Retro Childhood Review: Firebrat
“It will only be for a month, Molly.” “Why me?” she wailed, forgetting her vow of silence. “Why not Betty? She’s older.” “Because I think you’ll do a better job than Betty. You’re the reader in this family. The storyteller… Your grandma’s getting awfully forgetful, Molly. Ever since Grandpa died, she’s been living in the […]
Retro Childhood Review: The Last Unicorn
“I was born mortal, and I have been immortal for a long, foolish time, and one day I will be mortal again; so I know something that a unicorn cannot know. Whatever can die is beautiful — more beautiful than a unicorn, who lives forever, and who is the most beautiful creature in the world. […]
Retro Childhood Review: The Neverending Story
Bastian Balthazar Bux’s passion was books. If you’ve never spent whole afternoons with burning ears and rumpled hair, forgetting the world around you over a book, forgetting cold and hunger — If you’ve never read secretly under the bedclothes with a flashlight, because your father or mother or some other well meaning person has switched off […]
Adventures in SF Parenting: A SFWA Kerfuffle
Yes, I realize calling the most recent incidence of sexism in SFWA a “kerfuffle” somewhat diminishes the importance of the situation, but I’m going to try to make up for that in body of this post. As you may, or may not, know, I have two daughters. They are 11 (almost 12!) and 13 years […]
Adventures in SF Parenting: The Cell Phone Dilemma
Parents are continuously struggling to keep up with the technology that their children are using. We’re rather like the federal government in that our policies are often decades behind the technological curve (hence the NSA communications debacle). As such, we tend to treat things like cell phones the same way we would, say, a personal […]
Adventures in SF Parenting: The Wild, Wild Web
It may be reasonably obvious at this point that I am somewhat of a free-range parent. Sure, I have my lines, my boundaries, my helicopter moments, but for the large part I firmly believe that staying a bit hands off produces more self-reliant, independent, and creative children. Lenore Skenazy has a great way of pointing […]
