“Miss Moppet ties up her
head in a duster, and sits
before the fire.”
In honor of Children’s Book Week, I inaugurate an occasional series.
This is from Beatrix Potter’s Miss Moppet, and the most astute commentary I can offer is, “Huh?”

I’ve been working something up in honor of Banned Books Week, which starts at the end of next week. But this news item was worth passing along as a not-so-savory appetizer.
From Worth The Trip (a fantastic kids & teens book blog that’s been gracing my Queer Parenting Resources links list for a coupla weeks), we [...]

The beloved has a spate of evening rehearsals during the upcoming month or so, and I’ve called in the reinforcements, which for the most part consists of a phalanx of chums I’ve seen far too little of since we got with child #2. It’s not like I couldn’t hack it, managing the dinner/bath/bedtime routine [...]

The other night I was reading to the downstairs cousins and the lil’ monkey together. We live upstairs from the beloved’s brother and his family, and we each swap childcare an afternoon and a night a week. The nearby Granny and the GrandBaba take on an afternoon of kids themselves. Basically, it takes [...]

Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever delighted my sister and me when we were little, and it’s continuing to see a lot of action our kids’ generation, too. But after wiping the dust off my memories about the book, I find a fascinating time capsule of popular culture, some of it charming, some not [...]

Color-your-own Babar family, courtesy L. de Brunhoff.
Okay, so what was I doing not knowing that the dear, beloved Babar stories open with (a) the shooting death of his mother, and roll onward inexorably toward (b) the poison mushroom-induced death of the King of the Elephants, and (c) the marriage of Babar to his cousin [...]