Letters to the Editor
Leeandra Nolting
Published Letters: 177 Editor's Choice: 10
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what's interesting to me
[Read the article: The best-laid plans]
[Read more letters about this article: Here](and so far, it seems no one has commented on) is that she makes a comment about trying and failing to achieve "sexual normalcy."
The girl doesn't seem to be having a whole lot of "innocent," youthful fun while hooking up with a Catholic Italian rapper in a train cabin. (Since they don't go all the way, it doesn't count, I guess...) She doesn't seem to be getting her kicks from the danger and seediness that are a part of one-night stands. (I too laughed at the "potential rapist" line.)
She's doing it because she's romanticized one-night stands as an integral part of the hip, post-modern women's experience, much the way girls in the past would romanticize aspects of the traditional white wedding.
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correlation/causation
[Read the article: Have a daughter? You wimp]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Do "confident, aggressive" women have five sons and no daughters because they are "confident and aggressive" from their high testosterone levels, or do they become that way from being around little boys (who are expected to be confident and aggressive)? Do "nurturing, caring" women have five daughters and no sons because they have low testosterone levels or because they spend all their free time playing Barbies with their girls?
BTW, my late grandmother, who certainly defined confident and aggressive, had four daughters. She miscarried her only son. Girls run very heavy on that side of the family, outnumbering boys about 2-1. You have to go over 150 years back to find a male firstborn, and among families with three or more children, my cousin was the first to have a male as her second-born in about 70 years. There is no shortage of confident, aggressive females in the clan.
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there were actual sex scenes in the SVH books?
[Read the article: Sweet Valley High goes on a diet]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Shit. Missed those. I was looking for them, too. (I would have been reading these in about the fifth-sixth grade, so any of my grad school friends that read this, cut my former literary tastes some slack.)
Anyway, I'm 5'7" and 135 lbs. I just bought a skirt from Target that says size two on the label. It's BIG on me. I also have a cocktail dress that's from the early 1960s that fits tight through the waist. The label says it's a size sixteen.
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wouldn't baby sign language retard a kid's talking?
[Read the article: The parent trap]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't know; I don't have kids and I'm not a pediatrician.
But it seems that if a kid learns how to make signs for various things he wants and Mommy jumps up and gets those things for him, he doesn't have as much incentive to learn to speak clearly.
(My very earliest memory is of incredible frustration. I was laying on my back in the stroller, unable to lift myself up to where I could stick my hand in a rip in the stroller lining--it was navy blue vinyl, there was an L-shaped rip in it, and the padding inside was a green foam--and trying to make my Dad understand that I wanted to be lifted up THAT FAR and NO FURTHER so I could feel the green stuff. I don't know how old I would have been at the time, but I talked at eight months and haven't shut up since.)
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whoa, whoa, whoa...
[Read the article: The parent trap]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I got nothing against ASL or any other foreign language. (I minored in Spanish and know a little French, BTW, and wished I'd had the opportunity to be exposed to those languages more when I was younger, could hear better, and could pick them up easier.)
I don't think parents who teach a kid "baby sign language" are doing it to teach them about diversity. They're doing it to make it easier to understand what the kid wants, which is perfectly reasonable.
My point was that part of what makes a kid learn to talk is realizing he NEEDS to know this in order to get what he wants. A little bit of frustration is probably good for babies' brains.
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huh...
[Read the article: The parent trap]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Baby sign language seemed counterintuitive, but I guess it could work.
My best friend in New Orleans used it with her son. He's two and a half now and he speaks just fine.
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why not just replace the wheels on a cheaper stroller?
[Read the article: The parent trap]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Since a lot of city dwellers/people in snowy climates say that the little wheels on a regular stroller just won't cut it, why not buy a $100-$200 stroller and replace the wheels with bigger, stronger ones? You can buy wheels for tricycles and push mowers at most hardware stores for about $5-10 a pop, and they're pretty sturdy. You'd have to take a look at how the stroller folds etc., but it could probably be done on a lot of models.
(I don't have kids but I take my laundry to the laundromat in one of those folding grocery carts. I live in a third-floor walk-up in a building with thirteen-foot ceilings, and the sidewalks are very uneven in the French Quarter, so I replaced the little plastic wheels that came with the cart with more substantial ones, and I can now "roll" about fifty pounds of laundry up the stairs with one arm.)
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man, I am so in the wrong business...
[Read the article: The parent trap]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I looked at pictures of the $800 Bugaboo and $1,000 Xplory strollers. Yes, they are incredibly sturdy, well-made strollers--but all they are is metal and plastic tubing, wheels, and canvas. So you can switch it from a buggy to a stroller when the kid gets bigger? Whoop-de-do: you could also buy a $100 buggy and a $100 stroller later on, which might come in handy if you, you know, had another kid a year or two down the line (it didn't look like either of the expensive strollers could fit both a newborn and a toddler at once.)