I'm looking for girly or GN (or anything with frogs!) 12m size cotton flooted sleepers. Anyone have any? :)

I keep seeing mention of a downloadable computer game for toddlers. Of course now that I'm looking around, I can't find any of the posts I've seen it in. Anyone have any idea what it is and what it's called?

Miss Thang has an obsession with my keyboard. Was thinking this could be fun for her.

Thanks!

Mods, please delete if this is not allowed...

Kids Woot has the BeBe Sounds Portable Color Video and Sound Baby Monitor on sale for $69.99 - a really good deal on a video monitor, if you're looking for one!

I just had to post, because we've recently started using ours (not the same model - it's a Summer monitor) when we put our son in his crib in his own room, and it's SO nice to be able to peek at him without disturbing him!!

Post your goodmama ISO/IHA (In Search Of/I Have Available) lists here! We encourage you to use delivery confirmation when buying/selling/trading.

Have fun!

Weeping too, perhaps,
when you remember how he loved and yet
wished to leave you: always both, at once.

(translated by Stephen Mitchell)

a day late but still lovely.

"I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.

What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is."

I just want to know what to expect.
I am taking my 18 month old to her first ever doctor appointment. She has never had any shots, nothing like that. We just moved into kentucky so I dont know what thier laws/rules are about vaccinations and daycare etc. I plan on googling that to my best ability in just a second here. I normally stay home with our 3 children, but my husband lost his job recently(which is why we have moved somewhere cheaper)and we are now both taking part time jobs to make ends meet and my children will have to get thier physicals and a certificate saying they are up to date on vacs. which they arent. at all.
I am hoping that there is a way I dont have to get them vaxxed with things I dont approve of...but with them going into a public daycare place I understand the risks posed with not having them get some. I just want to know, since my 18 month old has had NOTHING so far...how will the doctors handle this? Should I expect to not be able to enroll her for a long time because of the amount of doc visits we will have to do first, or should i expect them to skip some shots? or give her a ton all at once?
just wondering if anyone has been in a similar situation or has any ideas?
oh, and we are using passport, the state program for health insurance if it matters. im new to all of this so forgive me if i have been cnofusing etc.
thanks

I'm still trying to decide on Xander's "big gift" for Christmas this year. One of the things he has asked for is the LeapFrog Tag Reading System..

y/n?

Is it a piece of crap? Or is it really worth the $50 + books?

Here I appeal to all who can be interesting in protecting the rights of a one-year old Canadian stranded in Russia because of ill will of his Russian mother.

My ex-wife Julia Ilina, a Russian national, a manager in the Danone company, kidnapped our newborn son Max in summer 2009 and has since forcibly detaining a baby in her Moscow apartment. What’s worse, Julia Ilina left the baby to the custody of her own mother and doesn’t take care of my son but sporadically visiting their apartment.

Julia’s reason is as simple as fony: allegedly I, a Canadian citizen, will be able to bring Max, a Canadian citizen, back to Canada without her consent.

Regardless of her actual motivation, Julia prevents little Max to keep company with his father (that is, me) for months now. As a result, I have been unable even to take a photo of the child to apply for his travel passport.

I filed a claim to a court in Moscow recently. Still, my chances to win a case in a Russian court versus a Russian respondent are next to zero.

This is why I have to publish this address. I consider it as my last resort for the time being. I bear a hope that there are some international human rights groups as well as the individuals that deal with children’s rights of this kind.

I’ll be grateful for any help, any advice, any action that could free my baby-son of his hijacker-mother.

Thank you.

Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.


-Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

So, Hetalia-fans, you want to create some Original Characters, Hetalia-based of the countries that haven't been shown. Hey, cool for you! It's a good exercise in research and creativity.

However, want my advice? Here is the very first thing you should do if you want to creat an OC about, oh, I dunno. 'Africa-tan', like a certain fan told me.

The very first thing you should do?

Buy yourself an Atlas and learn that Africa? Refers to a whole continent with over 50 countries within, and thus, your plan about writing an 'Africa-tan'? Not gonna happen. It would be like creating 'Europe-tan' or 'American Continent-tan'.

Maps and research. In this fandom more than in any other one, they are your friends. At the very least? In Geography.

Last exam tomorrow. Thank God.

Dear UK Supernatural ficcers,

This doesn't happen a lot, but when it does - damn, it's jarring.

I run across a fic that's friggin' awesome...right until someone starts talking. Usually, it's Dean. Ya see, one thing Dean Winchester shouldn't ever sound like is very, very, very British. Seriously. I doubt he's going to use "whilst" or "Indeed" unless he's going for humor or sarcasm, and I'm pretty sure he's not going to refer to male friends as "mates" or "boys" or use terms like "bloody hell"...or just basically sound like he just rolled in from a posh boarding school and it off to the polo match after tea.

"Sammy, go look down the alley whilst I go chat up the waitress."

No, dude. Just...no.

Is asking that writers for a fandom watch a few episodes, with special attention paid to how various characters address each other, really too much to ask?

Every single 'fic I've read tonight has snapped me out of the story by having some character refer to another character by his given name when in canon he would have used his surname, or with honorifics that the characters don't use with each other in canon, or even with weird nicknames that seem to have come from nowhere.

And maybe I'm just picky, but it irritates me. How can you watch a show without picking up on how the characters address one another? I don't even write for this fandom, really, but I've certainly picked up enough to want to attack a few 'fics with red pen...

On a sort of related note, if a character in an anime fandom has an English word for a name, and you feel like you have to spell it the way it's pronounced in the show instead of the way the word is spelled in English... please be consistant with your spelling. Remembering that you're calling a character something other than what I'm expecting is hard enough without having to be on the lookout for multiple unexpected spellings.

D:

What woman would not have kindled to see what Orlando saw then burning in the snow — for all about the looking glass were snowy lawns, and she was like a fire, a burning bush, and the candle flames about her head were silver leaves; or again, the glass was green water, and she a mermaid, slung with pearls, a siren in a cave, singing so that oarsmen leant from their boats and fell down, down to embrace her; so dark, so bright, so hard, so soft, was she, so astonishingly seductive that it was a thousand pities that there was no one there to put it in plain English, and say outright "Damn it Madam, you are loveliness incarnate," which was the truth.

In honor of Sesame Street's 40th Anniversary, and this weeks bentochallenge.



DH wanted Cookie Monster for his bento.
Left tier has a Cookie Monster made from Jasmine Rice dyed blue with Nori for his mouth and eyes, on top of a leaf of Romaine Lettuce. Below Cookie Monster is some left over Mongolian beef.
Right tier has 3 chocolate chip cookies with the letter "C" drawn on with Buttercream (C is for cookie, after all,) Blue cheese dressing in yellow silicon mold, baby carrots and Celery.



I chose Big Bird for mine.

Left tier has Big Bird made from Jasmine rice dyed yellow, with a cheese beak and eyes colored with food markers. He sits atop a Romaine Lettuce and Mongolian Beef nest.
Right tier has 2 chocolate chip cookies, seedless red grapes, and sliced starfruit.

Number 143 has nothing to do with Sesame Street, it's a special request from one of the local policemen. I tried making his patch, but my food markers fail me once again, even after buying a new brand. But if it saves me from getting pulled over, it served its purpose, right? erm.



Turkey, Provolone cheese and lettuce with Honey Mustard sandwich, surrounded by chocolate chip cookies, seedless red grapes, Skittles, and some Tostitos.

xposted to bentochallenge

(YMMV, of course)

I generally tend to avoid real person fiction as it sometimes makes me feel a bit ooky, even when it's not in extreme circumstances or a touchy subject(Heath Ledger anyone?) but I've noticed this quite a bit in past excursions.

You've got an actor(or a musician or a politician, etc. pick one, it doesn't matter). You've got a slash pairing in the summary and goldarnit, you're going to make that slash pairing happen! It's reasonable enough, the two actors have costarred in one or two movies and there's definitely room for some chemistry in there. But why oh why are you having Lawrence Olivier going to Walmart? Or Jeffrey Dean Morgan on a pirate ship?(not real examples yet.)

I check the summary. Nope, not a crack!fic. Been played pretty straightfaced up until that point, if a bit melodramatic and OOC. So...why? Do you really need to invent crazy circumstances just to get your OTP, especially when there are so many in character ways to get them together? Real people, though not part of a well-documented canon like most fictional characters are, have certain rules that apply to them and have exhibited a certain set of behaviors. No, I don't know that Viggo Mortenson will accidentally book a gay cruise and wind up rooming with Orlando Bloom...but there's a pretty good chance that would never happen.

And worse, don't suddenly turn it into a drama when it's been pretty friggin' cracky all along. It gives your readers whiplash.
If you're doing a crackfic good for you- all the more power to you for cooking that pot of crack!soup. Go the whole nine yards, make it a crack fic through and through, don't get your melodrama and wangst in my peanut butter.
If I'm laughing at the utter ridiculousness of your plot until you throw cancer or something in there to sober it up, I think you're doing something wrong. Gerard Way shouldn't bang his brother, go mall shopping, and then get killed in a drive-by all within the space of a few chapters.It makes me make this face @_@ and wonder what I just spent the past half-hour doing.

TL;DR, Keep crackfic crack, try to keep your RP fiction believable you crazy kids, you.

What is the best toy train for the money? Is there anything I should avoid in terms of quality? What's the consensus on Thomas? Those seem to be everywhere, but fairly expensive if you want a decent sized set.

His hour came with the shells,
with the notched iron splinters,
in the smoke and flame,
in the shaking and terror of the battlefield.

Word came to him in the bullet shower
that he should be a hero briskly,
and he was that while he lasted,
but it wasn't much time he got.

He kept his guns to the tanks,
bucking with tearing crashing screech,
until he himself got, about the stomach,
that biff that put him to the ground,
mouth down in sand and gravel,
without a chirp from his ugly high-pitched voice.

No cross or medal was put to his
chest or to his name or to his family;
there were not many of his troop alive,
and if there were their word would not be strong.
And at any rate, if a battle post stands,
many are knocked down because of him,
not expecting fame, not wanting a medal
or any froth from the mouth of the field of slaughter.

I saw a great warrior of England,
a poor manikin on whom no eye would rest;
no Alasdair of Glen Garry;
and he took a little weeping to my eyes.


( Thainig uair-sin lis na sligean )

" Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it. God Himself was pulled after us into the vortex we made when we fell, or so the story goes. And while He was on earth He mended families. He gave Lazarus back to his mother, and to the centurion he gave his daughter again. He even restored the severed ear of the soldier who came to arrest Him - a fact that allows us to hope the resurrection will reflect a considerable attention to detail. Yet this was no more than tinkering. Being man He felt the pull of death, and being God He must have wondered more than we do what it would be like. He is known to have walked upon water, but He was not born to drown. And when He did die it was sad - such a young man, so full of promise, and His mother wept and His friends could not believe the loss, and the story spread everywhere and the mourning would not be comforted, until He was so sharply lacked and so powerfully remember that his friends felt Him beside them as they walked along the road, and saw someone cooking fish on the shore and knew it to be Him, and sat down to supper with Him, all wounded as He was.There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long."


Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping.

I've heard of a lemon.

I've heard of a lime.

WTF is a MELON?????

Out of my mouth is coming, at some
distance from me, a thin gnawing sound
which you could confuse with prayer except that
praying is not constrained.

Or is it, Lord?
Maybe it's more like being strangled
than I once thought. Maybe it's
a gasp for air, prayer.
Did those men at Pentecost
want flames to shoot out of their heads?
Did they ask to be tossed
on the ground, gabbling like holy poultry,
eyeballs bulging?

As mine are, as mine are.
There is only one prayer; it is not
the knees in the clean nightgown
on the hooked rug.
I want this, I want that.
Oh far beyond.
Call it Please. Call it Mercy.
Call it Not yet, not yet,
as Heaven threatens to explode
inwards in fire and shredded flesh, and the angels caw.

--Margaret Atwood, "Half-Hanged Mary"

You say you wrote this fic to explain why A is justified in turning B's romantic gestures down, and to convince A/B shippers why they wouldn't work as a couple. The biggest flaw in your plan to convince people to abandon ship is that it is not actually canon that B is always drunk, doesn't care about A, and is secretly in love with his best friend/drinking buddy. Writing him this way makes your fic seem OOC, writing him this way and insisting that this is really how he is, in order to make a statement about why it's horrible and wrong to ship something you don't like, makes you seem like someone who has never actually seen the show.

When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring stright ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.

I'm stubbornly clinging to the idea that summer isn't all gone - although all I need is to look out of the windowat the grey, wet, windy, YUCKY weather... So I'm having my little bit of summer here in the bento instead...

Bento # 656 Spaghetti and spicy sauce, covered with a flower made of ½ egg, green pepper and carrots. Corn Cob. more green pepper, grapes on a skewer. Shaslik from a can.

 Hi mamas!  I recently switched my whole stash over to one size OBV dipes (mostly GMs) because I have 2 in diapers and I wanted them to share a stash.  I'm super happy to have found this group :)

Anyhoo, I have 2 OBV GMs that I don't know the names of.  Can anyone help me identify them?  I can post photos if description isn't enough, LMK.  

1)  Spring green serging w/ yellow snaps
2)  Lavender serging w/ baby pink snaps

Thanks!!

I believe it was on this blog that someone posted a link to the "History of Bento" documentary hosted on YouTube. Wonderful little film. One thing about the documentary was that when it interviewed people about their bento boxes, I noticed the meals were a lot simpler than what I imagined them to be. One guy in particular (a fisherman whose floating, round box was being showcased) was eating nothing but rice with a few strands of brown seaweed sprinkled on top.

Outside of the city (whose boxes seem to be the more typical ones showcased...especially those made for children or theme-based) are the bentos far more simpler and with less ingredients?

I found this bouncing around the web and thought I'd share. It perfectly describes everything I hate about game stop.

( The Guide Awaits )