Mock Turtle

A good new kids’ album for those interested who haven’t run across it - Snacktime by Barenaked Ladies.  Tested on a recent long car trip with success.  Worth getting just for the alphabet song, which starts with “A is for Aisle” and goes downhill from there.  The kids may not get it but they’ll want to know why you’re laughing.

http://www.bnlmusic.com/snacktime/

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Courtesy of UNESCO:

Since Monday 4 August, visitors can find, every week, the latest instalment of an adventure featuring Rattus Holmes and Felis Watson, detective heroes of a comic strip against doping in sport, published by UNESCO in partnership with EDGE G3 Ltd.

Entitled “The Case of the Spoilsports”, this comic strip (in English, Spanish and French) dramatizes UNESCO’s role in the fight against doping and explores the importance of the International Convention against Doping in Sport, adopted by UNESCO’s member states in 2005.

This week, read Chapter 2: On the Case [PDF]: The Baker Street Kids learned that their hero was using performance enhancing drugs when he won an important bicycle race. They were so disappointed. Then a mysterious visitor came to see the famous detectives Rattus Holmes and Felis Watson…

I’m not sure what’s more pathetic here: that UNESCO is bothering to market to small children, or that it has to rip off Sherlock Holmes to do it. Can’t they come up with an original concept at least? Talk about performance enhancements…

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This *almost* makes you wonder whether it was planted by a disgruntled soon-to-be-ex-employee…

Spotted on the title page of an (otherwise perfectly good) kids’ book in the Corgi Pups series:

“Series Reading Consultant: Prue Goodwin, Lecturer in Literacy and Children’s Books, Univeristy of Reading”

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More at link:

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Any guesses about this facility in rural Warwickshire?

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You’re literally smothering your children to death:

Of 30 infant deaths in 2006 and the first months of 2007, Cairns said that 20 were caused by “co-sleeping” with adults or other unsafe sleeping environments.

Just last Friday, a review of 10 autopsy reports from the Hospital for Sick Children showed that eight were the result of unsafe sleeping accommodations.

(I realize I’m preaching to the converted here. But you never know who may stumble across the site.)

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…it’s their parents we should be worried about:

The young man had been wheeled into Najma Ahmed’s emergency room with a bloody, penetrating wound to the chest. Whatever was inside had pierced his left lung dangerously close to the heart. His sternum was also fractured.

“It looked like a bullet wound,” said Dr. Ahmed, assistant trauma director at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. But it wasn’t a bullet. It was a nail. It turns out that the man and a buddy had been playing around with a nail gun, and a 2½-inch stud had been fired accidentally into his torso.

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Toppling televisions are a hazard for tots: Halifax researchers

March 28, 2007 - 14:12

Call me Milton, but does public money really need to be spent to figure this one out?

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Courtesy of ParentHacks (which is a pretty fun site):

Toss a couple of glow sticks in the tub, and turn off the lights. Voila, a multicolored glow-in-the-dark bath!

What a blast. And glowsticks are only about $0.99 now so it’s cheap fun for little kids.

But gee, you think the guy who thought that up ever partook of recreational pharmaceuticals?

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Maddy in her red sweatshirt (a little blurry)

Originally uploaded by morecoffeeplease.

(For Michael!)

It’s a bit blurry, as I was trying to take pictures of a fast-moving Kingergarten Dragon Parade (for Chinese New Year) today.

It was, as promised, “very noisy!”

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