Cool reads from my feeds

I'm sharing the interwebz lurv today, with some funny and cool stuff I've been reading.

First up, on Doing art with kids, from Parenting. Illustrated with Crappy Pictures.  This pic looks a LOT like Lolly's last art sessions.  And the blog is all round awesome and hilarious [thanks to Rachel from spinnering for putting me onto it!]

© 2011 Amber Dusick

(C) 2011 Lolly

Carl Thompson from Working At Perfect, on Electric Wheelchair Etiquette.

60 [mostly] cool 404 error messages, at Hongkiat.com [many are average, but some are awesome!]

My friend Kestrel made me lol with this on Facebook, from Unhappy Hipsters, Montessori peeps will love it.

No bibliophile or sefl-respecting atheist/agnosic can go past the Amazon reivews of the King James Bible, the LOLZ, they hurt!

For those of you who don't know, this is God's second novel after the Old Testament. It's a marked improvement, in my opinion. He got rid of a lot of his previous angst and scorn, and has really begun to show some of the maturity present in his later works. He's become a much more loving and kind God....

Finally, Stickman Communications' Hannah Ensor is working on a kid's picture book with wheelchair kids in it!  Hooray!

(C) Hannah Ensor via here.

Offbeat Mama!

My post on being a stepmother was published on Offbeat Mama!  Here is the original piece, with lots of extra pictures. 

If you're visiting, you might like to check out a few posts: on living with a wheelchair (which was on Offbeat Mama a few months ago), or on epilepsy, or on the hard work of caring and parenting. 

 Thanks for stopping by!

Reading Blogs makes me a better parent, Part the First

You know, when I'm thinking and feeling this parenting gig more, I'm in the zone, it goes great, I'm totally there.  Lolly and I are in sync and get along famously.  If I lose focus, revert to some crap behaviours or strange expectations, things go downhill and we both lose out.  One of the things that has kept me in the zone is the words of other parents.  About what to stay focussed on.  About what to expect from a three year old.  About being a parent and that sometimes that is hard work.  About stuff to do with her.  And how to think about how she plays and engages with that stuff.  About fun things.

For parenting awesome: blue milk; The Crazy Baby Mama.  Stuff to do, and thinking hard about how and why kids do it that way (or not): The Artful Parent; Teacher Tom; The Montessori Goldmine.  Check out more Montessori gems and ideas at What Did We Do All Day; A Bit of This and A Bit of That; and One Hook Wonder. 

Same with parenting a disabled child.  There are days it seems a never ending tragedy of epic proportions, and I swan about all "woe is me," beating my brow and lamenting and covering myself and my family with ashes* [*ashes are metaphorical].  Other days I'm more "oh yeah, whatevers" and "this is easy-pants!"  Sometimes those hair-tearing ashes days happen anyway, no matter how much zen crap I try about being in the friggin moment, but other times, reading something or thinking about something I've read can turn my switch from crap to slightly less crap.

NOT like this...

Now, I don't mean in a flowery unicorn shit way, about it all being some magical mythical journey and messages from angels and blah blah blah [that stuff generally makes me wanna get my poking stick out], but just a more settled feeling of "life, this is it."  In a positive way.  Some days you see the soul in the child more than the layers of shit to clean (and I mean actual shit), the trouble, the back pain, the near constant welling of tears (mine, not hers), the girl-sized hole in your loved-one's heart, the wheelchair, the sadness, the "look at my pretend seizure, Mummy" from the 3 year old, the actual seizures, the...whole fantabulous everything of what's wrong with this picture.

Official Poking Stick

Some days it just IS, it's not something sad or wrong, it's just a person with their own stuff, same as anyone, but more so.  My job is to help her out, give her some joy in her life, some respect, some love and some care, some family.  And it's easier, trite as it might be to say so publicly here on the Interwebz, to know that other people are out there, with their own people, and their own shit, dealing in their own ways.

Seriously, check out: A Blog About a Bloke; a moon, worn as if it were a shell; Blogzilly; Life with a Severely Disabled Child; the Flight of Our Hummingbird; and My Three Ring Circus.

So, upshot is, reading shit on the internet is good.  Not least of which that when googling images for "poking stick," I found the following:

More Like THIS.

Internet, I love you.


[Image source: poking stick]
[Image source - unicorn poker]

Blogging linky love

Seems ages since I gave a link to anything, here are some gems in my RSS feeds lately:

The fabulous Rachel (and IRL friend), who has the lovely blog spinnering, where she finds gems scattered across the interwebs, has a new gem of her own, a blog about great etsy finds: etsycoup.  Check it out, it's gorgeous!  I love it when people with taste do my shopping for me :D

I am loving the blog, life with a severely disabled child, OMG that woman is hilarious!  You can tell you're gonna like it from her blog header:

It's black humour with awesome coping stylings thrown in.  It's the life with a disabled kid blog I wish I could write!

I enjoy the Montessori inspired One Hook Wonder, not least of which for her witty self description:

I am a mom of 4 living in a small town. Because this can be boring, I'm forced to craft and do Montessori activities with my kids. Oh, and we do some Waldorfy things too. If not for those saving graces, I'd be living a life of crime and mayhem.

If you need Art inspiration, check out The Artful Parent, particularly this summary post of every kind of art you can imagine!  It mostly makes me feel inadequate as a parent, but hey, it's a start that I'm looking at it, right?  ;D

 

I fell off the Blogtoberfest wagon!

So, as you might have noticed, I fell of said wagon a few days ago.  I've been swamped, tired, and suffering from a lack of things to say.  We're off to Snail's school concert tonight, so hopefully I'll have some nice photos to share tomorrow.  I'm going to post out the rest of the month, even though I've missed a few :D

Here are some amusing and interesting links in lieu of my own personal genius.

What NOT to do in email - @ the Oatmeal.  Click through to read them all, tis made of funny.

Cool Star Wars stuff I wantz real bad - here at zazzle. 

On keeping a calendar (I sent this one to DinnerDad) - from Off the Hoof.

Meetings may be toxic, but calendars are the superfund sites that allow that toxicity to thrive. All calendars suck. And they all suck in the same way. Calendars are a record of interruptions. And quite often they’re a battlefield over who owns whose time.

In my experience, most people don’t schedule their work. They schedule the interruptions that prevent their work from happening. In the case of a business like ours, what clients pay us to make and do happens in the cracks between meetings, or worse, after business hours.  [...] 
“I’m adding a meeting” should really be “I’m subtracting an hour from your life.”

 And finally, the hilarious Hyperbole and a Half - the God of Cake.

 

Image - Allie Brosh / CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

I was linkied!

I forgot to linky that I was linkied!  So that will have to serve for today's blog :D

 The Montessori Goldmine: Thursday Round

This is a fabulous blog for those interested in Montessori and great kids activities.

And my wheelchair post was on Offbeat Mama - hurray! 

And if I post before going to sleep on Monday, that counts for Blogtoberfest!  :p

Climate Change sites

I got some great links for climate change today, and thought I would share them - register at each site for updates. Both do some amazing work!

350.org is aiming to reduce Co2 in the atmosphere to 350 ppm. Here is there nifty short animation:



The other site is AVAAZ - which has a number of amazing campaigns for justice in the world.

And of course, don't forget Get Up!

The Carnival of Feminist Parenting

The Fourth Carnival is up at Mother's for Women's Lib. Thanks heaps to Anji for all the work that goes into these. It's some great reading.