Schtuff

This is one of those posts with lots of words, not so many pictures. Eh.

Let's open by sharing a thought from Stephen Colbert, one of America's finest thinkers, despite being partially French ... he's like a modern Alexis de Tocqueville, except he's not nobility. Hrm.

If you ever wanted to travel back in time to relive your childhood, now you can -- by living it through your kid's childhood. Children are tiny versions of you, minus the crushing failure. If you're not going to live your unrealized dreams through your kids, WHEN WILL YOU?

Fill them with your dashed hopes and shattered dreams. If they succeed, then doesn't that mean, in some small way, that you yourself succeeded? And if they fail, well, then your dream was probably impossible in the first place -- though your child may want to through his kids at it, just to make sure.

.

Insightful, or mere genius? Yep.

What about geniuses, anyway? When you think of a genius, chances are one person readily comes to mind:


Still, for other people, it might be Albert Einstein, who among other accomplishments was the godfather of the atomic bomb, though he never took up his chance to bitchslap Edward Teller. Not scientifically speaking, of course; Einstein was better than that. I'm just saying a really good, hard, true bitchslap.

So without that, we can only look at Einstein's legacy as one that's mixed, but generally successful. It's not a bad model to emulate, right?

Enter Baby Einstein. What message are we sending to our children? Let's take our pick:

We don't want you to grow up on your own terms and explore the world around you; we're going to forcefeed this stuff to you.

Mommy and Daddy have such high aspirations for you, we hope you can become unemployed for years before becoming a faceless bureaucrat.

That's probably not the right message, is it?

Let's go back to that article:

The reality is that most parents feel guilty if we're not constantly entertaining or educating our children, especially those of us who have left careers to stay at home. We are bombarded with messages of putting our children first, without really knowing what that means. And with the noblest of intentions, we think that the more we do for them, the better. Yet how can parents entertain their kids all day and still effectively run a household? It's impossible to do, which is why Baby Einstein features testimonials of parents showering or getting alone time while their babies watch TV.

But it's not just parents' need for breaks that sells Baby Einstein. It's the pressure we put on ourselves to create the optimum learning environment for our kids, from the minute they are home from the hospital.

Then you do some more reading and discover that this baby snob development crap may really be crap -- your kid can get dumber, relatively speaking.

What about the rest of Baby Einstein? Well, there's this:

I returned it to the store.

I am just returning my SECOND

help help my brothers bleeding how do i call 911

Clearly, some of the Baby Einstein stuff doesn't last or work well, nor does it help with language comprehension.