Friday Miscellany

My two year old girl had a significant nose bleed last night. It didn't really bother her. All she said that she needed was "a wipe". Read about it here.

A couple of nights ago, my four year old son was heading up to bed, but before he left he had to update me on what he was doing with his little people. "The boys are in the castle and the girls are in the house." Gender stereotypes? How did this happen? He watches PBS! Of course, last week he was dressing up in his sister's princess costume.

A group of British teachers has proposed replacing the word "fail" with "deferred success" (see here). Does such an asinine proposal deserve a comment? We cannot teach children that they will always eventually succeed; some things they may never be able to do; we must teach them how to respond to failure. Despite what PBS Kids tells us, we can't do everything we want to do.

I bagged my first spider of spider season. He was a fat, rusty red, perched between the shrubs and our garbage can at waist height (I shiver to think about walking into it while taking the garbage out at night). My wife was returning with the kids at night, pulled up in the driveway and illuminated her with the high beams. It was a piteously easy kill. A double tap of Raid to the body, and she had spun to the ground. I always thought that this type of spider started to show up in mid-August about the time school started. Maybe they are as confused as I am with some schools starting school next week (see my post 26 June 2005 Fear and the Four Year Old for more about Spiderfall).



Here are what the spiders look like. Many of them are a bit more red. See more like it here.

Peace