I, Breeder

What's Next? Mom Jeans?

Brian Braiker — Fri, 16 May 2008 04:12:22 GMT

This whole having-a-second-kid nonsense is getting frighteningly official. Yesterday my bride came home with an Ergo baby carrier! Oh dear. Soon enough we'll have someone to stuff inside it. Imagine. The first time around we rocked the Baby Bjorn. Walking around Brooklyn with my first born strapped to my chest for a year was a lovely prolonged bonding experience. It also had the minor side effect of making me feel about as sexy as a eunuch wearing a diaper. In a bunny costume.

So what, I wondered, was this Ergo carrier all about. As you know, ergo is latin for "therefore," as in "I breed, ergo I apparently now wear things that are in the fanny pack family." These contraptions are very popular with all the crunchy Brooklyn moms. I peeked at the box:

"The best support for your Baby ... and your LifeStyle." Indeed.

I'm not sure why Baby is capitalized -- maybe they want to emphasize how very important your child is, you know, in case you forgot. Maybe they're German. Maybe it's a message from the 18th century when ergonomically-correct infant-shaped knapsacks were all the rage. More perplexing, however, is "LifeStyle" -- no space, both words capitalized. I mean, presumably if you need an ergo carrier, it's a bit late to start thinking about condoms .

Whatever. I wondered exactly what LifeStyle of mine this baby carrier is the "best support" for. Fortunately the box offered some helpful hints, such as Chillaxing By The Beach With Your NewBorn Because That's What You Do When You Have NewBorns:

If that's not quite the LifeStyle for you, they also have the Abu Ghraib Hood Accessory To Bind and Gag Your Squalling Child to Your Back, Freeing Your Handsome Self Up To Admire the Palm Trees:

This last LifeStyle isn't on the box, but maybe it should be. It certainly IS plastered on phone booths (remember those?) and bus stops around Brooklyn. It's my personal favorite: I Love My Boo, Which I Do While Wearing LifeStyles -- or Trojans or Magnums or Whatever's Handy in the Heat of Our Moment -- And I Also Get Regularly Tested ... But, Honestly, Having A Baby Doesn't Really Fit Into My Immediate Agenda:

Eight is So Very Much Enough

Brian Braiker — Sat, 10 May 2008 00:50:13 GMT

OK so I'm never going whine about having two little kids. This is a vow to you people. Never again shall I moan about how scared I am about having more than one little one, about losing sleep, about how hard life is as a parent and boo-hoo-hoo. You see i have made a horrifying discovery: I have discovered Jon & Kate Plus 8.

Those of you with lives who aren't watching Oprah every other minute or religiously tuning into the TLC because you're actually sane might not know what I'm talking about. Allow me to breakitdown:

I was at the gym the other day, a rare treat. Riding the ol' stationary bike. Watching TV. Totally zoned out. It was great. I'm flipping through the channels and because I don't really know my way around the cable lineup, not having cable at home, I'm just randomly watching whatever. I start with The Hills. I don't really get The Hills, but then I know I'm not the target demographic. I do think my soul died a little bit the day I learned who Spencer Pratt was. (Although, I will say this: JustinBobby is kind of rad.) I can't get mad at these children--they're pretty, paid handsomely to have nary a care in the world.

A a commercial break, I start surfing the channels. I end up on a scene where some mom is wrangling her kids into the kitchen. She appears to have two or three of them. "Ah," I say to myself, "This looks familiar. Herding cats. Heh." I watch for a minute and it slowly begins to dawn on me, she has more than three kids. Actually, wait. There's another. She has more than four kids. Dear God. She has more than five kids, seven kids. She has eight freaking kids. And they're all under the age of six or something.

It was at this very moment that my brain broke.

I stayed on the bike for about three hours, my broken brain attempting to process episode after episode of Jon & Kate Plus 8. Absolutely captivating television. The scoop, for those of you who don't know it: Jon and Kate Gosselin couldn't get pregnant so they took fertility drugs. Then they had twins. So very cute. A sane person would have stopped right there. But they are, apparently, not very sane. She says she wanted to have just one more baby because she didn't know what it was like to not have to split her attention between two babies. Ah, but the cosmos loves a good practical joke. Instead of one baby she had ... six. At one time. A whole litter of pups.

My broken brain was trying so hard to understand this fact. Eight kids. All under the age of four. In one house. Sweet Jesus.

After watching Jon & Kate for a while (they are, it turns out, very charming and kind of badass, if a little too heavy on the God stuff, at least on their Website), I toggled back over to The Hills. The blonde one was on some date with some cute boy she went to high school with or something and they were all like giving each other loaded meaningful glances over uneaten frisee salad and triple skim lattes and talking about the crisis in Darfur. No, wait. They were discussing recent breakthroughs in string theory and quantum physics. Hahah. I'm kidding of course. They were talking about, well, it's hard to explain, but I'm sure it was something meaningful about, like, cool stuff. that they bought shopping. And like. Yeah. Whatever. Also, Audrina's a slut.

I toggle back to Jon & Kate and there they are just trying to get through breakfast alive. It's chaos plus insanity times madness to the power of crazy. I'd buy a whole haberdashery just so I could tip every single hat in it. Man.

Talk about two very different "reality" shows.

This is when my broken brain formed it's first idea since breaking. It was a fantasy. My fantasy is this: I want Heidi and Spencer to have eight kids. I want Lauren and Brody to have eight kids. I want Audrina and JustinBobby to have eight kids. I want all those little Hills turds to have eight kids just for one day. That is something I'd subscribe to cable to watch.

On Recidivist Procreation

Brian Braiker — Mon, 05 May 2008 19:02:03 GMT

We have a few friends whom we know because they had their first kid around the same time we had our first kid. We met through a neighborhood "new mommy" list that my normally misanthropic bride signed up for about three years ago. Turns out to have been a good move—the people we met are fantastically wonderful and, now, three years into parenthood, our only social acquaintances. It's amazing how one's social life reorganizes itself around one's proclivity to spawn. The frequency with which I carouse with single friends has greatly diminished over the past 36 months. So, too, has the frequency with which I drink to excess (somewhere other than my kitchen/office/crawlspace), pass out and urinate on friends' couches, fornicate with dudes/goats, and generally ever see single friends other than over lunch or because they're my colleagues whose mere existence mocks my life.

Well! Now, just like us, our baby-friends are beginning to spawn anew. In fact. we're not even the first! We have one friend who had baby numero dos just two months ago (on Valentine's Day! awwww, sweetness!). Another good friend delivered her second boy just after that. We have a third friend whose first child was born within a couple months of our first child, late spring 2005. They had child number two ... a year ago. Meaning they had a baby when their first unable-to-rationalize/cope child was barely (not even?!) two.

We, as you may know, are expecting Child 2.0 sometime between five minutes and eight weeks from now. I, being journalistically inclined, did some cursory interviewing of these fascinating Recidivist Procreators. Here are some of the pearls of wisdom I have recently picked up:

1) "I always thought having a second baby would make life marginally harder. I mean, we've done this before, right? Yeah, well, it doesn't make just a little bit harder. It makes them exponentially harder. It makes life freakishly more difficult."

2) "Will you please fake my death so I can come live in your crawlspace? All I want is sleep."

3) "I couldn't find the baby's shoes this week and my wife was at work but she wasn't answering her phone and so I got really pissed ... and I sort of kicked my bedroom door down."

4) "Well. It's been a year now and I feel like I am just becoming human again. Sorry for falling asleep in the middle of that sentence."

5) "You know how, ever since you had your baby, you look at people with no kids and you hate them? You hate them because they can go out to dinner at any time; you hate them because they get to see movies; you hate them because they stay up past 11 and they still complain about their meaningless little lives. Right? Well when you have two kids, you hate people who have only one kid. You despise them. They have no idea how easy they've got it."

And so in conclusion: dear readers ... please fake my death so I can come live in your crawlspace. I promise the sound of my weeping won't disturb you too much.

So This is Weird

Brian Braiker — Fri, 02 May 2008 18:21:03 GMT

According to a University of California, Berkeley study, children who attend daycare or playgroups cut their risk of the most common type of childhood leukaemia by around 30 percent.

Sex and the Mommy

Brian Braiker — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:43:50 GMT

The New York Post, that paragon of American journalism--the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh columns all rolled into one --has a groundbreaking report today: One-third of moms have cheated! What?! At Scrabble, right?

Oh noes! The same amount--just 36 percent --say they're still attracted to their husbands. The rest would apparently rather bone George Clooney (well, who wouldn't?) or, um, Barack Obama.

Least reassuring quote: "The desire to have desire [for their husbands] is there."

AN UPDATE: Ladies, please stop reading now.

Seriously, gals. Go away.

They gone? Good.

OK, gents. So I sent that story to my friend Dan. His response? "They harangue you to get married and then...they cheat!"

I am never going to get any love again, am I?

Won't Someone Please Think of the Children? Better Yet, Think of the People Who are Supposed to be Thinking of the Children.

Brian Braiker — Thu, 01 May 2008 14:24:29 GMT

We don't go to too many baseball games in this household. I rarely pack up the family and head to Madison Square Garden, either, to take in a friendly game of basketball ... or one of them rock and roll concert shows that the kids like so much these days.

Also, we don't drink too many things out of a bottle around here that aren't scotch, wine, beer, seltzer or milk. Roughly in that order of importance.

So it's a good thing that I read this cautionary tale about a poor clueless Ann Arbor dad who took his 7-year old to a Tigers game and bought him a Mike's Hard Lemonade—which apparently contains delicious alcohol—who knew?! You see where this is going: dude finds himself face to face with the cops ... while his son is rushed to the hospital! And then foster care!! Oy. Note to self: remember to read labels on bottles real careful—like when my kid is old enough to attend the Hannah Montana comeback tour.

And here I thought we were only supposed to treat our tourists this way ...

Eight Weeks to Go. Maybe.

Brian Braiker — Thu, 01 May 2008 14:21:09 GMT

We go in for our little check-up with the midwife today. I love our midwife. We wanted to do a homebirth this time around, especially since the birthing center at Long Island College Hospital (which, logically, is in Brooklyn Heights) closed down, meaning my bride will have to birth in the delivery room (heaven forefend!). But our midwife isn't covered for home births. And we love her. So delivery room (and all the necessary evils that come with it), it is.

At the check-up today, the midwife measured the belly. My wife is a thin woman, narrow. She's well proportioned. And she's a gorgeous pregnant knockout--skinny all over and one big bump. Weirdly, people have been asking her for the past month if she's either A) due any day now or B) having twins. People are idiots. If her belly were any smaller, people would be asking her whether the baby was OK. Or if she was eating enough. Like I said, people are idiots.

So we grease up the belly, and listen to the thwack-thwack heartbeat. Bless. Aama gets weighed and measured. Like a steer. I ask the midwife if there's any way to tell how big the kid is. She says she guesses five, five-and-a-quarter pounds. Totally normal for 32 weeks. Good.

Then she tells us to come back every two weeks and adds, offhand, that the baby will probably increase in weight by a half-pound a week from here on out. We nod as we put on our coats. Then pause. We do the math.

That's four pounds in eight weeks.

That adds up to a nine pound baby. At least.

Remember how I mentioned that the wife is a narrow little lady? First Born clocked in at 6 pounds, 11 ounces. That's south of seven pounds ... of blazing crotchfire agony and bloody torn crotchflesh. Three more pounds will split the poor woman open.

Which made us pause again. This frickin' baby. She's going to come early, isn't she? Eep.

My Daughter and I Wear Matching Armani Track Suits, Color Coordinated With Our Bugaboo

Brian Braiker — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 21:10:56 GMT

Because if you don't buy a $200 infant-sized tie-dye dress from Burberry for your 18-month-old... the terrorists win? Or wait. Maybe they win if you do buy it? Ack. Complicated!

Key quote: "It gives me an excuse to buy nice things for myself." Ah, the true nature of parenting.

Mmmm, Cake.

Brian Braiker — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:24:48 GMT

A word to the wise, moms of the world in quaint cash-strapped villages: home-made erotic calendars don't always sell as well as they do in the movies.

Key, heartbreaking quote: "The sad part for us is figuring out what to do with them because it is not something you can recycle." Oh dear. The calendar, it's like a docket of despair, ticking off months of pain in daily doses of rejection.

Got Milk?

Brian Braiker — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:58:51 GMT

Cause if you don't, you're going to want it after watching this:

Praise the Lord that someone is out there funneling millions of advertising dollars into something that's not actually killing our kids. Or getting them doped up on the Internets. Even if it is making them hit the puberty by, like, second grade.

What's in a Name? I am Glad You Asked!

Brian Braiker — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:53:51 GMT

We've mentioned 'round these parts before: the bride, she is all gestational once again. As usually happens when the womenfolk start makin' babies, the conversation has been known to turn toward the topic of names. As in: What in Tarnation are We Gonna Call the Unborn? Now, more or less, we have come to an agreement (thank goodness we aren't having a boy because there was No Agreeing on the topic of appellations for the phallically endowed). We have chosen a name. I should amend that: my babymama has strongly recommended that I accept her preferred choice of name. As she reminded me, with serrated blades shooting from her fiery eyeballs, the child will be getting my last name, after all. Indeed. And so, we have chosen a name. It is a good name.

I am not going to tell you what it is. But I have it on good authority that in some regional Tlingit dialects it translates roughly to "Daughter of the Great One. And His Wife."

For those of you in the position of having to come up with a name, let me please be of assistance. I live to help. I am here for you, body and soul, but mostly body. This site is waaay better than the baby name voyager in that it trolls the 1990 census. It randomly selects first names and pairs them with randomly selected last names. Just keep hitting refresh. I found some girls' names that I really liked, and I e-mailed them to my lady:

Iola
Minta
Spoon (I mean, does it get any more awesome than "spoon?")
Misha
Ola
Floy
Minna
Lisette
Ila
Ivey
Shin
Spoon
Mike (kind of rad for a girl, actually)
Eustolia!
Noemi

I love them all. I think I lost her at Spoon, though.

Then comes the hard part: the middle name. With our first child, we chose a traditional Indian name, a nod to my masala mama's heritage. I am guessing she's inclined to do something similar this time. Well. I AM GUESSING SHE'S WRONG. Because LOD alerts us to the fact that Vlassic pickles will award a $25,000 savings bond to the parents "show their love and dedication to Vlasic® Pickles by making his or her middle name, 'Crunch' ..." So rad on so many levels. Maybe the bonds will have yielded returns significant enough to pay for your child's therapy once she's ready!

Finally, I'll point out that just this past March a company called the Generations Network published a book called "Bad Baby Names" -- now in blogular form! -- which is a compendium of ... well, you figure it out, hotshot. The book's authors scoured the census from 1790-1930 as well as marriage, birth, death and military records. All the names included in this slim volume are for reals. Like, Hysteria Johnson (b. 1881), Kathryn E. Coli (b.1894), Jump Jump (b. 1825), Jam Lamb (b. awesome) and Ima Hooker (no, for reals). But the highlight? Quite possibly the best name ever known to man in all of earth's history? There it is on page 31: Wanna Funk, born in 1930 in Kansas! Wanna Funk! born in 1930! This means she was 22 when Horace Silver's "Opus de Funk" came out, 33 when James Brown pwn3d the Apollo, 45 when George and Bootsy et al. boarded the Mothership. Whew. Talk about timing. Of course, chances are she is/was probably just a big Lawrence Welk fan.

How to Start a Mommy Blogging Brouhaha on the Interweb

Brian Braiker — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 11:44:07 GMT

Want to stir up a little ridiculous controversy that serves only to underscore your central point (that parents today be cra-zay)? New York Sun columnist Lenore Skenazy has the recipe for you.

Step 1. Let your 9-year-old son ride the subway all by himself under the theory that parents today are waaaay to overprotective. ("I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.")
Step 2. Write an excellent, thoughtful column about it. "Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them."
Step 3. Let simmer on the interblogs.
Step 4. Serve hot-headed.

Skenazy is totally on to something here. The over-propensity among parents (usually Of a Certain Means) to hover and helicopter over their kiddies' every move is a serious bugaboo of mine (awful stroller pun intended, sadly). But more importantly it does the kids a disservice. The real world is not a baby-proofed, rounded-corner, anti-bacterial rubber room. Thank God. So why raise kids as if it were? They'll be sorely disappointed. (As it is they're going to have to grapple with the fact that they're not the Specialest Little People on Earth they've been told their entire childhoods, but that's another source of irritation for another time).

Now Skenazy has now bequeathed the Internets with a special gift: Free Range Kids (LOVE the name). A snip of her blog's mission statement: "At Free Range, we believe in safe kids. We believe in helmets, car seats and safety belts. We do NOT believe that every time school age children go outside, they need a security detail. Most of us grew up Free Range and lived to tell the tale. Our kids deserve no less."

The blog's first post was April 1 and there's only been one more since, which does not inspire great confidence that this brilliant idea will yield an especially robust site. But we'll reserve judgment for now.

I Comfort Myself in the Knowledge that I am Raising a Strong-Willed Woman. So at Least There's That.

Brian Braiker — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 16:44:29 GMT

Chris Collins / Corbis

What do you do with an almost-three-year-old who fights with you? And when I say "fights with you" I mean "goes all Mike Tyson and bites an ear off your head" kind of fighting. 'Cause I've got a serious fighter on my hands here. She is not, let's be clear, a hitter or a scratcher or anything violent like that. But when she adopts a cause, she digs in. Like a steamshovel. Relentless. Unwavering. Much like when, say, Mother Teresa set up shop in Calcutta and never once considered buckling under the oppressive weight of her deeply-felt mission to bring succour to the impoverished ... once my child decides she wants a lollipop, it's all over until she gets her lollipop. Or at the very least she digs in until someone's daddy dies in a steaming puddle of his own urine. Whichever needs to come first.

Take this morning, for example. And when I say "take this morning," I mean "remove it from my prefrontal cortex so I need never remember it again." Ma Breeder went into the office bright and early, leaving me in my still-slumbering state of blissful non-awakehood. Of course, my schizophrenic brain was only capable of half-delighting in the luxurious decadence of a big empty bed. The other half was anxiety-struck in anticipation of the yelling that was guaranteed to emerge from the Chamber of the Spawn. And then it came: MOOOOMMMMMYYYYY!!!

Me, stumbling in: Hi baby. Gooooodmorning!
Her: I said "MOMMY!"
Me: I know, banana. But Mommy's at work.
Her: I want Mommy.
Me: She's at work.
Her: But I want Mommy. Because I need my Mommy.
Me: I know, babyducks. But she's at work.
Her: I want Mommy.
Me: She's at work. Let's have breakfast!
Her: NO I CAN'T HAVE BREAKFAST BECAUSE I want Mommy.
Me: OK, well she's not here and I am. Or should I leave?
Her, whining in a frequency that has been known to paralyze elephants: Nooooooooo. Don't leave me!
Me: OK then! Let's change that diaper!
Her: I want mommy.
Me: I swear to you, if I could give you mommy right now, I would. I'd give you eight mommies. On steroids and estrogen. But she's at work.
Her: I want Mommy.
Me: FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY AND JUST AND GOOD WHY DON'T YOU BELIEVE ME?!!! She's at work.
Her: I want some gum.
Me: She's at wo-- oh. Gum? You can't have gum until you have breakfast. [This is how rules get made up: on the fly. -- ed.]
Her: GIVE ME SOME GUM. Where's Mommy?

It's hard to know how to react here. It's very easy to escalate and start yelling, like for real. And also get beet-red-in-the-face, pissed. But if you do, you're just coming down to the child's level. Just when patience is at its thinnest, one neds to find that reservoir of strength you didn't know you had (like that time you lifted a capsized Volkswagen off of a nun's crushed legs). One needs to go to what I call your Love Place. You must find within you that secret lakeside resort of calm, loving understanding. You have to at the very least act like a grown-up (hint: does not entail succumbing to all-consuming rage and throwing a fist-full of unused pull-ups down the hall). This secret lakeside resort is very hard to find--that's why it's a secret. But I have to believe it exists. Otherwise the human race would not have survived.

Anyway. Finally I wrangle her out of her crib through the strategic implementation of an alligator hand puppet and a story about a silly cat who wears red shoes. Amazingly, her mood recovers much faster than mine. She's all giggles and jokes and daddylove the second her feet hit the ground. I'm wary of this good will. We go to the kitchen to eat. I open the fridge. She points to the peach yogurt. "I want that one," she says. So I say, stupidly, "peach yogurt, coming right up!" Her: "I DON'T WANT PEACH YOGURT! I WANT THAT ONE!" Of course she's still pointing at the same peach yogurt. Only she's crying hysterically now. I hoist her up and let her grab the yogurt she wants. She chooses the blueberry yogurt on the other side of the fridge, naturally. Then: "I want a silly purple spoon," she announces settling into her chair ("you have to push me close to the table"). I open the utensil drawer and am confronted with the reality I already knew awaited me: we have no silly purple spoons. I hand her a not-very-silly blue spoon. She starts crying. "I WANT A SILLY PURPLE SPOON!"

I damn near lose it here. I dump all the spoons we have in front of her. "HERE! SPOONS! TAKE ONE! KNOCK YOURSELF OUT!" This is not, i should note, typical behavior of someone who has found the Love Place. Shouting about spoons before breakfast is not something that comes from the grown up, loving, secret lakeside resort place in one's heart. So I take a deep breath. I chill. She settles on a spoon. She wants a bowl for her yogurt. I pluck one of her bowls off the shelf. It happens to be blue. She objects. "Not that one! NOT THAT ONE! I WANT A PINK BOWL!"

Oh, sweet bleeding Christ.

I get her a pink bowl. She wants granola sprinkled on top of her yogurt. I sprinkle granola on top of her yogurt. She takes a bite. One bite. One single miserable bite. And says. "All done! I want gum."

Me: You can't have gum until you eat some breakfast, you know that.
Her, throwing herself on the floor: PLEASE HAVE SOME GUM!?!?!
Me: No sweetie, I know you want some but you can't have any. Eat your yogurt and we'll talk.
Her: I don't WANT yogurt. Give me gum.

It's war. It's officially war. She's on her back on the floor, crying and pulling her hair. I am fetishizing the moment when the sitter comes and I can put on my headphones. I should probably read some more books on raising kids, I am now realizing. We once read plenty of books. Books about pregnancy, books about newborns. But now? These dark waters are desperately uncharted.

I try rationalizing with her. ("How can you have gum before breakfast? That's silly!")

I try ignoring her. ("What does NPR have to say about the national foreclosure rate? I wonder!")

I go into my room and quickly get dressed while she thrashes on the kitchen floor.

I come back and give her a hug and try to calm her down and whisper sweetness into her ear. She yells at me--barks orders at me, with pointed finger!--commands me to fetch her some gum.

I snap.

I plop her into her stroller, perhaps a little too heavily, and tell her she can sit there until she's ready to calm down, talk to me properly and maybe eat some yogurt. And miraculously, after 2 seconds, this works! She cries. Every teardrop is a year of my life ripped from my heart. But it works! She agrees to eat some yogurt. She asks to be spoonfed "like a baby," and I happily oblige. She finishes it! She's all smiles and jokes and daddylove again! So, finally, I give her a big fat piece of gum.

All settled, right? Wrong. This is just one fight. These scenes unfold daily at bedtime, bathtime and naptime too. Boundaries are being tested. So is my will to live. Don't get me wrong--she's no monster. She's delightful and charming and thoughtful most of the time. But there are these flashes. In the end I usually get the result I want, or some approximate compromise. Problem is, I'm only consistent in that I'm alternately too soft or too hard, depending on my mood. And her mood. Sure, I got her to get out of bed and I got her to have some breakfast before gum, but I can't help feeling that I went about it all wrong. I mean, the kid was chewing gum at 8:03 am. Sugar-free, but still.

Whatever. At 9 the blessed sitter arrived and I darted out the door. Caught my train. Put on my headphones. About two stops into my commute I realized: I missed my daughter. That, and I really needed some coffee.

"They're young. They heal fast."

Brian Braiker — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:14:10 GMT

As founder of the Tinkering School, Gever Tulley fully admits to the fact that he puts "power tools in the hands of second graders." He also delivered an excellent talk at the TED conference last year: 5 dangerous things you should let your kid do. What, pray tell, are these five things? I'm so glad you asked:

1. Play with fire
2. Own a pocket knife
3. Throw a spear
4. Deconstruct appliances
4.5 Break the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
5. Drive a car

"trust me, they're going to learn things that you can't get out of playing with Dora the Explorer toys." Watch and learn.

Economically Stimulating

Brian Braiker — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:51:34 GMT

Under the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, more than 130 million American households will receive lump sum payments beginning in May. The only way to get one is to file a federal tax return for 2007. In brief: Yay! I can has lots cheezburgers!

What to do with this unexpected and very sensibly-allocated windfall? The IRS FAQ page doesn't quite offer the, uh, stimulating reading you might expect. Which is why I am here for you, gentle reader. What should you do with your economic stimulus check?

I humbly submit to you, pumpkins, the very thing your wee ones need: The Economic Stimulus Tutu.