soul food

I'm enjoying equipping our play kitchen now that Anna's using it more. Today I found a little shelf for holding kitchen items. I'm not sure it will stay where it is, but she likes it doing its shelf thing there on top of the range.

Here's something else that's giving me pleasure: good and varied reading material in the co-sleeper. I don't hesitate to read withdrawn PEOPLE magazines from the library. But I might reconsider once Henry gets curious about my reading material. I think Adam Carolla's book In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks is pretty hilarious, but it may not be everyone's cup of tea. The Boston Review is engaging and fascinating. I don't identify with Nancy Hirschmann, but I sure do love Shannon Hayes' response. Superbaby? Well, I decided to just check it out and take a look. It's interesting. She has some helpful, reasonable things to say to me, a mother who leans heavily to the no-scheduling end of the spectrum, about the value of routine in daily life.
This quotation from Adam Carolla, though, really gets me laughing:

"Giving birth is tough, but let's not treat it like it's anything more than it is. I can't stand the mommy bloggers, the women who have kids and then decide to go online and write about the dos and don'ts. You know, hard-hitting topics like 'Sack Lunch. Friend or Foe?' It's all the same forty-year-old white chicks. ...[A]ll of a sudden after you have a kid you must write a children's book and a blog to explain to other people how to do it. You're telling us stuff we've all known for a billion years."