That was me when I got on this site! Really, this has got to be one of the very coolest kids’ music education sites ever. In this award-winning, interactive online experience, children (and adults like me!) get to learn all about opera using Humperdinck’s famous Hansel and Greta opera. The child gets to design the costumes, choose choreography for the siblings in Humperdinck’s masterpiece, and learn about various conventions of opera along the way. There’s also an excellent section on the site for teachers and parents that offers information, lesson plans, and other fun stuff related to the opera. This [...] Read more »
One of the funniest skits I’ve ever seen in my life…
Years ago, when I first saw this skit with Chris Farley as Matt Foley, motivational speaker, I remember laughing so hard I cried. Every time I’ve seen it since, I’ve still laughed until I cried, including this morning. As this is an embed from Hulu, please bear with the opening 30-second commercial~~I promise you it’s worth it! Enjoy the inimitable Chris Farley and company~~ Read more »
On the Keeping of (Technological) Secrets
Not long ago I was given a rude little surprise. As many of you with blogs already know, the back end of some website content management systems allows you to see the types of searches that readers have made in order to find your website or blog. Nothing unusual about that, and since web-hosting companies refuse to reveal the identities (only the intentionally-unidentified searches) of the readers who make their way through these searches to your blog, no one’s privacy is compromised. On occasion this has provided me with unintentional moments of hilarity, as when I realized that due to [...] Read more »
Thanks, Mom and Dad…
This post made my day! Put simply, a mother of 4 informs her young brood that no, she doesn’t want them to be happy after all; in fact, she spends the better part of every day seeing to her children’s unhappiness. In this she confirms the dubious suspicions of all offspring everywhere (“my parents hate me!”) as their parents refuse them one thing after another…refusals that their small selves are convinced will cause them to “just die” if they can’t have the privilege/object/freedom in question which their unreasonable parents are denying them. I would like to take this opportunity to [...] Read more »
How Ingenuity Can Equal New Underwear
My sister-in-law sent me the following link. She suspected that due to my history of being home-schooled and the fact that I love knitting, I would find the following blog post particularly entertaining. She was so right. I am still picking myself up off the floor. Without further ado, here’s the first paragraph of the post: “Wanna bet? Mrs. G. has a friend, another homeschooling mother, whose twelve-year-old daughter announced one afternoon that she was too old for lifeless, white cotton underwear. As a matter of fact, she stated, she was ready… “ Don’t miss the rest of the article [...] Read more »
Hiding from the Pint-Size Ones, or, the Terrors of Halloween for People who Forgot to Buy the Candy
My husband and I had a little incident last night in which I ended up hiding on the floorboards next to our bed, too scared to move or make the slightest sound. My husband lay bedridden and motionless, computer balanced silently on his chest, no discernible noise of any kind emanating from his direction. Even our poor dog Pugsley rested silently, twitching not so much as a paw in the midst of the nerve-rending situation. Read more »