They have more jewelry and really cool wallets on their website, too! A small catch though: these pieces are not kids' toys... too easily swallowed, and once swallowed, the magnets can join and.... you shudder. So, aside from having to hide them from your toddlers (which can't be an easy task), these are really cool. Check more out Dinomighty Design - their stuff is inexpensive enough to impulse buy it, gotta love that. :)
18 weeks. And, just now, things have started to not belt, tie or sit in their usual places.
Just like with Wombat, this is what finally tells me that it is real. :)
Cameron Herold, an entrepreneur who entrepreneur-ed well enough to now coach other entrepreneurs, gave a TED talk on how to help nourish creativity and can-do attitude in your kids (instead of squashing it down as traditional schooling tends to do). I summarized his key points below the video, so you can skip down to those if you are short on time.
I think he raises a fascinating point - that the better you want to do in school, the more conformist you must become. School rewards following the rules, taking what others tell you at face value and, most importantly, believing that whoever wrote a book knows better than you. Looking back on my schooling (in Russia, all of these schooling attributes are taken to an art form. Russian intelligentsia specifically prizes someone who thinks over someone who does... but hey, that's a whole other post), I must agree with him.
I wish, when I was in school, someone had told me that most people (and books) don't really know what they are talking about - or, at least, seem much more knowledgeable than they are. Just because someone dismisses an idea doesn't mean it's bunk, just because something has been printed does not make it true, and just because someone is a grownup in a suit does not give them authority in any subject. And, most importantly, just because no one you know does what you want to do does not mean it's not worth doing. Wombat, take notes.
Key Points for your Entrepreneurial Kid:
1. No Allowance!
Allowance teaches kids the wrong things: get some money just because... or just for showing up. It's limited, like a salary, and determined by your... seniority! You didn't realize you were running your family like a union? Well, now you know.
Instead, have kids propose doing projects around the house, and have them bid - and negotiate - how much they want to be paid for the projects. Help them sell things and toys they don't need. Help them figure out what services the neighbors might pay for. Help them set up a lemonade stand.
This way, they will learn skills that will help throughout life. These skills require much more practice then just taking a paycheck.
2. It's your money. Make it work for you.
Set up 2 piggy banks for each child: one as a "toy fund", from which they can buy whatever and whenever, and another for "savings fund". Take money from the savings fund on the regular basis and deposit it into an investment account.
This will help you teach the kids about investment fundamentals (not to mention delayed gratification skills!) It will also teach them that the amount of money you have is finite. A lot of them (heck, a lot of us) seem to have a hard time getting that.
3. Have kids read you bedtime stories.
A couple of nights a week, instead of reading a story to the kids, ask them to tell you one. Pick a few random objects (a computer... a stuffed animal.... a sock.... and keys.....) and ask them to tell a story involving all of those actors.
You will teach them to make stuff up on the fly. :) No, seriously, this is a really important skill that have saved my personal bottom many many times. Being able to (on the fly, with no prep) produce a well-sounding, coherent and smooth story will help you tremendously in whatever you do.
4. Point things out
When you get poor customer service at a car rental shop, and your kid sees it, point it out. Say "this is a lousy employee, doing a bad job for this business". When you see good service or performance from an employee, point that out too. Let your kids learn what good and bad employees look like. They might have to find some someday.
5. Don't medicate (for Pete's sake!)
Oh, this is my personal pet peeve. Wait, let me get on my soap box. Ahem.
Besides Cameron's points (loads of successful CEOs are bipolar, attention deficit can make it easier to juggle many tasks, etc etc), there is simply no doubt that we are medicating kids that are completely normal. Normal, just not as quiet or easy as we'd like them to be. Don't take my word for it - go read neuroscience papers - and see that when you are popping a brain-altering pill, you really have no idea of just how it alters your brain. What's worse? The doctor who gives it to you doesn't either. Medicating your nervous system is a lot like, um, off-shore drilling: you'd be stupid to do it unless you really, truly, honest-to-God have no other option whatsoever. Climbing off the soap box now. Ahem.
The venerable New York Times has a great article on whether babies have morals. While I'm sort of cautious toward nativist theories (I'm looking at you, Chomsky), the research is interesting nonetheless. Read the article, watch the video, take it with a grain of salt.
In (sort of, somewhat) related news, Salon has a good review/interview with the author of "For Better", the book that finally clarifies the elusive "state of marriage in the United States". Like, not 50% of marriages end in divorce. Not even close. Try more like 20% or less.
And, finally, The New Yorker has an article on Andrey Ternovskiy, the guy who created ChatRoulette. If you are looking for a reason to enroll your child in youth sports, look no further than this profile. Money quote:
Sitting in his carefully engineered workspace—a comfortable chair and two giant monitors placed at the precise distance that Wikipedia says prevents eyestrain and a humped posture—Ternovskiy says that he sees the computer as “one hundred per cent my window into the world.” He doesn’t seek much else. “I always believed that computer might be that thing that I only need, that I only need that thing to survive,” he says. “It might replace everything.”Soccer league sign ups are coming up. Don't let this happen to you. :)
The New York Times has an article on marriage and whether it's good for you. It includes fascinating research, such as burning couples' arms mildly, and then seeing if the wounds heal faster in happy marriages than they do in unhappy ones. No, seriously. And guess what? They do heal faster. See, you have to go read this thing. The next time you are really upset with your spouse, you can mildly burn them and tell them it's in the name of science.
And if you are looking for a way to make your marriage happier (which you will need after reading the previous link), go find a hotel to stay in on Oyster. They have hotel reviews accompanied by real, un-edited and un-airbrushed hotel photos. The difference between the photos taken by the hotel and the candids is quite staggering. The good hotels though still come out on top - my new favorite place to stay in New York looks gorgeous candid or not. Oh, how I would love to stay there again. On, say, a trip to New York. Ahem. :)
When I was growing up in Russia, I used to have a piano. It was black, gorgeous and very old. I didn't realize how old at the time. I didn't really care. It was in my room as long as I could remember, and my parents told stories about getting it into our first-floor apartment through a window. It was never clear in the story where the piano came from or how they got it. I remember liking its legs, which were turned, curvy and heavy-looking, and I assumed all pianos looked like this. Some of my friends had plain-looking pianos at home and I just thought that they preferred the simple style of those.
When we left the country, the piano had to stay behind because of silly reasons like "it wouldn't fit on the plane overhead bin". The person who bought our apartment kindly told us that the piano wouldn't transfer to him - that he will keep it for us, but it will remain ours and if we ever want it we are welcome to have it. We all laughed at that because, really, there was no way we were going to see it again - but it was nice to think we still had some connection to our home.
I started to miss having a piano almost as soon as I no longer was required to play it, of course. And so, now being an adult, I decided to buy one. Naturally, I set out to find one like mine. I looked high and low, and all I could see were plain, modern-looking things that did not have the same romantic appeal as my old piano. It was all either plain-Jane or some horrid country-style lattice-front ugly orange thing. (You can tell, of course, that my primary drive in selecting a piano is not its, um, musical qualities. The musical qualities really take a back seat when you have no pitch or ear for music, such as yours truly). In confusion, I stopped looking.
But then.... I found The Antique Piano Shop. And in it, I found pictures of pianos that looked remarkably like mine.
