Children do not want to go to sleep at 8 PM, or whenever you've decided bedtime is. They're not sleepy, and they want to play. But their parents have been waiting all day for a chance to catch their breath, and they'd love to have a few minutes of calm before they fall into their own exhausted sleep. New Zealand dad Jordan Watson (previously at Neatorama) shares some of his wisdom about putting children to bed.
It's a losing battle. You cannot make a child fall asleep. You can only hope to outlast them so you can have a few minutes to yourself. Good luck. -via Tastefully Offensive
A lot of people have curly hair that's hard to comb, but this is something else altogether. Shilah Madison Calvert-Yin has "uncombable hair syndrome," which is a real condition. Each shaft of her hair is triangular instead of round. It's caused by a gene mutation, and is very rare. Only about 100 people in the world have the syndrome. But Shilah's family has embraced her awesome hair.
“Shilah loves her unique hair, but that has come from constant positive reinforcement at home from friends and family,” her mom Celeste Calvert-Yin, who lives in Melbourne Australia, told TODAY via email.
“As a little, little girl she often told us she was like a unicorn as they are very special and unique just like her. It brought a tear to our eye.”
Some kids create art that looks like nothing but scribbles, others make art that is so inscrutable you have the ask the kid what the hell it's supposed to be.
But the kid in this story made a piece of art so vile and perverted his Redditor father Bubsing thought the kid was headed for counseling and home schooling:
‘My kid created what I thought was an angry-rage-boner-poop-fly-guy,’ Bubsing wrote.
It turns out Bubsing was all wrong about his kid's strange creation- because he was looking at the artwork upside down.
This little boy lost a tooth, placed it under his pillow, and received a dollar from the Tooth Fairy. He responded with a letter asking for a raise from a dollar to $5. This is the letter he got in return. In case you can't read the print, you can enlarge the original imagehere.
He does look a little perplexed at the official explanation. Considering he's about six or seven years old, it's probably not that easy for him to read, much less understand. But he's got another dollar just for asking, so that's probably a win in his eyes. Let's just hope the warning about keeping his teeth clean and cavity-free sinks in. -via reddit
Parents who feel burdened and stressed out by their new bundle of joy are missing one key factor about babies- they're like living dolls, and therefore quite amusing to have around.
You can't toss them around like plush toys or expect them to strike and hold a pose like an action figure, but if you let your baby do their thing and follow suit the resulting photos will be pure comedy gold.
And since your child isn't old enough to remember the time you let a lemur crawl all over their head for the sake of a photo op you won't be scarring them emotionally and therefore won't be on the hook for the cost of their therapy!
It's exciting to discover what our kids are going to get jazzed about because they don't even know yet, and whether they flip out over something silly or something worthy of excitement their reaction is always precious.
The little guy in this video is named Brock, and his mom Anita Mander captured his adorable reaction when she took Brock with her to pick out paint colors at Home Depot.
Summer camp is supposed to be an opportunity for children to get away from home and do something different from what they do every day. It's also supposed to be a welcome respite for parents with bored children underfoot in the summer. But modern communication devices (phones) have changed that. Kids are used to having their phones with them to play games, watch TV, and stay in touch with family and friends. Camps often have children hand in their phones, and they usually adjust pretty well when there's so many other things to do. Their parents are the ones having a hard time being out of touch. Barry Garst of Clemson University tells us what's going on.
"We started to hear from camp directors a number of years ago that parents were the most problematic areas of a camp experience," says Garst. Not weather, not water safety, not grizzly bears. Nope, it's parents who call daily demanding reports on their kids, who expect to hear from the camp director about every skinned knee.
Meg Barthel, the lead girls' counselor at Camp Echo, carries a device with Wi-Fi around camp. "I have to respond to the mothers who are used to this constant communication with their daughters," she says. How many messages a day? "Up to 100."
Garst says thanks to mobile devices, parents today are conditioned to hour-by-hour check-ins. "The No. 1 concern is the separation that parents feel, and the difficulty in accepting a different type of communication with their child when their child is at camp."
Hence, the phones buried in luggage, mailed to campers, or even, he says, stitched into a stuffed animal.
Summer camps report another difficulty is getting their college-age camp counselors to put away their phones, even if just for the time they are interacting with campers. And they also have helicopter parents. Read more on the modern problems at summer camp at NPR.
Filmmaker Jacob Krupnick's project Young Explorers follows children who have barely learned to walk, as their instincts for exploring are kicking in. This isn't easy for urban parents to negotiate.
In a recent interview at ICP, Krupnick tells a story to illustrate the disconnect between child's instinct to explore and a parent's instinct to protect them.
While filming my daughter walking around Coney Island, she passed a boy her age who was tied up in one of those child nets, tethered to his mother, unable to experience life outside her reach. Ada, my daughter, marched past him. His look of astonishment read something like: what is that creature? Half an hour later, they met again along the boardwalk. He was still attached to his mum. He looked at Ada tentatively and tenderly offered her a piece of popcorn. In these moments, you come to see how desirable freedom is.
I can relate. While watching Bejla above and Tristan below, I had to keep reminding myself that not only was Krupnick right there filming, but the child's parents are no doubt just out of camera range. At the same time, in the back of my mind I wanted to reach out and hold their little hands.
It's sweet that kids care enough to buy, or even better make, a present for their parents, and many elementary schools encourage their students to create crafts and holiday cards for their folks so they're from the heart.
And sometimes when the kid presents you with their handmade gift you want to bust a gut laughing at the adorable ridiculousness they've just handed you, but you know the kid might be hurt by your laughter.
So you keep a straight face, saying "wow" and "cool" a lot to emphasize how great you think their gift is, secretly knowing you're going to have a good laugh about that wonky gift later on.
But these hilarious kid gifts really are the best because they'll always make you smile, and the fact that the kid cared enough to give you something to crack up about for the rest of your life is priceless!
Some little girls become so obsessed with princesses they start dressing like them, acting like them and telling everyone who will listen that they want to be a princess when they grow up.
They may even mistake real life people for princesses from fairy tales, like this little girl did when she came across a bride named Shandace Robertson decked out in her wedding dress.
In the little girls mind the beautiful white dress she wore made Shandace look just like her favorite princess from The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins, a book she was carrying around when she met the bride.
This happy coincidence was captured by photographer Stephanie Cristalli, who was busy shooting post-wedding pics of the bride and groom on a sidewalk in Seattle when the little girl and her mom Kelsey Edwards approached the "princess".
Now that little girl can live happily ever after since she got to hang out with a princess in Seattle, and the bride has an extra heartwarming element to add to the tale of her wedding day.
And BTW- The Woman In White is not exactly what I would call a kid's book, but maybe the little girl is a really advanced reader?
A group of two-year-olds are competing in the Dutch Championship walking bike race on July 8. Senn Swieters pulls out in front, giving it his all on his green walking bike, having the time of his life. Senn's headed straight for the finish line. The crowd cheers him on!
Or maybe not. Don't celebrate until the finish line is crossed. Considering how much the average two-year-old cares about winning, he's probably avoiding the finish line because he doesn't want the event to be over. A good time was had by all. -via Mashable
Forced perspective is a simple way to add your own creative touch to a photograph, and since forced perspective pics are best taken with a partner they're also a simple way to bring two photo fans closer together.
When oil painter Alya Chaglar asked her daughter Stefani if she'd like to play with her food she lit up, but Stefani must've had a hard time understanding how mom holding up a piece of food and taking a pic equalled fun- untile she saw the pic.
Then she really got into the spirit of the project, her pose and facial expressions matching the food and flower dresses her mom used forced perspective to dress her up in, and the pics are gloriously adorable.
Dads have some bad sides- they're hostile and angry when woken up from a nap, grumpy and groggy when they don't get enough sleep, and sleepy and gassy when they've had too much to eat.
But one of dad's good sides totally overshadows the bad- when he's being an adorable goofball by playing dress up with his kid.
That's when you can see a dad at his most adorable, as exemplified by silly doting daddy Sholom Ber Solomon and his tiny daughter Zoe.
Sholom was eager to set up a father daughter photo shoot with Zoe, a bit too eager to wait until she'd learned how to walk, so he dressed them both up and took them out on some silly staged adventures.
KentuckyFriedIdiot said, "Daughter wanted to go to Disneyworld, but since it's too expensive we did the next best thing" which meant a roller coaster in a plastic tub powered by Daddy, while watching a POV video of a coaster ride. Genius!
If she were any bigger, he might have had trouble pulling this off. As it was, I felt like I was riding right along with her. -via Tastefully Offensive
When we hear someone talk about their 5-year-old painting we usually envision messy finger paintings and a parent who has to clean up one masterpiece of a mess for the sake of their child's artistic enrichment.
But Cassie of CassieSwirls isn't an ordinary 5-year-old in that way, because she creates paintings of galaxies that look so good you'd never know they were painted by a kindergartner...unless you look at the signature.
Cassie's galaxy paintings have been blowing people's minds with their incredible detail and rich use of color, and Cassie even adds glitter and metallics to make her paintings "happy".
So far young Cassie has sold over 100 of her galaxy paintings, and like a true citizen of planet Earth she has donated nearly a thousand dollars from the sales to charity, so her paintings can bring people happiness in more than one way.
