Great Dad

Here’s a website for the blokes. There is a wealth of resource material for women readily available online, mainly due to the fact that they carry and birth the baby and are usually seen as the primary care giver. It’s nice to see somebody dedicating an entire webspace for the fathers out there. Staffed by guys and with several contributors being malle doctors, I’m sure there’s something for every man here who has a burning question or thirst for the knowledge that will enable them to become an even better parent.

Great Dad

How to nap

Only got a few hours inbetween your child’s sleep/feeding times and need to catch up on some Z’s? Here’s how:

How to nap

Thingamababy

This dude makes me look lazy, sure his site may not be as stylishly laid out as Janglebug (ha) but he sure does dig up the info to share with the parentals! He has a shedload of categories to explore and some excellent blogroll links. Thingamababy has been going strong for a while now and is a respected parenting blog that you should bookmark today.

Link

Mental Heuristics

A heuristic is a “rule-of-thumb”, advice that helps an AI program or human think and act more efficiently by directing thinking in an useful direction.

Some of these heuristics are age-old wisdom, bordering on cliche, but most are actually helpful.

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If you want something done, do it yourself

Comment: Obviously true, and doing it is usually very good for your self esteem. A surprising amount of work can be done this way, and experts are not always necessary. However, there is a risk of becoming overworked if you try to do everything yourself – we all need other people after all.

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Never procrastinate anything you can do right now

Comment: Very powerful. There are many things that can be fixed or solved with a minimum of effort, but are often pushed aside as unimportant. Unfortunately they won’t go away, and in time the feelings of guilt for not having done them will make you even less likely of fixing the problems.

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When you have several things you could be doing and don’t know which to do: Just do any one of them!

Comments: If you cannot decide between two or more possibilities, then there is a good chance that the differences don’t matter. However, most people begin to hesitate in this kind of situation (Fredkin’s paradox). If you are conscious of this, you can just choose one choice randomly or according to some standard method.

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Always assume that you will succeed

Comments: If you don’t expect to succeed in an endeavor, then you will not do your best and will not notice possible solutions, while if you feel that you will eventually succeed you will concentrate all your power at the problem. Of course, there is no point in attempting what you cannot do, a certain amount of self-knowledge is always needed.

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If you can’t find a solution, change the rules.

Comment: Remember that there are no no-win scenarios.

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If you cannot do anything about something, there is no point in worrying about it.

Comment: Worrying is stressful, and in most situations doesn’t accomplish anything – it just wastes energy. Instead of worrying about things, either do something about them or find ways around the problem. One useful idea is to write down your worries on slips of paper, and then put them away in a box. Regularly, once a week or so, you open the box and see what you can do about the worries that are still relevant.

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Do not rely on conscious decisions for speed – Just Do It

Comments: The conscious mind is surprisingly slow, conscious choices and actions are delayed for a significant time (a reflex acts within some tens of milliseconds, an unconscious reaction to external stimuli circa 100 milliseconds and a conscious choice several seconds). The duty of the conscious mind is usually to inhibit rather than start action, and if you become too conscious of what you are doing in a tense situation you will hesitate or slow down.

It is a good idea to learn to rely on your non-conscious mind, since our conscious mind is slow and has very low bandwidth while the other systems in our brains have a tremendous capacity and actually do most of the real work anyway.

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Don’t try to explain away your actions for yourself

Comment: While we often do things we do not want to explain our real motivations for before other people (out of fear of embarrassment, anger or loss of image), it is a bad idea to try to convince oneself that the motivation was anything different from what it was. It will only reduce your self-knowledge with deliberate misinformation, and it is often valuable to understand what motivations you have (even if you dislike them or would never admit them in public).

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Listen to your intuition, but do not believe it unconditionally

Comments: Intuitive or emotional thinking, analogies, “gut feelings” or “flashes of inspiration” can sometimes give fantastic new insights or show problems from a new direction. Unfortunately such thinking isn’t always reliable, and quite often completely wrong! Such insights should never be accepted because you admire their beauty or they are intuitive, only because they fit with reality.

Sleepy Bye Byes

Having trouble getting your tike to slumber? This could be the thing for you.

Sleepbot Environmental Broadcast: The official radio service of Ambience for the Masses.   Peaceful streaming audio featuring a random cycling of some of the most sleep-worthy tracks ever created.   Live on-line sedation is available 24 / 7 / 365 and all without a doctor’s prescription. Turn it on and soothe that little tacker to sleep.

Learn more here

Is Your Child A Tagger?

Does your young’un stink of aerosol spray cans and go by the name Daze172?
If so, he/she could be a villinous tagger!

According to the City of Santa Ana, Orange County, here are some of the evil signs to look out for:

Taggers come from every race and socio-economic background. Although most taggers are males there are female taggers. Some indicators that your child may be a tagger are:

• Your child is in the age group statistically associated with tagging, ages 12-18.

• Your child has tagging written on their clothing such as their shoes or inside their baseball cap, schoolbooks, notebooks, backpacks, cd covers, and on their bedroom furniture or walls.

• Your child frequently wears baggy pants or carries a large backpack. These are used to carry cans of spray-paint, various colors and types of magic markers, etching tools, slap tags and cameras to take photos of their taggings. The clothes and backpack may be paint stained.

• Your child has large quantities of magic markers in various colors, types and sizes, spray-paint cans, shoe polish containers, or dot markers used to mark bingo cards.

• Your child has or carries tools used for etching glass or mirror surfaces such as spark plug porcelain, drill bits, screwdrivers with a sharpened tip, small rocks, or any other type of sharp instrument.

full list here

Kid’s Birthday Parties

Sam Di Brito writes the All Men Are Liars column for the Sydney Morning Herald. Here’s a great piece he wrote recently concerning the dread of parents everywhere – the birthday party. His reader’s comments are enlightening at times also.

“Once partnership has beckoned and fatherhood headlocks a man to the floor of responsibility, a bloke is forced to confront one of life’s more complex joys – the children’s birthday party.

They’re an occasion where the screaming of one’s own kiddie-winks seems subsonic compared to the thunder clap of two dozen little people pinging on soft-drink, when the kinder sturmtruppen that besieges your fridge after-school appears as polite as a Neville Chamberlain handshake when measured against the midget hoard eviscerating party pies and sausage sandwiches in your backyard.

It’s also a time for you to rub manboobs with a dozen or so parents whom you have absolutely nothing in common save a primary school or soccer team – men and women you’d run off the road with single digit enthusiasm if you encountered their beetle-brows on a holiday congested freeway.

For the single, childless man, however, these occasions serve both as aphrodisiac and prophylactic, for while there will undoubtedly be a couple of yummy mummies on hand to make things frisky, their bleating progeny flash like lights at a death-trap level crossing …

It seems an eon ago when a dunking bucket of apples and a drunkenly sketched donkey looking for its’ tail was enough to occupy a group of seven-year-old children.“

Read the whole article here.

Childhood Fears

Life’s a scary place to be, especially for kids.
Here’s some unpleasantness your child may experience that being aware of will be of help top the both of you. From the pen of Jan Petit.

1. Fear of the dark
Under the bed.
Inside the closet.
Between leap and landing (floor to bed).
(Related) Long arm reaching out from under bed.

2. Fear of separation
Lost in a crowd (accidental).
Lost in a crowd (on purpose).
Lost in the woods (either).

3. Fear of abandonment
Parents dying.
Parents divorcing.
One parent moving.
Parents remarrying.

4. Fear of wicked stepparent

5. Fear of pee accidents
In school.
In bed.
In friend’s bed.

How to Have Fun With Your 1 Year Old

By the time your baby reaches the age of one, he/she has reached a milestone in his development where he/she can have fun with you, and do activities with you as well. Over at eHow (an online “how to” guide for almost anything you can imagine) are some activity ideas for parents that can do good for both you and your child. Of course not everyone has a child aged 1…some are older, some are younger. eHow’s information pages cater for kids of all ages, so take a read and see if there’s something thoughtful for you there.

How to Have Fun With Your 1 Year Old

eHow parenting overview

Babysteps

Here is the very first post on Janglebug. We hope to create a hub where we can share web finds, fun activity ideas, toys, music and cool stuff that both kids and parents could enjoy together. Please visit regularly for updates and be sure to check the links posted to the many other great sites dedicated to sharing great experiences with your children.