Everyone's a stylist

I had a lot of fun last night taking Ben's picture for his LibraryThing profile. We must have gone through about 20 different tries, modifying wardrobe and props for each one. The setting was a no-brainer -- in front of a bookshelf, preferably his most esoteric books. Props were a bit harder -- we started with a nice pedestal glass of beer, tried a couple different pipes, and ended up going the simpler route with none. Wardrobe, too, was modified -- we started with just a t-shirt (it's ThinkGeek's French Linux t-shirt, although you can't see it), but decided to add his blazer when we were pumping up the pomposity. Blazer and no pipe turned out strike the right chord.
Ben tends to squint when he is smiling, so after trying some different facial expressions we got this one -- a nice smoldering gaze.

It was fun!

Fisher Price's "Pull-A-Long" Lacing Shoe I

Fisher Price's "Pull-A-Long" Lacing Shoe I
Originally uploaded by saracarl.

A second vintage Fisher-Price toy. This one is great -- shaped like a shoe; pull toy; lacing toy; shape sorter (the people go in via the windows).

Parent Hackery

Asha's posted a nice profile of me over on ParentHacks...

and I am proud to claim the nomination (if not the creation -- none of mine even made the list) of the number 1 ParentHack of 2006:

'The Problem' is the problem -- not the kid

by Stu.

Queen Buzzy Bee

Queen Buzzy Bee
Originally uploaded by saracarl.

My husband's mother found his old toys in the attic and brought them down for our daughter to play with. He was an exceptionally gentle child, so these are all in great shape.

This one is called Queen Buzzy Bee. She's an old Fisher Price pull toy. Her attenae are on springs, so they bobble, and her wings turn in circles as you pull her.

I'll post a few more in the coming days.

TX Roots Blog

Yay! I've finally convinced my sister to blog! She's calling her blog TX Roots, and it's full of her expat observations. She's currently living outside of Instanbul, but I believe the blog will cover some of the other places she's lived (Guinea, West Africa; Australia...). If you ever thought being a math teacher was a boring job, you should check it out.

Advent Wreaths

You'd be surprised at how difficult it is to find tasteful advent wreaths. Your best bet is probably ordering a fresh wreath, but if you want something you can use year after year, these were the best that I could find (and really, I'm not that thrilled about any of these).

advent wreaths

Another reason everyone should be told they can do math

New research, not on whether women are inherently better or worse at math than men are, but rather on whether they believe those differences are due to genetic or social causes.

I would buy if you believe you can't change your abilities, you wouldn't bother trying, but this actually implies that if you are told (or presented with information that tells you) that you are genetically worse at math, you actually score worse on a math test administered shortly afterwards. (In other words, this was independent of lifelong habits, beliefs, or training.) (hat tip to Ben)

On a related topic, a friend once mentioned some studies that showed spatial thinking abilities to be related to how much you are thrown in the air as a kid. I would love to find that study, if anyone knows of it. Parenthacks had something similar a while back, about spinning infants around to improve their cognitive abilities.