Bibliomama

A man came into the little independent bookstore I worked in one Sunday in Toronto. He was pleasant and well-dressed. He wandered around the store for a while, asked a few questions about cookbooks by the Urban Peasant. When he went to pay for his purchases, he felt in the back pocket of his pants and got this horrified look on his face. He said he had thrown his jacket in the trunk of his car without realizing his wallet and car keys were in it. His two kids were playing in the park near his house and he was supposed to go pick them up. He tried to call his wife but couldn't reach her. He reached a locksmith but since it was Sunday it was going to cost a hundred dollars for him to come and unlock the trunk. I'm sure most of you can see where this is going. I was young and nice and stupid. I lent him the hundred dollars. He gave me his name -- Brad Jacobson -- and the number where he worked, at the University of Toronto. He asked me if I liked homemade wine. Naturally, when I c...

My friend Ilana posted a link on Facebook today to an article at http://www.doublex.com/ called Get Your Kid Off Your Facebook Page . Katie Roiphe feels that the "trend of women using photographs of their children instead of themselves" as profile pictures may be a "potent symbol for the new century", and questions what this phenomenon might be saying about "the construction of women's identity" today. Roiphe goes on to lament the fact that women who work, belong to book clubs, wrote their thesis on Proust and stayed out drinking until five in the morning in college now go to dinner parties and talk about nothing but their children, boring their friends to death and raising worrisome questions about whether they are able to use their words to converse about anything beyond diaper rash and the politics of toddler-stomping and plastic vegetable distribution at playgroup. She goes on to posit that the world is too child-centred and women are letting th...

This post was inspired by Amber at Strocel (if I knew how to do the no-doubt-extremely-simple link thing those words would be a different colour and clicking on them would, you know, do stuff. But I don't) posting about her daughter's art. By the time Eve was one and a half, according to various former teaching professionals she was holding a pencil 'correctly'. It should be noted that several of these former teaching professionals were related to her, and convinced that she was gifted, advanced and prodigiously talented in several areas, so bias should be assumed. Still, it was impressive -- she covered page after page with clouds of tiny circles, with single-minded fervour. My husband's uncle is an artist and teaches art students in B.C., and he took one to use as a teaching aid, to convince his students they didn't always have to draw 'horses, with pretty eyes'. Her second Christmas, Eve opened a huge pack of coloured pencils first, then lay on her ...

" My Mom got a speeding ticket because she was looking at garage sales." "You don't have to poo on me!" "This is what we do. That's the way we do it." "What language is Jai Ho?" "My Mom had to bring my Dad his shoes because he had a doctor's appointment for his feet because his toes are all weird." "Una cerveza, por favor." "You're so cool -- constipated over-rated (something I didn't hear) loser." "For some reason I feel like some of the chocolate has nuts in it." "I don't think there's enough room." "I'm a tuna sandwich." "I can burp the alphabet but I'll just do A since it's your birthday." ********************* What are: Things you will hear (whether you want to or not) while driving to the North Gower Bowling Alley for your son's ninth birthday party with five boys in the back of a minivan.