crooked house

My Wonder Girl

Sylvie has decided to go as Wonder Woman for Halloween this year. I'm delighted by this switch in her allegiance to the Disney princesses. She is now obsessed with superheroes and spends a great deal of time making up new ones. If DC suddenly puts out a comic featuring Bubble Girl, Cookie Girl, or Blood Girl, you'll know they hired Sylvie. Those are just a few memorable ones out of the dozens she's suggested to me over the past few days. Oh, yes, and Princess Girl and Princess Boy, so I guess she hasn't forgotten completely about the princesses.

This is her fighting face. And this is what happens when she gets really mad:

You think I'm kidding but it's happened before.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Nails Parenting

The Crappy Laws of Parenting

 

The brilliant Amber Dusick reveals the eight crappy laws of parenting.

I Love You Just The Way I Am

Sometimes that's all I got. From Super Relax via Black Belt Momma.

Mahone Bay Scarecrow Festival Carved Pumpkin Display: Retro Jack-o-lanterns

 

Some of these retro Jack-o-lanterns remind me of the original illustrations for the Oz books.

All of these pumpkins were carved by Jo-Ann Ramsay of Jo-Ann's Deli Market in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia for display during the town's annual Scarecrow Festival. This is Jo-Ann's Market:

Manners for the Junior Set

Yesterday we took Luke into Chapters, the giant Canadian chain bookstore, to use a fifteen dollar gift certificate he got for his birthday. He zoomed up and down the aisles in a frenzy of delight, pulling book after book off  the shelf.

"Luke, you don't have enough money for all these books," I tried to explain. "You've got enough money for maybe two or three books, tops."

"Don't worry 'bout it, Mommy," he said, pulling five or six Dora books off the shelf and tossing them onto the floor without even really looking at them.

I sat down and began picking them up. David pointed to a book on the shelf right behind me.

"Maybe we should get him that one," he said.

It was Munro Leaf's How to Behave and Why.*

Leaf was best known for The Story of Ferdinand but in the 1940s he wrote a series of rather pedantic but charming books about behaviour that have been reprinted in the last five years or so. (The latest is Brushing Your Teeth Can Be Fun.) 

I was reminded of this when I was reading Patricia's post about the book Goops and How to Be Them.

The Goops appeared around 1900 and demonstrated, through the unpleasant antics of bald macrocephalic children, how not to behave. The Goops, in turn, reminded me of Goofus and Gallant, a cartoon fixture of Highlights magazine when I was a kid. I think they still appear in its pages today.

Found on Metafilter. Click on it to enlarge if you can't read it. Other possible things for Goofus to say:

"Your father ought to get a job."

"That coat is so last season."

Although perhaps that second one is more the kind of thing Gallant would say, albeit much more tactfully. If you've got a suggestion, add it in the comments. The unfortunate thing about these kinds of instructional materials is that the rude kids are generally more entertaining.

*And no, in the end, Luke didn't choose to use his gift certificate on How to Behave and Why . Surprise, surprise. (Which I always mentally pronounce as "soo-preez, soo-preez" ever since our waiter said it when David ordered a hamburger and a coke in a café in Paris.)

This Is Important.

I think I first saw this perfect cartoon on Fuse #8 but I can't find it over there now. I swiped it from Language Log where they are very fittingly debating about the cartoonist's choice of word order. Should it have been "Someone on the internet is wrong"? Hmm.

I've been feeling a bit frustrated lately because I haven't had a moment to put the internet to rights. For instance I've been ruminating on the subject of excess packaging and you know you want to hear all my thoughts on that. And there was something else I wanted to make a proclamation about but I can't remember what it was right now because I can hear Luke stirring in the other room and I've let him sleep for far too long already. We'll be up till midnight. See you when I can manage to book a babysitter or when Luke starts school, whichever happens first. I know you'll be on the edges of your seats (in your pajamas, I hope) just waiting for my opinions on plastic.

Update: Mateo and Mar very kindly informed me in the comments that the comic is from xkcd, which is updated Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.