LEGO Bricks were one of the favorite toys of my childhood. I can’t wait until my son is old enough for the gear-filled LEGO Technic sets. I therefore enjoyed reading Business Week’s recent article on The Making of a LEGO Brick (thanks, Slashdot), which details the precise production process (“only 18 out of 1 million […]
As both the mother of a train-obsessed child and a refugee from grad school in history, I was delighted to find a Wikipedia article on the history and geography of the Island of Sodor, home of Thomas the Tank Engine. It’s not quite world-building on the Tolkien scale, but it’s a step in that direction,
Last weekend’s Saturday Night Live show featured a skit about Olivia Cruises. It’s crude and obvious, revolving around the ship captain’s prurient thoughts regarding lesbians. Still, the women get the final word, and Olivia itself is promoting the skit via its e-mail list. I figure that being made fun of on SNL connotes a certain
A very happy Thanksgiving to those of you celebrating it today. For my readers outside the U. S., I hope you’re amused by the spectacle of the American part of the blogosphere slowing to a crawl for a day while we gorge ourselves silly. (I posted this in advance so I can keep my day
Just in time for the holidays, I’m relaunching an updated Mombian Shop, chock full of books, music, videos, toys, baby gear, and lots of things for house and home. You’ll find items geared towards children of same-sex parents and items celebrating lesbian culture, but also more general categories of products. We’re a diverse lot, really,
Continuing my occasional series on games for kids: Hisss, a simple color-matching game, has become a recent favorite. Players draw two-color tiles and place them on the table to build snakes. Whoever completes a snake head to tail gets to collect the tiles, and whoever collects the most, wins. The game is marked “four and
Although my son has an apparently infinite capacity for playing Candy Land (interspersed only by rounds of Cariboo), I have a limit. I don’t, however, have a limitless budget for buying new games. My solution has been to create variations of older kid/adult board games we already have around the house. Here are a few
I’m visiting Boston with partner and son on a house-hunting trip. We took a break today, however, to go to the Boston Children’s Museum—and got in free, thanks to a Reciprocal Membership I’d bought at our local Mid-Hudson Children’s Museum. The Reciprocal Membership Program, sponsored by the Association of Children’s Museums, gives free admission to
LGBT culture creeps in when you least expect it. No wonder the right wing is scared of us. My son loves when my partner or I make up stories for him. He can be very specific in his requests, however, and often tells us what characters he wants in the story, where they should be,
As promised, here’s a thread for our next travel guide installment. This week’s location of choice is the San Francisco Bay Area. (Boston was last week, and I’ve been writing about New Jersey for two days, so it’s time to switch coasts.) If you live in the Bay Area or have visited, please leave comments
