Smoking baby 2.0: Now with 100% more beer

How does a 3 year old, even one with a possible traumatic brain injury, just take up smoking and drinking? And who just gives a kid that age cigarettes on credit? Bonkers.

For comparison’s sake: Smoking baby 1.0

Satanski shows us how to march in a parade

My nephew marched with my library during today’s Memorial Day parade. You’d think a 5-year-old wouldn’t be able to teach us anything about how to get from the beginning of the parade to the end. You’d be wrong.

I don’t know why every parade marcher doesn’t break this out at some point during the parade route.

Yay for Sportsmanship!

Awwww. Maybe it’s an excess of girly hormones or something, but this article definitely made me cry. Not mist, not tear up; just flat out cry. What’s not to love about a well-to-do softball team being willing to forfeit so that they could help a disadvantaged team who’d never play learn the game? Awesomely, every adult featured in the article sounds sane, which isn’t always the case with high school sports. I salute the parenting and teaching skills of the adults in all of these kids’ lives, because they seem to be great people, too.

Some things should just go without saying

It’s never a good idea to tattoo a toddler, especially if that toddler isn’t even your child.

If you’re in a restaurant and your 2-year-old drinks alcohol that you ordered, and was placed on your table with your party’s other drinks, it’s your fault. Not the waiter’s, not the restaurant’s. How could these people even kind of think that their reactions were reasonable? If I were that restaurant, I would have banned them for being negligent parents, crappy customers, and pretty useless in general.

I’ve just decided that May is going to be Personal Responsibility Month on this blog.

Cute!

I love everything about this picture and the article that goes with it. Listening to little kids talk amongst themselves is one of the things I love the most; they’re hilarious, and make a surprising amount of sense when they’re being serious.

No child left behind

Except this one. Oy.

An 8 year old kid + a loaded Uzi = Bad, bad things

From the article:

A Massachusetts sporting club is donating $10,000 to children’s charities as part of a deal settling criminal charges in the death of an 8-year-old boy who accidentally shot himself in the head with an Uzi during a gun fair.

There were so many points of failure in this story (the organizers’, the former police chief’s, the gun club’s, the father’s, and the poor 15 year old boy who was supervising Christopher) that it’s hard to know where to begin casting the blame. Christopher Bizilj deserved so much better than what happened to him. Mistakes and lapses in judgment happen all the time, but I honestly don’t know how his mother, Suzanne Bizilj can stand the knowledge that when their child was handed a loaded Uzi, her husband was preparing to take pictures, rather than to help his son hold the firearm.

Craziness

I’m wonder if yesterday’s post made it sound like I hate children, which actually couldn’t be further from the truth. I like kids, and kids really like me. I’m the Baby Whisperer. You give me a fussy kid and me holding them generally quiets them down pretty quickly (note: this only works on babies who don’t know me very well – I guess my charm is in my newness). I just try not to be all, “Won’t somebody think about the children??” when it comes to a everything. I think that sometimes people give up too much in the name of protecting children, to nobody’s benefit.

Unless, of course, protecting children is exactly what you’re supposed to be doing. In which case, you’d better earn your keep. I just read the most horrific story about Our Little Rugratz, a daycare center in Jersey City that left behind a two-year-old after a field trip to New York City. Are you kidding me? My 19-year-old cousin was in Manhattan on Saturday and wouldn’t even let me leave him in Chinatown, where he was supposed to meet up with his friends.

How is it possible that people in charge of multiple children didn’t count obsessively to see if they had everybody? Kids wander off all the time, so if they’d known that they were missing one child, that would have been more understandable. But they didn’t. They left Emily Grogan in New York, and didn’t realize it until several hours had passed. Oh. My. God. And the first indication that parents Amy and Joseph Grogan had that something was wrong was when Amy went to pick up Emily. I’m so sorry that her parents had to go through that, and completely understand why the Grogans have pressed charges against Iris and Luis Pietri, the owners of the daycare center.