For 2012’s worst “Toys Oppressive And Destructive to Young Children.”
Wow.
Destructive is such a strong word, as is oppressive.
What are some of these dastardly things?
Hmmm, you’ll find a Lego Friends product, as well as a Fisher Price toy, and even a ball.
Personally, I kind of hate all of the “smart” Fisher Price toys. They creep me out.
Voting ends December 5, so hurry!
My husband and I have been mulling over party ideas for our three year old daughter. She was born after Halloween, but very soon after, so we thought about a Halloween-themed party. Or we thought about just renting a bounce house, putting it in the front yard and being done.
Silly us, we should be doing this.
My daughter loves swimming.
Now if only we lived in Florida.
I don’t like these.
And I don’t just mean the bad Photoshopping of the backgrounds.
Little girls in bikinis are a big pet peeve of mine, even before I had a daughter. And now Liz Hurley has decided to jump on the early sexualization of young girls bandwagon with her own clothing line. I think the purple one, with the ring on the top piece, is especially egregious. Little girls are not women, nor should they dress exactly like them!
I just don’t get the whole little girls in bikinis thing. If anything, we should be covering our kids’ skin as much as possible, not exposing most of it to the sun. I don’t do a long sleeve rash guard, but both of my kids wear short-sleeved ones.
I know that Jessica Simpson also took some heat for posting photos of her infant in a bikini, which although the baby is cute as a button, I’m not totally down with it. I read that it was supposed to be a retort on how Simpson should be in “bikini body” shape after giving birth, but still.
Fight the bikinis, girls, fight the bikinis!
All right, 84% of you hate the idea of the candy corn Oreo. 10% want to at least taste one, and 5% are all over them. I think I need to eat one just out of sheer curiosity. But I’ll let someone else buy the box.
Now, have you heard about the college professor breastfeeding her infant during a lecture?
It is difficult to believe in this age of attachment parenting that ideas such as this were once popular:
Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight. Shake hands with them in the morning.
…
When you are tempted to pet your child remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument. An instrument which may inflict a never-healing wound, a wound which may make infancy unhappy, adolescence a nightmare, an instrument which may wreck your adult son or daughter’s vocational future and their chances for marital happiness.
Shake hands with them in the morning! That is classic!
My son would come into the bed when he woke up in the morning and snuggle with me/us until we kicked him out. I never saw that as unnatural for a second.
Now that quote up there? Totally unnatural.
And of course, written by a man.
Is your tween girl hankering to dress like a literary character?
Well, she’d better be prepared to slut it up as Hermione Granger, because tight, short, and shiny is most of what is out there on the store-bought costume front. I’m sure you can find some that aren’t, but all of those listed as “most popular” are the ones that show the most skin.
This is called Robyn Da Hood Tween Costume, and I just can’t with the name. Perhaps it has its origins in some movie that my seriously unhip 41 year old self does not know about, but I still can’t no matter where it is from.
Hermione certainly is looking grown up. May I interest you in a shirt, Hermione? Shirts are your friend.
She certainly looks ready for a party, although I’m not sure it will include tea.
The list is practically endless.
And extremely depressing for us non-sewers.
It seems that this little girl is being frightened by someone else entirely.
Photo Credit: Star Foreman
We always do a family egg hunt every Easter, and sometimes we go to hunts sponsored by local parks. This year was one of those years, we were meeting a friend of mine who has a daughter almost the same age as the Munchkinette.
So of course there is a taped off area full of eggs, and for our age group (1-3 years) a bunch of kids who really didn’t know exactly what was going on. I know mine certainly didn’t.
But the parents sure did.
The parents kept pushing the tape boundaries, inching ever closer to the eggs. One lady in front of us had extended the tape a good three feet into the “egg area” so that the city workers were forced to move some of the eggs which were now very much in arm’s reach.
That should have given me my first clue as to how this was going to go down.
For our age group, we were instructed to not help our children, and only let them pick up what they themselves could put in their basket.
They might as well have been whispering in a hurricane for all the good that announcement did.
When the air horn went off, I of course allowed my daughter to bend over and pick up an egg, only to have a helicopter parent of another child swoop it into her arms, along with the dozen other eggs she already had.
I loudly exclaimed that only the kids were allowed to pick up eggs, and was treated as if I did not exist.
This woman was definitely not the only person with this mindset, as I saw kids who could barely walk with baskets filled to the brim with eggs.
Mine got four.
WTF, people?
No wonder cities have been cancelling egg hunts.
This stuff is FREE. There were some kids who got no eggs at all. Your precious spawn truly does not care about the contents of the stupid eggs, which tend to be things more commonly found at the 99 Cent Store. Would it kill people to actually follow the rules and have a little humanity?
An early life lesson for my daughter is that the answer is yes, it apparently would.