the only ones that made the handles high enough for him to be comfortable pushing it instead of having to walk like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Trust me, he has never been able to use that excuse to not push the stroller.

And speaking of husbands, Mariska’s is sporting some pretty fierce loafers!

I need to focus on some children other than my own right now.  Especially since mine just spilled his drink all over his father’s library book   And so I give you Maddox and Pax Jolie-Pitt.  I never realized, but I wonder if they purposely named them both so their names ended in x?  I know, I have way too much time on my hands.

This picture is what life is all about.  This is exactly the kind of super fantastic-ness that the Manolo alluded to in his introductory post.  When the world becomes a place where a kid can’t parade around in silly glasses, then that’s a world I don’t want to live in anymore.

And, how much do I love Maddox and his bad self?  Pax is a cutie as well, although I think that with all the hauling around of children that Angelina does, methinks she has no need for the gym.