Hundreds of thousands of Minnesota residents lost power in outages caused by storms over the weekend. Here, a resident looks over a house that was damaged during a storm on June 21in Minnetonka, Minn. (Richard Sennott, The Star Tribune/AP)

Minnesota power outage: A family learns four lessons to get by in a storm

By James Norton, Guest Blogger / 06.24.13

Minnesota is experiencing the worst power outage in its history — on June 21, an intense storm savaged the tree canopy throughout the Twin Cities, leaving more than a half million people without power and making an articulate argument in favor of buried power lines

My Minneapolis neighborhood, Longfellow, looks like it was attacked by a cheesed-off Paul Bunyan. My wife Becca and I work from home where we care for our 2-month-old son Josiah, and our power's been gone since 9 p.m. on Friday night. Excel Energy says the power will be back by Wednesday — but trying to restore a power grid is more horseshoes and hand grenades than a precise art.

The experience has been one of the most challenging things our young family has faced, right up there with the whole "giving birth" thing. But the process has been nothing if not educational.

Treasure That "Peak Moment"

As I write these words, Becca is happily snuggled in a comfortable hotel bed with our son. The room is cool and clean, and I'm able to use wireless Internet to work. A bit less than 24 hours earlier, the two of us were cooped up in an increasingly dark, muggy house. Our son was nearing peak volume (just this side of "jet engine" on the decibel scale), and we were both exhausted and frustrated — with each other, with the situation, with the electric company, with life in general. The ice cream sandwiches had melted. The bratwurst had gone bad. We'd arrived at a dire place.

Looking back, that moment was a precious gift. A horrible, unpleasant, madness-inducing precious gift, but a gift nonetheless. I wish I'd done more to listen rather than talk. I can see how heat, stress, and disrupted routine can stack up. But with a bit of teamwork, we survived.

And I can now view it from the other side of the mess with the knowledge that while things can get highly unpleasant, we can pull back together, rally, and recover.  

Change the Venue (If You Can)

Once a power outage (or the minor natural disaster of your choice) has severed your links to everyday life, consider taking a step further and embracing the experience. Travel, if you can. Move into different digs. Spring for a hotel, if it's doable. Is the cost of two nights at a decent hotel something we had budgeted for? Absolutely not. Would we rather spend this money on Josiah's college education, or a trip to Lake Superior's North Shore, or basically anything else? Naturally.

But was it money well spent? Absolutely. We are cool, our baby is happy, our phones are charged, we're back in touch with friends and family and one another. When you hit a hard wall, mix it up — bring in friends or family, take a trip, check into a hotel or otherwise change the game.

The Social Media Safety Net

The sunny flipside of Facebook's in-your-face interface is that when the going gets tough, your friends and family are there. Soon after losing power, Becca posted about it on Facebook; I jumped in to some other friends' threads about the storm and its aftermath. Friends have invited us over for meals, offered us air-conditioned respites, and even (after we'd arrived at the hotel) offered to put us up in their homes, baby and all. Reach out on an open forum, and you may be surprised at how many people offer you a hand.

Context is Golden

At some point — assuming that we aren't consumed by a solar flare or something — power is going to return. The air conditioning will function again, and we can once again do seemingly trivial but absolutely essential things like cooking a meal and storing things in the refrigerator. At that point, everything we do will seem that much easier and more natural. The everyday struggle of raising an infant while working from home will feel like an effortless ballet compared WITH the humid, stressful, messy experience of being without electric power for days during the summer.

And the next time this happens, we'll be ready to ride the storm, as a family.

Mayim Bialik says she's tired of hearing criticisms about using attachment parenting to raise her children. (AP)

Mayim Bialik: Enough with the attachment parenting criticism

By James Norton, Guest Blogger / 06.24.13

You probably know Mayim Bialik from "The Big Bang Theory" (or "Blossom," if you're old). But if you're a parent, you may well know her as a notable practitioner and advocate for a form of child rearing known as attachment parenting (a subject that we've reported on in the past, here and here). It's always dangerous to try to summarize anything as complicated and emotionally charged as an entire style of parenting, but loosely put, it's a philosophy that endorses a mix of practices including long-term breastfeeding, co-sleeping, and child-carrying (as opposed to stroller use) in an effort to (among other things) foster a secure, nourishing emotional bond that will last for the lifetime of the parent-child relationship.

She told Yahoo!'s omg! site this weekend that she's tired of strangers approaching her as a precursor to a fight about parenting. And if you're a parent, you know what she's talking about.

While there are a few parenting practices that are universally endorsed — not, for example, leaving your baby in the car seat on a hot day while you go grocery shopping, but just about everything else falls into some sort of ambiguous gray zone. From nutrition to breastfeeding to educational practices to sleep schedules, there's no aspect of a young child's life unworthy of comment, argument, and sometimes vicious debate. 

This seems to be because children are seen as a sort of shared resource, to be collectively protected and cared for, a hangover from the "it takes a village" hey-day of child rearing that has mostly receded into a nostalgic fog. It's loving in theory (and often in practice — one of the things a new parent experiences and appreciates is the kindness of strangers), but it can lead to awkward interactions. My wife has been approached multiple times by total strangers who feel empowered to inquire as to her breastfeeding practices. That she is then congratulated for doing the right thing for our child (as opposed to the pro-breastfeeding lecture she might have gotten for saying, "oh, we feed him formula,") only slightly dampens our annoyance at being subjected to the Parent Your Child MY Way police.

Now, there's evidence that breastfeeding has real health benefits, particularly for the first month (and quite possibly for the first six, and so on and so forth in a declining line up until college graduation). But to what extent do we have the right to ask (or even demand) that other people do something to potentially enhance their children's lives?

It's possible that the mom in question may have a medical challenge, or be an adoptive parent, or be unable to produce enough milk to help her baby thrive, or any number of other personal stories that make breastfeeding (or exclusive breastfeeding, or breastfeeding until the child can ask for milk in eloquent complete sentences) difficult or impossible. Having to work a 9-to-5 job and a second job to make ends meet could be among those factors — not everyone can schedule lives around feeding and pumping.

As for Bialik, that her status as a celebrity and public advocate for attachment parenting should lead to occasionally heated conversations with total strangers can't come as a total shock. But personally, I won't be judging her. I've got a baby to raise. Turns out it takes a bunch of work.

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The best books for children list package ever? See the link below for a larger, easier to read (easier to appreciate its beauty) word cloud. (Emelie Fredrikson / tagxedo.com)

Best books for children: a word cloud merges best-of lists

By Emelie Fredrikson and Andrew Averill, Contributors / 06.24.13

If you Google "books for children," you're going to be overwhelmed by links. Dozens of retailers, libraries, blogs, and media institutions publish their children's book recommendations annually, monthly, sometimes weekly or daily. You'll choose a site that seems reputable and hope for the best, but how can you be sure? What's more, the recommendations are typically formatted into lengthy vertical lists that can wear down your patience and your computer mouse's scroll wheel. 

While we at Modern Parenthood understand the value in filtering out the best children's books from the bad, we wanted to do away with the scrolling and introduce an aesthetic sensibility to boot. So we made a children's book word cloud (click here for a larger, more readable cloud).

For the uninitiated, word clouds are a way to visualize word choice. Text is entered into a word cloud generator and out comes the words which appeared most often in the text. The generator uses size to represent frequency, so words that are small in the cloud were used less in the text than and words that appear larger. 

These generators even let you input whole phrases, or in our case, titles of books. We combined titles from nine must-read children's book lists, including lists from Barnes and Noble, the Boston Public Library, ChildrensBooksGuide.com, etc., and put them into a word cloud generator. What came out, and what you see in small format at the top of the page (again, click here for large format) is a word cloud that displays the children's books most frequently mentioned by must-read children's book lists. If a book was mentioned on multiple lists, it will appear larger in the world cloud.

Within the word cloud are timeless treasures like "A Wrinkle in Time," "Where the Wild Things Are," and "The Little Prince," along with forgotten gems like "Maniac Magee," and "The Rainbow Fish."

We've also written about some of the books in the word cloud. Monitor books reporter Molly Driscoll interviewed the author of the "Magic Tree House" series last summer. Mary Norton's "The Borrowers" was made into an animated movie by the famous Japanese animators at Studio Ghibli. The movie, "The Secret World of Arrietty", was reviewed in the Monitor last winter. 

Do you like looking at book lists in a word cloud or do you prefer a more traditional format? Let us know on Twitter: @Modparenthood

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The first day of summer 2013 is the year's longest day in terms of sunlight, but it still pales in comparison to the amount of sun in northern Norway. This photo was taken in North Cape at exactly midnight. (Courtesy of Saleha Mohsin)

First day of summer 2013 has nothing on northern Norway's 60 days of sun

By Saleha Mohsin, Guest Blogger / 06.21.13

Today the sun will shine for 18 hours, 50 minutes and 1 second.

Now I realize that in December, when the days are short and the imposing darkness begins to wear on me, I’ll regret having said this: I’m tired of the sun. My body needs the kind of peace that only a dark, starry night can provide.

At first I was looking forward to being in Oslo on June 21, the longest day of the year. The best remedy for a grim Norwegian winter is the buildup to the summer solstice. But I went on a whirlwind trip with the Foreign Press Association into the Arctic Circle where, for five days, I didn’t see a cloud in the sky. Just the intense, bright yellow sun. In northern Norway towns like Kirkenes, Honningsvåg, and Vardø, the sun doesn’t set for 60 days. Even when the peak of the midnight sun has passed, twilight increases by just 40 minutes each day. There isn’t a proper dark night from April through August.

The first two days I was charmed by the whole thing. Sunshine all the time! Having to wake up about four hours earlier than I’d like didn’t feel so tough because the brightness and surprisingly warm weather lifted my spirits.

After a few days I started to feel tired. The sun was there when I got up at 6am for a press conference with the prime ministers of Russia and Norway, and at 2pm when we drove to the Norwegian-Russian border for a ceremony. When I clambered into bed at 11pm, I could see the sunshine bursting through the ineffective hotel curtains. My eyes opened for a moment around 3am and the blazing sun made me feel like I had fallen asleep watching television in the middle of the day. Even after eight hours of sleep I still felt like all I’d had a power-nap.

By the end of the week I was programmed to fall asleep when the lights were simply turned off. I nearly nodded off during a Power Point presentation by an oil company executive.

Fortunately for them, localers are used to 60 days of sunshine in the summer and 60 days of darkness in the winter. I spoke to a native of Finnmark County in the High North and he said besides being a little more tired than usual in the summer, he didn’t find it too challenging. “We aren’t depressed drunks in the winter, nor are we hyperactive in the summer,” he said, debunking ubiquitous myths. “It’s really not a big deal.”

I was lucky enough to have the chance to go to North Cape (Nordkapp in Norwegian), a 1,007-foot-high cliff with a plateau that attracts tourists from around the world to see the midnight sun in the summer and northern lights in the winter.

North Cape is the second northern-most point of Europe, a mere 2,102.3 kilometers from the North Pole. It has restaurants, a small chapel for weddings, a museum, a theater with a short video about the natural beauty of the High North, and a cheesy souvenir shop.

North Cape offers panoramic views of the point where the Norwegian Sea, which is part of the Atlantic Ocean, meets the Barents Sea, part of the Arctic Ocean.

The midnight sun can be seen from 14 May to the 31st of July. The sun reaches its lowest point from 12:14 – 12:24am during those days. 

It's going to happen. Your children, once babbling babies, will turn into intelligent, confidant adults. As Louis Armstrong sang, "I hear babies cry, I'll watch them grow. They'll know so much more, then I'll ever know." (Courtesy Florentine Films)

Louis was right: when your kids start to 'know much more than I'll ever know'

By Judy Bolton-Fasman, Guest blogger / 06.21.13

The young woman sitting across from me at the dinner table talked enthusiastically about her research at the MIT Media Lab. She was involved in designing prosthetics that would enable a person to climb a mountain or run a marathon. She was also graduating the next day from MIT and on her way to a masters program clear across the country to study mechanical engineering. Only 14 percent of engineers in this country are women and my niece is one of them.

My nephew graduated the day after his sister and is off to college to pursue his dream as a video game designer. At the other end of the table, Anna is telling my sister-in-law about her internship shadowing a cardiologist. She’s been scrubbing in to observe procedures like putting in pacemakers and defibrillators. “And you don’t feel like fainting when you see all that blood?” I ask in disbelief. Adam is excited to start a research internship in a lab studying stem cells.

These kids alternately awe me and make me weepy. When did they become young adults with interests and expertise so far from my own area of knowledge? When did I stop becoming my children’s primary confidante? Their first line of defense? I don’t write to their teachers anymore about this or that or send notes that they have to sit out recess because of a cold. They advocate for themselves. I watch Anna explain to a server about her severe dairy allergy. I used to do that stuff.

My role as a mother is undergoing a radical realignment and I’m not ready. I’ve known that my kids would only belong to me for a finite period of time. They’d grow and want to stumble into the greater world on their own. What young adult wouldn’t? I did.

So it was with great reluctance and more than a bit of trepidation that I let my children take the train down to Manhattan to stay with their respective friends for the weekend. I know there are kids younger than they are that literally travel the world by themselves. I also know that my kids are more than capable of taking trains and catching subways on their own. They’ve spent extended time away from home at camp and on school trips abroad. But this was a new adventure for them, navigating New York City on their own. Adam told me not to worry—in New York you’re never lost for long. You just count. I wasn’t concerned that he’d get lost, I was hyper about him looking like he was lost.

There are books written about parents like me. The classic on the subject of the overprotective parent is by Lenore Skenazy. She wrote a book called Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts With Worry. After her book came out a few years ago, she was on the Today Show with her then nine year-old son whom she allowed to navigate the New York City subway system without a cell phone. It was jaw dropping for me. I thought about Skenazy when I interrogated my almost sixteen year-old about his pending maiden voyage on the Times Square shuttle. He shrugged me off and said he took the T in Boston. And then I remembered he’s the kid who debates at school and speaks Spanish fluently. My niece the engineer backpacked through Europe after her senior year in high school. At her college graduation dinner she told us a story about dusting off her French to ask a hotel concierge where she could do laundry. And my computer science nephew will likely be acquiring skills to control a drone someday.

It’s thrilling to watch this generation put down a stake in their future. But does that future include me as a mother? Friends with grandchildren assure me that there’s a Round Two in the mothering game and it’s even sweeter the second time around. One friend went so far as to tell me that if she had known how wonderful grandchildren were she would have skipped having children and gone straight into grandparenting.

I have no doubt that my niece, my nephew and my own children will have a great impact on the world. Like any experienced chess player, I can see the endgame already. And my part is to let go and wave goodbye after each milestone. The other day I was helping Adam through some disappointing news. I sat on the edge of his bed and he said that he felt like a five year-old. I told him that sometimes we need to feel like a little kid to be nurtured.

For the moment, though, I’m going to pretend that the only changes I have to cope with in the near future are to wave goodbye at the train station and cheer on my niece and nephew for receiving their diplomas.

Instagram founder Kevin Systrom talks about an added video feature to the Instagram program at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., June 20. (Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press)

Instagram video: Parents need not change their approach with the new feature

By Anne Collier, Guest Blogger / 06.21.13

Facebook’s little photo-sharing app just became a video-sharing app too. Whether they’re using Apple or Android phones, Instagram’s 130 million users can now simply pick whether that image they want to capture is better static or in motion, then click on either the little camera or videocam icon. If they go with video, they can capture up to 15 seconds (no looping over and over as in other video-sharing apps like Vine). The filters that have always added to the fun in this app are there for video too (13 of them for it), and they can pick the frame they want to use to represent that little video on their profile or wherever they share it. If their shooting isn’t very steady, there’s a pretty amazing feature called Cinema (for now just for iPhone 4s and 5) that stabilizes the video for them.

Everything else about this new addition is a lot like the photo part of Instagram – which is almost more about illustrated conversations than mere photo-sharing. “We’re still committed to making sure you have control over all of your content. Only the people who you let see your photos will be able to see your videos,” wrote Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom in the IG blog. And we ConnectSafely folk have written a straightforward, 5-page parents’ guide to Instagram that tells you how to help your kids keep it fun and constructive (we’re in the middle of updating it as I write this). Here’s coverage of the video announcement at TechCrunch.

When is the summer solstice? June 21, which leaves just enough time for baking these delicious summer solstice cupcakes. (Courtesy of slowfamilyonline.com)

The Summer Solstice is tomorrow. Celebrate with these themed cupcakes

By Susan Sachs Lipman, Guest Blogger / 06.20.13

Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year and the beginning of the summer season, is upon us June 21 this year, at 05:04 Universal Time, or 1:04 am on the U.S.’ east coast, 10:04 pm, June 20, on the west. Throughout the Northern Hemisphere, it can be marked by Midsummer festivals, especially in Scandinavia, where people celebrate with maypoles that honor nature’s bounty and bonfires that recall the heat and warmth of the sun. Still other cultures have solstice rituals that honor the sun, the feminine and the masculine.

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, my family often attends a summer solstice celebration at Muir Beach, hosted by the Muir Woods National Monument park rangers. We enjoy a bonfire, nature storytelling and campfire songs, and a ritual walk around the fire, holding stalks of sweet flowers and herbs, and then throwing them into the fire, to greet the new season and also let go of anything that no longer serves us.

View more photos of summer solstice at Muir Beach.

An easy way to celebrate Summer Solstice, whether your gathering is a large one or a cozy one, is to make Summer Solstice cupcakes. 

Just as Winter Solstice gives birth to the light, Summer Solstice, with its day that never seems to end, holds the seeds of darkness. We discover darkness in the bits of chocolate concealed inside this sunny cupcake.

Summer Solstice cupcakes
This recipe comes from the terrific book, Circle Round
Makes 20-24 cupcakes

1/2 cup butter (one stick) softened in the summer sun

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 cups flour, sifted first and then measured

pinch of salt

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 cup milk

1 cup chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Use paper liners, or grease and flour cupcake tins.

2. Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time. Add vanilla.

3. Mix together the flour, salt, and baking powder. Add half of the dry ingredients to the wet mixture and stir in. Follow with 1/2 cup milk, then the other half of the flour mixture, and the rest of the milk. Stir in the chocolate chips.

4. Bake for 25 minutes.

Because of the sweetness of the cake and chips, these don’t need frosting, but you can certainly add it, in a solid color or a cheery sun or flower design.

This is a great explanation of how Summer Solstice works. Happy Winter Solstice to those in the Southern Hemisphere, who are marking the lengthening days. Perhaps chocolate cupcakes with white chocolate chips are in order?

Happy Solstice to all!

Let the kids roam this summer rather than dictate their every move and activity. It will engage their imagination. John Rivera splashes Raymundo Flores during a trip to Lake Conroe on June 19, in Conroe, Texas. (AP)

Summer activities for kids: Nix the planner, it's time to play pretend

By Susan DeMersseman, Guest blogger / 06.20.13

Parents these days enroll their children in lots of enriching summer camps and classes. Lucky kids. And other lucky kids just putter around their homes or yards pretending. "Let's pretend" were the words that commenced most of childhood play for generations. With rich imaginations children created exotic and fantastic worlds in which they were the main players.

Empty packing boxes became all kinds of little shops and vehicles. A line of chairs in the dining room became a bus or train. A bedspread thrown over a sawhorse became our tent on the Amazon. In our own attic was a box of fancy dresses, suits, hats, and old jewelry. We became Mom and Dad or duke and duchess.

I have nothing against the kind of "enriched childhood" many parents are trying to create. I just don't want kids to miss the richness that comes from their own unique imaginations.

When I see the Kindergarten children in a school where I'm the psychologist with baskets of dress-ups in their play area, I am grateful. This may be one of the few places where these developing minds get to exercise the capacity to imagine. Too often these days children's imaginations are hijacked by television or by toys that require a specific story line.

As children we often had as much fun making our toys as we did playing with them. When I wanted to play secretary, I spent an entire afternoon making a typewriter from a little black box and circles of paper that I carefully cut out, labeled with appropriate letters and glued on the box. When we wanted a swimming pool we spent a whole day digging a hole, placing a tarp and running water. All for about 30 minutes of splashing. Our mother had suggested the location of the "swimming pool" and a few days later a big lilac bush was planted there. (Guess mom had a little imagination too.)

Children still have these impulses and with a little unstructured time will organize an activity, create, and pretend. My daughter was one of those children who absorbed all the tape and cardboard in the house into her creations. One year I gave her a shoebox filled with tape, scissors, cardboard, etc. as a Christmas gift. She loved it, managed to use it all up in short order and continued to gather the tape from her parents' secret hiding places.

I became convinced that one of the ways we encourage imagination is by tolerating messes. Sometimes the imagination of my children resulted in chaos in the living room, where every stuffed animal and piece of doll equipment became part of some elaborate setting. I must confess that it was often tempting to just let them watch cartoons because it created less mess. On the other hand the mess created from too much media can be in their heads rather that on the living room floor. Much harder to clean up.

Some children are natural directors in pretend plays. "You be the princess, and you be the horse and you be the dad." My daughter was one of those directors, and to be allowed to play with her and her friends she would tell her little brother, "You be the monster". It's hard to know what impact her training had on him, but there were times when he played that role too well. Fortunately he escaped the type casting and is now the most wonderful grown son a mother could want.

Toys that have multiple uses and, even better, time in the great outdoors can spark the "pretend potential" in children. I hope every child gets to make mud pies at some point in their childhood. Even pretending with them can help. I'm certain that our now grown children became the creative cooks they are because of the hours we spent pretending to be restaurant patrons and ordering wildly exotic dishes.

One of the best friends of imagination is boredom. We have to let kids be bored every now and then and let them find inspiring materials around to create their own fun. In these critical times we need rich imaginations to solve our many problems and equally important to bring joy and laughter into the world. Even if it means more messes in the living room — it's a small price to pay.

If you give twins rubber bands, they're going to have a really good time. (Screenshot YouTube)

Twins rubber bands video: Two babies have the best time ever

By Andrew Averill, Contributor / 06.20.13

This video of twins playing with rubber bands has been stretching across the Internet the past few days, so why haven't we at Modern Parenthood posted it yet? To be honest, we've been too busy geeking out to the twins and their rubber bands to actually do something productive.

With the video finally paused, no easy feat considering the psychological tug of a baby's laugh, not to mention the laughter of two babies, we're ready to do our job. 

This is clearly the most infectiously funny video since the 2008 four laughing babies video which has more than 3.6 million views.

So just what is this video? Simple explanation: twins plus rubber bands equals laughter. Explanation with a Les Miserables paraphrase: To watch these little laughing persons is to see the face of God. 

Want more baby videos? Follow us on Twitter — @ModParenthood