New Year’s Eve, 4pm

M: Can I sleep over at [friend]‘s tonight?

Me: Um, you don’t want to be here with us?

M: No. We’re cleaning [friend]‘s stuffed animals. We found if you put soap on the stains and let it set, the stains come out with the soap when we wash them!

Me: That’s true, but it’s easier just to put them in the washing machine. We’re going to have cheese and crackers with everybody probably around 7:30, why don’t you drop by for that?

M: No, we just want to play in the basement.

Me: OK then. Have fun! Happy New Year!

M leaves

D: So, just to be clear about this — we’re less fun than laundry.

Me: Yep.

M, singing:

L, O, double-L I, P-O-P spells lollipop, lollipop
That’s the only decent kind of candy, candy
Man who made it musta been a dandy, dandy
L, O, double-L I, P-O-P spells lollipop, lollipop
It’s a lick on a stick guaranteed to make you sick
Lollipop for me!

C, A, SS E R, O-L-E spells casserole, casserole
That’s the only decent kind of medicine, medicine
Man who made it musta been an Edison, Edison
C, A, SS E R, O-L-E spells casserole, casserole
It’s a lick on a spoon guaranteed to make you swoon
Casserole for me!

Me: What? A casserole is dinner, not medicine!
M: I know, but that’s how the song goes!
Me: I think it’s supposed to be castor oil. C, A, S-T-O-R, O-I-L spells castor oil.
M: Oh.

M: I have a new book for school — Anne of Green Gables.

Me: Oh, that’s a good one. I like that book.

M: That girl talks way too much. She’s like [friend's name] when she’s tired, all talk talk talk talk talk talk blah blah blah.

Me: Well, hon, you have been known to talk rather a lot yourself, you know.

M: Well, when I’m complaining, yes.

Once upon a time I was staffing a camp bus and there was this one little boy of about eight who DID NOT want to go to camp. He clung and clung to his mother who, in a moment of extreme madness, had actually got on the bus* to say goodbye to him.

Two of us pried the kid off the mom, one finger at a time. Finally Mom was detached (and firmly directed off the bus) but then the kid latched firmly on to the handrail on the bus stairs and couldn’t be budged. The bus couldn’t legally leave with him there in front of the white line, of course, and the mom stood three feet away from the open door, continuing to feed the drama.

Five minutes of soothing conversation with the shrieking kid got us absolutely nowhere and was making my head pound — I was, shall we say, not at my best after a long night out — and the mom was looking like she was about to lose her wits entirely and come back on the bus so finally I looked at a friend of mine and kind of hopelessly said “Help. DO SOMETHING.” He reached over and very quickly and neatly flipped the kid up over the rail into the front seat of the bus before the kid even knew what was happening. The bus driver slammed the doors closed and we were off.

The kid didn’t stop shrieking for a good long time — Barrie, IIRC.**

That kid? That kid has nothing in common with my kid.

A mere 60 hours after her arriving home from her usual summer adventures in Western Canada, today was Camp Day for M. We got to the bus departure zone today and she found her friends, ran around with them doing some excited shrill squeaking, then got on the bus for three weeks of camp without a backwards glance.

“Do you think she’ll come off again and say goodbye?” D asked, and we each gave it about 50% odds. She did, in the end. Then she got on the bus and we smiled and waved as it left, and I remembered That Kid and felt glad that my own kid chooses other forms of drama.

Maybe we’ll get a letter from her this year. I’d give that about 50% odds, too.

–
* Rule for parents at camp buses: no matter how upset your kid is (or you are) it’s best to deploy the Madagascar penguin solution: smile and wave, boys; smile and wave.

** Once he was at camp he was fine. They all are.
I did make sure to send his cabin on their canoe trip with someone other than me, though, because it was really loud shrieking.

My nephew was apparently in need of some of his own dress-up clothes so for his 3rd birthday recently, I made him a cape using these fabrics and this tutorial:

It’s totally reversible and the neck closure is done with a little bit of velcro so it’s pretty safe (the velcro comes undone easily so it would be hard to strangle yourself).

Because of the length and the way the seams are tacked down it has a pretty good swing to it, even when one is wearing a bathrobe:

Among the detritus that came home at the end of the school year, I found M’s poetry notebook. They covered cinquains, rhyming couplets and odes.

It is a brave teacher, I think, who is willing to venture into Ode territory with a class of grade 2/3/4′s.

“I like M’s poetry,” said her teacher at one interview. “It always makes sense“. So it does… mostly:

An Ode to Popcorn (By M.K., grade 4)

O popcorn how wonderful you are
Your crunch and saltiness make a delcicious snack
I love to eat you riding in the car.
I even like you when your burnt and black.

I can put flavours on you.
I love the watermelon flavour
And sometimes, in mysterys, you’re a clue.
The popcorn, yellow and crisp, I savor.

(I left the original spellings intact. I wouldn’t want to mess with anyone’s artistic decisions. )

A to-do list I found on M’s floor today.

I detect a nascent world domination plan here, which I suppose was inevitable given her genetic material.

I’m intrigued by the possibilities of the “fake lightening machien” and the “bat machien” and I wonder what the stuffed horse robots are going to do with their remote-controlled car, but I particularly like the note at the top: “*clean desk before attempting any of this”.

Having pretty much exhausted biological subjects (roadkill, organs, diseases), makers of fine plush lovies have moved into statistical distributions. You can buy a full set of ten, or individual distributions if you’re particularly fond of one.

I note they also sell “statosaur” burp cloths featuring embroidery which combines dinosaurs and statistical distributions. Excellent!

A few weeks ago I finally finished M’s quilt:

It’s roughly twin-sized – 55″ by 75.5″. I’m quite happy with it, although the back (off-white lightweight polar fleece) isn’t perfect — sewing fleece is an occult art, I fear, and even the walking foot on the machine wasn’t quite up to the task — and the binding is a little odd in spots as it was my first attempt to finish it on the machine. Still, I much preferred using the machine to do the binding. I started off finishing it by hand but it looked terrible given the fleece backing and the high contrast between the off-white fleece and the purple binding, so I figured if it wasn’t going to be perfect it may as well not bore me for eleventy-billion hours and I tossed it onto the machine. The binding, which doesn’t show up well in the picture, is the same fabric as the inner border.

I used Warm and Natural cotton batting, which is warm but relatively thin. With the fleece backing, the quilt is good alone for shoulder seasons. In winter M can toss it over her duvet.

I had some small scraps left over, mostly 4.5″ strips, so the quilt spawned two accessory projects.

First, there’s a 12″ throw pillow:

This was a project I mostly did during the sewing class M and I took together in the winter. On my own I wouldn’t have thought to add the extra detail stitching, but I like the effect. The front and back are more-or-less the same, using up 18 4.5″ squares, and there’s a narrow border of the purple binding fabric along the edges (since I also had a bit of binding left over).

I didn’t want M’s doll to feel all left out, and there were still some scraps left, so I improvised a quilted sleeping bag for her as well (and as usual, a cat decided to photobomb):

It used 8 4.5″ squares and 8 2.25″ squares of scrap fabric, as well as all but about three inches of the leftover purple binding, an extra strip of the dark purple outer border (cut in half to form the side bands on the sleeping bag), some leftover batting, and a random scrap of the binding fabric on the back the was coincidentally exactly the right size:

Now the doll will be able to join in the general mess of M’s bed:

A while ago I was chatting with someone about books and bookstores and all that sort of thing and the question was asked: so, what do I read? I answered rather stupidly — “um, not bestsellers” or somesuch — but it did remind me that I’ve fallen out of the habit of posting about books, so I’ll start to correct that now.

What do I read? The honest answer is, anything that holds still long enough for my eyes to focus on it. But I don’t have a lot of time (and even less money) for physical books, so — while I’m being honest here — I’ll admit that most of my “reading” lately has been either children’s books or audiobooks. (Although I was recently given some excellent books for my birthday, which I’m very much enjoying and which I will talk about later.)

I read a lot of kids’ books because my daughter brings them home and she has pretty fun taste in books. I like to get a sense of what she likes so I can buy her books she’ll enjoy. Given the amount of travelling she does each summer, I like to send her and/or whoever’s flying with her with lots of new books. Also, she’s a Talker so it helps to have read what she’s read if I would like to understand much of what she’s telling me.

So on that front, I can recommend Patricia C. Wrede’s four Enchanted Forest books, which have dragons and princesses and things but which are far more clever than that brief summary implies. The protagonist in the first book is a princess who flees to the dragons in search of a less vapid life and then has to explain to dozens of would-be rescuers that no, she does NOT wish to be rescued and would prefer to remain Chief Cook and Librarian to the dragons, thankyouverymuch. They’re quite fun. Fast reads in book form, and well done as full-cast audiobooks as well.

I’ve also dipped into the Dear Canada books. D calls them Canadian History Propaganda books, which is fair. M has been bringing them home from the library of her own accord. It’s a whole serious of deeply wholesome books purporting to be diaries of girls at various points in Canadian history. These I find a bit tedious but M loves them and they’re not horrible. Faint praise, but there you go. Harmless stuff.

Collectively we’ve also been enjoying the How to Train Your Dragon series, which are full of goofiness and farting and so on. The sample sentences in Dragonese are worth the price of admission.

The child has also enjoyed Kenneth Oppel’s bat books. I’ve only read the first one, and I admit I bought it for M on the basis of 1 degree of separation from Ken Oppel plus good reviews, but they are indeed good books. M’s read all of them and they led to much swooping about and pretending to be a bat, which I enjoyed much more than the princess phase, so there you go.

I’ve long had a lot of time for Dan Savage, low-bullshit un-shockable sex columnist and general sensible guy, but his latest project is really something I’d like everyone under the sun to both know about and spend an hour of their time with.

The It Gets Better Project is Dan’s attempt, through video, to convince LGBTTQetc. kids that life gets one hell of a lot better after high school and they should live to experience it. Suicide rates for LGBTTQetc. kids are appallingly high. The project was instigated by one particular suicide, but I don’t think Dan would discount any of the young lives who chose to end themselves so tragically. So, Dan has asked folks to post videos telling their own stories, under the general It Gets Better Theme. I’ve watched every single one that has been posted as of now and you know? The relief on every single face when they say “right after high school ends and you don’t have to see those people every day? It Gets Better. I promise” is both so affirming, and so simultaneously damning of the way we allow teenagers’ lives to unfold, that it’s an undeniable challenge to the apparently appalling status quo. Frankly I think any kid who’s having a bad time in middle school or high school will find immense value in this project, LGBTTQetc. or no.

Please spend an hour or two watching these videos. I’ll paste a selection of my own choosing below, beginning with Dan and his partner’s own video, but by the time I hit Post more will have been posted so see the project channel for full details and access to all current videos.

These are just a few that I’ve chosen to show. There are hundreds of others. Please give them your time, and please forward it to anyone you might know who might benefit from it, now or in future.

80/365 Sept 7: First day of school

Originally uploaded by morecoffeeplease.

To our intense dismay — because we are both strong proponents of the public school system — for the past few years we’ve found ourselves deeply dissatisfied with our local public school. Which, according to all publicly available data, is supposed to be a good school. It’s a school at 108% (or something similar) capacity, though, and there are nearly a thousand kids there from JK-8 so it’s a school that focuses very much on shallow compliance and smooth operation. It doesn’t really have time to give a fig about any particular individual student and it makes no attempt to do so. M was bored and unchallenged there, a problem which nobody attempted to rectify in any useful way, and we put up with many ridiculous and unhelpful processes. Her teacher last year in particular was absurd in her marking (examples below) and really went out of her way to set kids up to fail.

Leaving the absurd marking aside, one example. At a parent-teacher interview I caught sight of the sheet on the wall on which the teacher recorded whether or not the seven- and eight-year-old kids had, without any prompting from her (“OK kids, get your reading logs out of your backpacks NOW and put them RIGHT HERE” would be age-appropriate), turned in their reading logs on the assigned date and at the assigned time, and found a row of six or seven negative Xs beside M’s name. Why on earth, I asked the teacher, did you let this happen for more than two weeks without writing something in the @^$##@ planner that goes back and forth every day and which is supposed to convey such information? She sidestepped the question.

M’s reading log — and she was not the only one; this was the case for about a third of the class — had in fact been sent back to school on time each week in her backpack, so somehow not only was the teacher somehow failing to get the kids to turn them in, but she also wasn’t communicating anything to us that could’ve helped solve the problem. She was more interested in playing Gotcha! than in helping the kids learn. Of course, this is only one example, but if I listed all the ones I know of nobody would be able to read to the end in one sitting.

Then we looked at some of M’s work and discovered that the exact same bit of work hadn’t been done in the exact same place on each week’s spelling worksheet for fourteen weeks in a row, again with nothing mentioned in the supposedly critical planner.

At that point I admit I wrote off the teacher utterly and attempted to suppress some very stabby thoughts indeed.

By about February we were wondering whether we shouldn’t pull M out after March Break and homeschool until the end of the year. At that time I had a layoff notice for the end of March and while I may well suck as a teacher, I could not possibly suck as badly as the teacher she had. Had I been laid off this probably would’ve happened, but the layoff notice was rescinded so we focused our efforts in getting through the school year and preparing for the next.

We recognized that grade 3/4 — where you begin to read to learn instead of learning to read — is a perilous time for bright kids and that if you let them turn off, tune out and coast at this point, it’s very hard to get them back into active learning. In Toronto gifted programs used to start in grade 3 for this reason. Now they start in grade 5 or 6 — much too late. We figured we’d better do something pretty quickly because taking a flyer on M’s ending up with a teacher within her public school good enough to counter the damage her grade 3 teacher did was kind of a long shot. I hadn’t heard any particular schoolyard gossip extolling the virtues of the grade 4 teachers. The only other public option was sending her to grade-4 entry French Immersion, and the research on French Immersion didn’t lead us to conclude it was a good idea (sadly. French Immersion kids tend, in the general case, to emerge with bad English and then proceed to lose their French).

For April, May and June M went to 2 hours a week of tutoring at Oxford Learning. They were expensive and M didn’t have any particular academic issues aside from being bored, but we wanted her to remember that learning and challenging yourself could be both fun and worthwhile. Oxford did that job very well. I recommend them.

In January I sat down one night and looked up all the alternative schools within a 45-minute transit ride from our house. We ended up applying to one, but they used a lottery admission system and M’s number didn’t come up. There was no point trying other public schools in our neighbourhood. They’re all massively oversubscribed and none are taking out-of-area kids.

In early March I sat down again and went through all 174 (at the time) private elementary schools listed on the TDSB website. I eliminated schools that were unreachably distant and schools that were religious (madrassas, Christian, Jewish). I reviewed the websites of the remaining schools and among five or six possibilities ended up with a clear front-runner in the tiny Howlett Academy on Madison, next door to the Tibetan Buddhists and across from the eponymous pub.

We toured the school and OMG, it was like night and day. The kids there were engaged, the teachers customize the curriculum for every single child so they are all appropriately challenged (this is only possible with a tiny school), and oh, their processes were so, so sensible. They do everything humanly possible to set the kids up to succeed and to teach them HOW to learn as well as expecting them to then put it into action and do the learning. They have high expectations and they set kids up to meet them. The head of the school, a teacher herself, set it up to counter the flaws she perceived her own boys experienced in the public system — the exact flaws we too were perceiving.

M started there this week and yes, night and day. She loves her teacher and agrees she’s not bored and has learned stuff. Yay.

As parents we love that the school sent home a mere two forms at the beginning of the year. These forms took me 8.5 minutes to fill out, vs. the hour I spent last year, and since they were brief and efficient they didn’t leave me in a foul temper. They accomplished in about four paragraphs what took the old school twelve pages and eight separate forms.

Also, there has been nary a whiff of Comic Sans. That alone is worth I don’t know how many thousand dollars of tuition.

Walking up the street today on the way home, M and I were passed by the ice-cream truck, which then stopped a hundred metres up the street by the park.

M: The ice-cream truck comes every day in summer!
Me: Yep.
M: But not in winter.
Me: No.
M: (thoughtfully) When do you suppose is the last day of summer? For ice-cream trucks?
Me: Dunno. Soon, though.
M: Yeah.

(pause)

Me: We’d better get some ice cream just in case it’s our last chance this year, eh?
M: Good idea.

We’ll call it cheap insurance against Seasonal Affective Disorder.

(OK, maybe only three. But it felt like twenty-seven since there was hand-sewing involved.)

M is hard on pants. At this point in the year every single pair will have a rip in at least one knee. I never bother fixing them particularly well, since she’ll have outgrown them by the fall anyway, but I do some nominal patching whenever the rips get indecent.

She had two pairs of identical jeans, one with massive rips in both knees, one ripped in only one knee. She’s low on shorts and the jeans still fit, so we decided to turn the more-trashed pair into shorts. After pinning them at a good length and cutting them several inches lower, I turned up a hem and stitched it down with the sewing machine. The thread is purple because I was too lazy to reload the machine with navy thread, but oh well, purple is M’s favourite colour right now anyway. Then I turned it up again and tacked it down by hand (grumbling only a bit) and added some little ribbon flower decorations for, as Olivia the pig would say, extra beauty.

I’m pleased with how they turned out. My theory is that they may withstand the summer.

Then I had two jean-legs left over. This is the less-destroyed one.

A piece of the more-destroyed leg became a patch for the other pair of jeans. Again with the purple machine-sewed hem and the hand-applique (with more grumbling).

It’s totally noticeable, but they just have to last through the summer — camp, mucking about in barns, etc. — so who cares.

Then (having been called on to sew up a light flanellette skirt for M’s doll that same morning) it occurred to me that the leg of the jeans was probably about the right size for a doll skirt. I cut it off at an approximately suitable length, used the machine to sew a single rough hem and added a bit of elastic. Done! Pretty good for a five-minute project.

Sadly it’s a little too tight for Ms. Doll to wear while riding her horse, but she can wear it post-ride.

And there endeth the jeans.

A sad farewell to Addison, a very brave small boy who was born on my 30th birthday and who named his new immune system Steve. May there be no pain where you have gone.

Jane Siberry with k.d.lang – Calling All Angels

a man is placed upon the steps, a baby cries
and high above the church bells start to ring
and as the heaviness the body oh the heaviness settles in
somewhere you can hear a mother sing

then it’s one foot then the other as you step out onto the road
how much weight? how much weight?
then it’s how long? and how far?
and how many times before it’s too late?

calling all angels
calling all angels
walk me through this one
don’t leave me alone
calling all angels
calling all angels
we’re cryin’ and we’re hurtin’
and we’re not sure why…

and every day you gaze upon the sunset
with such love and intensity
it’s almost…it’s almost as if
if you could only crack the code
then you’d finally understand what this all means

but if you could…do you think you would
trade in all the pain and suffering?
ah, but then you’d miss
the beauty of the light upon this earth
and the sweetness of the leaving

calling all angels
calling all angels
walk me through this one
don’t leave me alone
callin’ all angels
callin’ all angels
we’re tryin’
we’re hopin’
we’re hurtin’
we’re lovin’
we’re cryin’
we’re callin’
’cause we’re not sure how this goes

50/365 March 19: Pierced ears!

Originally uploaded by morecoffeeplease.

M is very pleased with her newly-pierced ears. She chose studs with tiny pink pearls and tolerated the piercing with not even a squeak. I was a bit nervous that she’d get through the first ear and balk at the second, but I needn’t have worried.

It was oddly hard to find a place that was willing to take a child. The reputable and recommended piercing-and-tattoo places I called won’t touch anyone under thirteen, even with a parent present. If you’re an adult they’ll not only pierce pretty much any body part, they’ll brand you with a hot iron if you like. Such, I suppose, are the oddities of our current legal system.

– maybe hospitals should be nicer to midwives.

I gave birth at Women’s College Hospital, and of all places I fully expected them to support my midwives. But they were unspeakably awful to them — rude, dismissive, demeaning, the whole gamut of bad behaviour. They topped it off by ignoring me (I was admitted unplanned, following a complication; midwifery patients usually go home shortly after the birth) as totally as they could, unless they were calling me by a name I don’t use and rolling their eyes at me. I was, to put it mildly, unimpressed that a hospital that purports to support women’s health behaved so badly to an entire profession that not only purports to, but does, support women’s health..

Nursing moms need more support: Toronto

A study by Toronto Public Health of 1, 500 first-time mothers in this city found that while most new moms try breastfeeding in the hospital, only about 63 per cent are still doing it exclusively by the time they’re discharged from hospital.

Six months down the road, only 17 and a half per cent of moms are not supplementing their child’s diet with formula, the study titled Breastfeeding in Toronto – Promoting Supportive Environments found.

Breastfeeding takes support. Serious support, from the new mom’s partner, family, and all health practitioners and support staff. If you have a hospital that cares so little about women that it rolls its eyes at midwives and ignores their patients, how well supported in breastfeeding do you suppose women who give birth there tend to feel? And that’s the hospital that’s theoretically most sensitive to womens’ needs.

Yeah. No surprise there. No wonder that only 63% are breastfeeding by the time they leave hospital — probably less than 36 hours after giving birth. Shame on the hospitals.

(For the record, with my midwives’ support, I breastfed my daughter for a year.)

Starting in Senior Kindergarten, it seems to be traditional to send kids home with a badly-photocopied Canada Food Guide and some badly-photocopied grocery store sale flyers and assign a Food Groups Collage as homework.

For SK, fine, this is more-or-less appropriate: you’re five years old. You can practice reading and cutting and sticking and since it’s your first go-around with the Food Guide you might learn something. Grade 1… OK, maybe it’s a good review. Grade 2… WTF? This again? And now again in Grade 3, by which time the whole thing is just a waste of paper and gluesticks and everyone’s patience, even with the novel additions of “Good Tooth Care,” “Physical Activity” and “Safety Rules” to the assignment. This time the photocopied food pictures were so bad you could barely tell what they were, so we cast about for alternatives.

I thought it would be more interesting to do something a bit more active and connected to reality, as well as finding some way to inject some actual new learning in there somewhere.

First, we needed some pictures of food. Being lazy, I figured taking our own pictures would be faster and easier than doing a whole pile of image searches. We have a camera, we have food. Ta da! So I settled on having M explore the kitchen, pull out foods from each food group and stage a bunch of pictures. So far so good.

I have strong opinions about teaching kids to use technology appropriately — so how to work in some learning on that? I remembered I had a demo of Comic Life, which makes photo montages super-easy. M could learn how to use it in about three minutes (thus actually learning something), and then we could all escape the whole cut-and-stick part of the assignment which, by Grade 3, is neither fun nor appropriate. Excellent.

It took us about an hour to do the photos, since not only did M need to dig about in the fridge and cupboards but the various foods had (apparently) to be artistically arranged with some stuffed animal models (and we had the Physical Activity, Dental Care, etc. photos to do). I think searching for all the images we needed would have taken much longer.

It took M about another hour to put together her seven collage pages and get them all properly labelled in Comic Life.

My only involvement was to take the pictures I was told to take (I could’ve let M do it but my camera is new and I’m still a bit overprotective of it, and her own camera is not great) and to get M started on Comic Life — no helicoptering necessary. I’d share the final result but the 7-page PDF is 358Mb (oof).

Anyway. I thought I’d share the idea since this assignment seems to be issued annually to pretty much everyone and I think this version of it a) is super easy, b) is more active and less tedious than the usual cut-and-stick, c) helps the kids connect their own foods and activities to Food Guide concepts, and d) involves an appropriate bit of technology use.

Also: no effing gluesticks. Hallelujah!

Edited to add: here’s a screenshot of one page

Child: Guess what my favourite number is?

D: Three.
Me: Nine.

Child: Nope, six hundred and sixty-six!

Me: How come you like that number?

Child: I dunno, I just do. (laughs slightly evilly)

Ah, how I love Lenore Skenazy. And STATS, who interviewed her.

Perhaps the problem needed to be approached from a different angle, she thought. What if you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped by a stranger and held overnight? How long would you have to leave him outside, and unattended for that to be likely to happen? When she asked people to take a guess, the most she ever heard was three months. Some people ventured a day, an hour, and even – implausibly – ten minutes.

…

The answer to Skenazy’s question was… 750,000 years. By reframing the way the risk was framed, she took the focus away from one, and placed it on what the chance was in real time – and 750,000 years is a far more arresting and reassuring number than one in 1.5 million.

…

“I haven’t seen horrible diseases sweeping the country as a result of any child rearing technique that we’ve been using, whether it’s drinking baby formula or using a sippy cup,“ she says. “So, rather than worry about these, I worry about cars. They are the number one way children are killed.”

There are lots of interesting statistics down the side of the article (because it is STATS, after all). I would’ve like to see similar “one in” and “x years” numbers for other forms of child mortality, particularly car crashes and injuries from toys. They do give either numbers or rates-per-million, but without numbers you can compare directly it’s hard to grasp how many orders of magnitude there are between the various risks. Some sort of graph or image, even, might help, since our brains are notoriously bad at relative risk analysis.

Anyway, great interview with Ms. Skenazy. Her blog Free Range Kids has much more.