Porque é que os animais mordem os donos?

Atente-se bem no sutiãzinho deste/desta ;)

eBook to download

This book teaches hearing parents how to use simple sign language gestures to communicate with their hearing infants before their infants can speak. Joseph Garcia uses anecdotes, practical guidelines and humor to explain the benefits and method for taking advantage of this unique form of early communication. He will help you recognize when your child is receptive to learning. He recommends which signs to teach first and shares ideas for games that can be fun and useful when introducing new signs. The book is also a useful reference with 145 clearly illustrated signs, enabling you to choose and teach the signs that will be most beneficial to you and your child. This book is also included in a separate "package" edition called the SIGN with your BABY Complete Learning Kit - which is comprised of the book, 60 minute training video and quick reference guide.

Análise à língua portuguesa em livros infantis

O Letrário decidiu verificar se há perigo no maravilhoso mundo da leitura infanto-juvenil ou se, pelo contrário, podemos descansadamente continuar a incentivar as crianças a ler seja o que for, desde que a classificação etária anunciada coincida com as idades dos nossos meninos.

Merci, Val, de m'indiquer ce site ;)

Adorable: Jane and the Dragon

Poor Dragon. I tried to explain what animation meant, how it was stories told with pictures that move. He threw a huffy and flew off to his cave leaving me to issue this challenge in his place. My name is Martin Baynton and I created Jane and the Dragon. (Please don't tell THEM that.) So for those Knight School Students who are keen to create animated stories of your own I would love to see your work.

And here's the challenge. You know how Smithy loves designing and building new tools and devices, well I challenge you to write and animate a short story based on one of Smithy's new inventions. Get together with some of your school friends and give it a go - it can be done using any animation software you're familiar with, or stop frame animation using cut out images. Have fun and be as inventive, creative and entertaining as you can.

You might need to carry out research, so I have found some places where you can learn about simple animation, and life in the Middle Ages.

The competition closes on May 30th, 2008. In the teachers' turret your teachers can find out everything they need to know about the competition such as entry forms, rules and prizes which include books, DVDs, and a visit to the Weta Workshop Studios for some lucky animators who will get to see Weta Workshop animators at work.

We will publish the winners here in Knight School, and we will also publish them on Weta Workshops own website too.

Videos available on YouTube ;)

Childhood Fears

Check out some more art from Joshua Hoffine

Wish List

Truques & Manhas ;)

Tão simples... Como usar um só «brinquedo» para todos os sítios em que o bebé está (por enquanto :) em vez de comprar - porque tem sempre que se comprar :| - arcos de actividades e sei lá que mais gingarelhos :-Þ
E quando se tem a sorte de ter recebido de prenda o Melhor Tapete de Actividades, até parecia mal :D

Wilbär do zoo de Estugarda

Encontrado no Cute Overload, pois então :)

Magnum celebrates Mothers

A minha preferida ;)

Donkey Xote ;)

Finalmente uma versão contemporânea em animação!
E que importa que o burrico se pareça muito com o do Shrek?
Quem é que não adorou aquele rechonchudo pestanudo e abelhudo?

Nas palavras de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra:

De rir a bandeiras despregadas!
Uma obra-prima realmente inspiradora!

How to have children

They say that children are noise covered in dirt. Actually they're fast-moving noisy dirt. That's why they're best when they're asleep, because that's the only time they are quiet, clean and still.

Children have an enormous amount of energy. They get this directly from their parents, who have precisely no energy by about 8.30pm. This explains why mindless rubbish TV is so popular at around this time. Children are nature's contracep- tives. A baby crying in the night is the exact opposite of a Romantic Moods CD.

Unlike a CD player, there is no remote control, so you have to get out of bed to adjust the volume. Once you've started having babies, the phrase "Let's make love" becomes associated with "Let's change more nappies" and that's not necessarily apowerful aphrodisiac. One of the great things about having children is that you get to know another human being for the first time - your parents. Every parent vows not to make the same mistakes their parents made.

Unfortunately, having children in the first place was their big mistake and you've already made it.

Girls and boys are born different. Boys come out wanting to play withanything round. Girls come outknowing that their arrival will change the dynamics of the family insubtle and possibly useful ways. What children growing up needmore than anything else is aconstant, stable environment that willnurture and comfort them.

The TV plays this role in most families. When children grow up a little and require a higher level of interaction, they can then go online. The quickest way to grow up is tohave children. You can try and remain childish, but your children will then have to grow up faster to compensate. When you become aparent, you often become worryingly like your own parent. You startusing the exact phrases they did, such as, "You must eat that so you'll grow up big and strong" - even though you ate it and grew up short and weedy. Most people who have children wouldn't have it any other way.

There are moments of pure joy when your heart is filled with love. These moments come on a regular basis after 7,894 other moments involving noise, dirt and damage to property. my eye, "and the fact that you're always citing that single incident isproof that it's the only time I've ever been antisocial!"

Anyway, Eric's demeanour throughout the incident was equally awkward. He clearly didn't want to walk with me just as vehemently asIdidn't want to walk with him. "His antisocial attitude makes himinteresting," I think. "I can relate to that. What an interestingly antisocial self-assured person." Now all I need to do is wait here inthe toilet until I hear him scamper away. So I do. "I'm going to hire him!" I think.

Feliz Dia da Mãe / Happy Mother's Day

Ajuda de Berço

A Lei da Rolha :)

Comece já hoje a juntar as suas rolhas de cortiça!

A partir de dia 22 de Abril (Dia da Terra) será iniciada a recolha nos restaurantes.

No Dia 5 de Junho (Dia Mundial do Ambiente) já poderá colocar as suas rolhas nos "Rolhinhas" dos Hipermercados Continente

Posteriormente iremos alargar a outros locais.

My thoughts exactly :) às 8 semanas

Wise and funny words from Linda Lee at Parent Dish:

One-sided conversations with an 8-week-old

Are you seriously waking up because you heard my laptop opening? Listen, it's not like I'm looking at PORN over here, Judgey.

Smiling like that will get you nothing, Mr. Manipulator, except your mother's total inability to act like a rational adult. Who's a mushy? Who's a poochy?

Hey, nothing quite like a freshly-changed diaper to poop on, huh? Unless of course it's my HAND.

"Goo"? You seriously just said "goo". That was so over-the-top cute I am looking for the hidden cameras.

Get your little squirrel paws out of your mouth, dude, I'm trying to feed you over here. Don't make me break out the duct tape.

I hate to tell you this, but you have a zit. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's an adorable zit, but I'm not sure this bodes well for your teen years.

Did I not just file those nails yesterday? You are like a teeny tiny Wolverine.

The full-body joyful squirming is enough on its own, you don't have to add the openmouthed smiling and cooing. How much can a person be expected to take? My god, my heart is like an over-saturated sponge dinosaur.

Say, what's with all the grunting? . . . Oh.

Flocke aprende a nadar

Wall Tattoos

Cute as a Baby ;)

The art of having a baby

One spring morning a few years ago - well five, in fact: one never forgets such things - a postcard dropped through my door. It showed the Madonna del Parto by Piero della Francesca, a painting I thought I knew well. You probably know it too, at least from reproductions, the original being on display in a former village school in Tuscany. It shows two angels drawing back the curtains of a tent-like pavilion to reveal a Madonna with her eyes gently lowered: a column of calmness, beautiful in blue, one of Piero's magnificently still, silent figures.

I did a double-take. I had always thought the Madonna was supposed to be pregnant - she has one hand to her waist as if easing the weight, and the other just below her breast where a seam in her overdress has been unstitched, as if her clothes were growing too tight. But I wondered, suddenly, whether she was not pregnant at all, just gesturing at a potential pregnancy, representing a mystical future she could only imagine. Like so much Christian art, perhaps the Madonna was only a symbol; or worse, centuries of people looking at the picture had mistaken the bulk of her robes for a gently swelling belly. After all, anyone who thought that Arnolfini's wife was pregnant in Jan Van Eyck's famous painting had only fairly recently been told to think again. Costume historians had established, once and for all, that the yards of green cloth she holds swagged up to her waist are not a sign of fertility, just Flemish high fashion of the 15th century.

I know exactly why I had this brief crisis of faith in Piero's mysterious painting. I had just believed - hoped - that I was pregnant: pregnant again after the loss of a baby. It was inconceivable to me (and inconceivable is, alas, the vicious word that always springs to mind in these circumstances) that I was not, after all, pregnant; or at least not very pregnant. They call it a chemical pregnancy, as if it existed only in a science laboratory and not in the hearts of the parents, and it is generally over within weeks. I found I could not look at paintings or sculptures of pregnant women at all at that time without wondering whether they were really, conclusively pregnant.

We need images, quite apart from anything else, where we have no words. The postcard was an encouragement from a friend who couldn't possibly have guessed how bad the timing would be. Grateful as I am, it's not actually the painting I would choose in any case. I don't know that pregnancy per se is what one wants to see when struggling through the sunless corridor of infertility, any more than photographs of other people's longed-for babies on the walls of IVF clinics.

But how is an artist to represent fertility when it is an unknown quantity - an entirely invisible state? Nobody knows who has it and who doesn't, at least from the outside. In Piero's day, the only manifestation of fertility would have been pregnancy itself; the only proof for the purposes of art the growing belly or - to use an atrocious but common fertility clinic phrase - a 'take-home baby'. The first proof of it nowadays, oddly enough, is still graphic: that notorious double blue line on the test, although even this is not quite a proof. I have seen lines so faint you could barely make them out by the light of 100 suns, gone ahead and celebrated, and then seen them vanish in the very next test.

Fertility in art is generalised, if I may so generalise. It is an attribute in search of a body. It is a ripe bosom and child-bearing hips, or a healthy young nude with an inviting smile, or a woman in some frieze bearing a basket of apples or corn. It is plentiful Ceres, Roman goddess of harvest and motherly love (a concept, you notice, not a human being) or her Greek counterpart Demeter, scattering seeds, her name apparently meaning distribution-mother. It is, I am sorry to say, the figure made 25,000 years age by an anonymous man in Austria, who picked up a piece of limestone and carved it into a nude woman with outsize breasts and Zeppelin thighs (but no face of course), that posterity has laughably dubbed the Venus of Willendorf.

Fertility in art is availability plus abundance, with an optional lusty wink. It is, in short, total embarrassment. And an embarrassment not even restricted to the depiction of women, let it be freely said. Who, coming across it in the National Gallery, hasn't squirmed in front of David Tenier's rude personification of Spring as a gardener carrying an upright young tree in a pot before him: fertility as a huge comedy phallus.

And its opposite: infertility? No sight gags there; no sights at all. I can hardly summon even one image to mind. Barren land, seeds cast on stony ground, the empty vessel, the drought - Biblical metaphors, all, that speak irrefutably for themselves without need of further illustration.

Perhaps one should not be surprised that art has trouble representing fertility except as animal, vegetable or allegory. For fertility is a curious, secret thing, something unknown, invisible, unmeasurable until, like so many of us, you end up in a clinic being told that you do not have very much of it.

Fertility is a potential, pure and simple, abstract. But art has always had to invent images for states of being that can't be discerned in the visible world. Depression, for instance: think of Dürer's Melancolia, that large woman sitting heavily on her stool, head in hand, face like thunder, surrounded by a sizeable junk yard of allegorical bric-a-brac from which she can't escape and in which nothing is clear, uplifting, bright or ever likely to improve. Or Munch's Scream - that peculiar worm-like figure clapping its hands to its face while the air around him reverberates with a long howl of psychic pain. Not for nothing is it the most instantly recognisable image, I'd say, in modern art. If you want something to give you courage, look at Delacroix's deathless Liberty at the Barricades, best foot forward and that brave high arm leading the citizens onwards. If you want to stop arguing about who's turn it is to do something dull but needful about the house, look at Rembrandt's Jewish Bride, the tenderest image of harmonious love and the pleasures of marital peace imaginable.

We should use art. It's a necessity, not a luxury for connoisseurs and collectors. And what painter ever made a picture just to be seen by one or two viewers? Our great public collections are for our great mutual benefit: to be plundered for comfort, new ideas, moral lessons, tales of the lives of others and, like music, for inspiration and encouragement.

During the years I have longed, beyond words, for a child, I have often gone to the National Gallery for inspiration. But there are only one or two paintings of women with child (none of them, incidentally, the Virgin Mary: Piero's Madonna was always uncommon). Naturally, there are cornucopias of fruitful nudes.

In my work as an art critic I came across Anish Kapoor's quasi-mystical sculptures, rounded womb-like cavities that seemed to glow by cunning optical effect. I saw Peter Randall-Page's fertile stone forms, rounded again, sometimes gathering soft moss outdoors in the landscape. I looked at Helen Chadwick's ethereally beautiful necklaces made of images of rejected embryos - five cells interlinked like Olympic rings, silver-blue, just as they are beneath the microscope in reality. I looked and felt as sorrowful as Chadwick must have hoped.

I remember that Ron Mueck, the Australian super-real sculptor my fellow critics like to despise, but I don't, made a sculpture during a residency at the National Gallery clearly with the Virgin Birth in mind. Half life-sized, and astoundingly real right down to the last follicle and flush of the cheek, it's a mother seeing her baby for the first time only seconds after birth, both of them utterly dazed.

Labour is so recent the mother's hands are still clenched, her toes flexed as she struggles to raise her head high enough to see the baby on her stomach. What she feels is not yet obvious either to herself or the viewer - how can she know who this person is; we call them little strangers, don't we? - a being only just made visible. It is the precise moment before amazement gives way to emotion. Who is this child and where did it come from? It's a question the sculpture itself raises since there seems to be no explanation for the baby's position so high upon the mother's stomach, the chord still uncut. How did this miracle get here?

Science still doesn't have many useful answers. You can know every single fact of reproduction and yet not understand why it isn't happening. You can be as expert, very nearly, as the experts themselves. But unexplained infertility remains the commonest kind, and almost as inexplicable is the way it may suddenly come to an end.

Fertility clinics have no idea what to put on their walls. Something pink, something soothing, something vague and inoffensive as the ambient, computer-generated waterfalls and glades displayed under the comically literal banner 'Pictures' at Ikea.

I suppose they don't want to raise your hopes to a pitch. But it is in these clinics that some of us may be blessed enough to see the first, best, most astonishing image of fertility finally coming to life - in my case the little dark universe on the scanner twinkling with two sequins of light: my twin daughters' tiny beating hearts.

And how does that feel? I don't have words. Let me give you an image instead. It is a painting made a very long time ago by a monk working alone in a cell, a man whose imagination enters more deeply than one can believe, almost, into this timeless, ever-recurring moment. A woman is receiving the news that she has conceived - not from a doctor, as you guessed, but an angel. In fact the split-second of the telling is in itself the conception. Mary leans forward, her hands crossed over her body as if receiving a blessing, but also as if protecting the new life there. Her face is a graceful portrait of that singular moment between universal awe and the dawning of more bewildering emotion. It is Fra Angelico's Annunciation - sudden revelation made visible.

Nature’s Best