Since 1992, author R. L. Stine has been scaring the pants off young readers with his Goosebumps books. The science fiction/horror series for the under-twelve set has inspired several board games, PC games and even a television series. Having already made tons of money for Stine and Scholastic, the Goosebumps series may soon be making even more.
With Stine's recent release of a new 12-book series, Goosebumps in Horrorland, and a forthcoming video game, the series is seeing a resurgence in popularity. Columbia Pictures wants to get in on that and are currently negotiating with screenwriters to bring the books to life on the big screen. Just which book will be adapted hasn't been determined yet, but considering that the Goosebumps books are second only to the Harry Potter series in making money for Scholastic, you can assume it will be popular.
Or will it? Aren't the kids who made the Goosebumps series so popular adults now? And reading a scary horror book is a lot different than actually seeing it up on the big screen. Will you let your kid see it?
Haute mamas to be watch out: Christian Siriano is launching a line of maternity wear! The Project Runway winner is set to unveil the line for mamas to be in Spring 2009. Pity I won't be pregnant anymore (I hope) although it may be reason enough to get knocked up if you've been considering it. Chances are, if you are pregnant and you buy Siriano's stuff, you'll look glam.
Siriano and two of his fashion buddies, Marta Abrams and Elise Rosemarin, collaborated on the line. Abrams and Rosemarin head up Moody Mama maternity wear. The collection, much like Mr. Siriano, is being called Fierce (for Moody Mama).
Funny enough, a rep for Moody Mama says Siriano joined up because he thought it would be good if a gay man and two women who'd never had children designed maternity wear together. What do you think--is it important for the designer of preggo-wear to have been preggo herself, or does it matter? I doubt Bill Blass spent a lot of time in evening gowns, but what they hey do I know. I'm sure the line from Siriano will be stunning to say the least--in looks, anyway (no word on the price).
Felicity Huffman is frazzled, ya'll. And she has every right to be. Not only is Huffman star of the big and little screens, she's also wife to actor William H. Macy and a mom. In fact, Huffman says her motherhood is probably what landed her the star's most famous role, as Lynette on television's Desperate Housewives.
Huffman left two of her three kids in the bathtub and plodded through the rain to make it to the Housewives audition. She thought she'd managed to pull it together but says those who auditioned her liked the fact that she was "a mess" and "frazzled." Also, and this is my favorite, part, her pants were dirty. Sounds like motherhood to me!
Felicity admitted to the agents that she was going crazy with the kids. According to her, the women in the room looked at her like she was crazy; but then, you know, she got the role. I don't watch the show, but from Huffman's comments it sounds like the frazzledness is just right for her character. And, let's be honest--does this woman EVER look frazzled? No. But, as a mom myself I am sure there are times when, indeed, she is.
This summer, the Olympics are providing lots of great family entertainment. The opening ceremony's parade of nations inspired my son to plop his globe on the kitchen table for an impromptu geography game. The gymnastics and swimming competition stirred discussions about health, discipline and sportsmanship. But it's the Olympic host country itself that is generating the best conversations.
My kids have always been fascinated by China. Evidence of their love for all things Chinese abounds. My Chinese bathrobes have been absorbed into their play clothes collection; they beg to use chop sticks (even if we're having spaghetti); they can be convinced to eat new vegetables if I proclaim them "Chinese"; they love Mulan; and my four year-old regularly breaks into a foreign language she claims is Chinese. We have high hopes that the Beijing Olympics and accompanying coverage will expand their knowledge of China beyond Kung Fu Panda and Chinese restaurants.
Thanks to years of careful planning on the part of the Chinese government, China put on the most spectacular opening ceremony in recent memory. Viewers were rightfully dazzled by the combination of Chinese artistry and technology. If my kids are any indication, interest in China is at an all-time high.
(Click the photo to see the 5 Most Irritating Kids Shows on TV)
Yes, yes, you read that right. Sad but true, the Public Broadcasting Service, better known as PBS, has decided to cut Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. If ever there were such a thing as true classic television, that has since gained cult status among us adults, it would be Mister Rogers' and that crazy red cardigan of his. He will be sorely missed by a large portion of Americans, even if out of nostalgia.
Mister Rogers is basically an institution. Like Sesame Street, the show was some of the best of what educational television has ever offered. He was a nice man that got children to actually trust men, and he always took the time to change his shoes. Comfort was big with this man, and so it is with many of us today. According to Brian Linder, the head of the savemisterrogers.com, who is spearheading a campaign to get PBS to think twice about relegating the show to member stations, the show continues to provide " a special nurturing voice in the lives of children." Yes--that's what I was trying to say! Linder believes Fred Rogers, bedecked in his red sweater (and, uhm, comfortable shoes), taught not only the young boy a thing or two, but also his parents.
Frankly, I think it's pure blasphemy to remove Mister Rogers from programming. Can someone please tell me another show that is possibly good enough to take its place? That's what I thought: SILENCE FROM THE INTERNET. So what is to be done? Well, join the campaign to save our favorite cardigan wearing nice guy. Do your part to let PBS know how you feel by visiting the website. For my part, I'm imagining Mister Rogers the movie. Clearly we need one. If something as vapid as the Smurfs can get a run on the silver screen, then by golly Mister Rogers has a posthumous Oscar headed his way. Question is, who would play him? Possibly Will Ferrell? Will is sort of a softy and a sweetheart, so maybe he's our man. Or, maybe Luke Wilson. That might not work though, as Wilson is sort of too hot to be Mister Rogers. Thoughts???
Lately, my seven-year-old has shown an interest in playing a rather bloody video game. It's not exactly violent, but involves a skateboarder who bleeds profusely whenever he wipes out. I refuse to let her play because I don't like the way the bright red blood oozes realistically across the pavement. Of course it isn't real, but I am uncomfortable with the idea that she will become desensitized to the sight of massive amounts of flowing blood.
Clearly there are many parents who have no such qualms when it comes to blood, gore and assorted acts of violence. According to the journal Pediatrics, an estimated 2.5 million kids ages 10 to 14 watch R rated movies, often with parental permission.
The researchers gave 6,522 kids a list of movies, 40 if them rated R and chosen for their extreme graphic violence. When asked to list which ones they had seen, an average of 12.5% indicated that they had seen each of the R rated movies. The researchers didn't ask where they saw the films, but did include a question about whether or not their parents allowed them to watch R rated movies. One third said their parents were okay with it "sometimes" or "all the time". 22.6% of those who weren't allowed still managed to see at least one anyway.
Studies have shown that exposure to violent media can increase aggression and desensitize a person to real violence. For that reason, the researchers believe that violent movies should have an explicit warning that they "should not be seen by young adolescents" and they encourage pediatricians to talk to parents about the risks involved.
Of course, there are those who see no harm in exposing children to horror. Gerard Jones, author of Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Superheroes and Make-Believe Violence, says these experiences are "a classic, vital part of teen culture." I think the key phrase in the sentence is "teen culture". A ten-year-old is not a teen.
On a rare date night, my husband and I went and saw Dark Knight last weekend, to find out what all the excitement was about. Though I thought the movie was really well done and can understand all the buzz, it was hard for me to concentrate on it because of the boys sitting in front of me. It's not that they were too noisy or distracting, it's that they appeared to be 6 to 8 years old. As the movie grew psychologically darker and darker, I couldn't help but wonder how it was affecting them.
This year's Batman is no kid flick and doesn't even try to be. Its PG-13 rating should be enough to warn parents that the content isn't suitable for young children (note: that's not permission to leave your young children in the car, by the way). But is a PG-13 rating high enough? Complaints from British parents are piling up, saying that the 12a classification the movie received there (similar to our PG-13 rating) isn't appropriate and that the movie should be rated 15a (no one under 15 admitted without an adult). Ireland and Scandinavia both rated the movie 15a.
My husband and I talked about this in depth on the ride home. Why does violence not warrant the higher ratings that drugs, sex, and language get? This movie was very violent; even if the camera cut away before viewers could see any gore, there was very little left to the imagination. Kids under the age of 13 are clamoring to see this movie -- it IS Batman, after all -- but this is definitely one movie where parents might want to adhere to the rating or at least pre-screen it themselves.
"He's resting quietly and has some fractures. Nothing life-threatening. Nothing permanent," said Bill Luckett, Freeman's business partner. "He's in good spirits, but he's in some pain." According to The Associated Press, the car Freeman was driving left a rural highway and flipped several times. A spokesmen for the Mississippi Highway patrol states that there is no indication that drugs and alcohol were involved and that Freeman was wearing a seat belt. The jaws of life were required to remove the actor from the vehicle.
Morgan Freeman is known for his roles the popular films: "Million Dollar Baby", "Driving Miss Daisy", and "The Shawshank Redemption". However, for a kid of the 70's like me, he'll always be Easy Reader from The Electric Company.
Wondering if the latest additions to the Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt clan most resemble their famous mommy or their daddy? You might soon be able to decide for yourself. Word is that the first pictures of baby Knox and Vivienne Jolie-Pitt will be available at People.com this Sunday at 7 p.m. EST.
If you'd rather have a print copy, People magazine will have photos of the darling duo in Monday's edition. If you're not in the US, look for the superstar spawn in OK! magazine, which won worldwide rights to photos of the babes.
People spokeswoman Nancy Valentino said she didn't know how much was paid for the photos, but the talk is that the pay-out this time is between $10 and 15 MILLION dollars, which the Jolie-Pitts have said will be donated to charity.
Photos of the couple's newborn daughter Shiloh showed beyond a shadow of a doubt she got her mommy's unmistakable lips, reportedly raised over $4 million for charity.
I really like that Angelina and Brad donate this money to charity. It makes it so much easier to justify tossing that issue of People among the other items in the grocery cart because it's not celebrity voyeurism, it's a way to SAVE THE WORLD!
Unless you've maintained one of your own, it's difficult to describe how addictive keeping a blog can be. Having a corner of the internet people visit just to read your words and thoughts on life and issues can make an ordinary housewife feel like an A-list celebrity.
So you might guess it would be easier for a celebrity to give up their blogging habit, as they already have opportunities in the limelight and have supporters and fans outside the internet. Rosie O'Donnell, who just announced plans to take a blogging break for the month of August, begs to differ. Her most recent blog post read:
i am taking off august in blog-ville 2 c if i can rosie unplugged happy summer peeps peace in peace out
The opinionated former talk show host shared with People magazine, "I'm wondering if I can do it. Every time I watch [the TV show] Intervention I'm like, 'They need this show for people who need to get off their computers!' My real addiction is the computer and the blog."
Some things Rosie could do to help survive her non-blogging month:
Take the kids to the beach
Create toupees for Donald Trump out of craft supplies
Prank call "The View"
Cover Elizabeth Hasselbeck's toilet seats with plastic wrap
Actor Mark Wahlberg has vowed not to sell the baby pictures of his new child-to-be. Marky Mark is putting a stop to any offers from magazines before they even get started, insisting he will not be selling his baby photos like so many other celebrity parents have of late.
The actor is expecting his third child with girlfriend (and perhaps soon to be wife) Rhea Durham, who is due in September. He is already father to two other children with Durham, Ella, who is four and Michael, who is two. I don't recall Mark pimping out pictures of either of them to the tabloids either!
Wahlberg wants to keep the birth and his family private, which is a welcome refreshment to the baby picture overload we've been experiencing lately, our fascination with which is borderline disgusting! Rumor also had it that new mom Nicole Kidman and her husband Keith Urban would not be selling pictures of their new daughter, Sunday Rose. Perhaps there is a new celebrity parenting trend afoot?
If there's one thing that's controversial among parents who blog, it's whether or not it's appropriate to post pictures of your children online. Some parents worry that it isn't safe, while others are concerned that their children will view it as an invasion of privacy when they get older. Still, there are plenty of parents out there (including Dooce, arguably the most famous parenting blogger) who have no problem using photos and/or real names.
Seventeen years ago, these kinds of issues hadn't ever been discussed. So when photographer Kirk Weddie called his friend Rick Elden to see if he could take some shots of Elden's young son Spencer in the pool, Rick didn't think much of it. A few months later, the Elden's were surprised when their infant son showed up on the side of Tower Record's building on Sunset Boulevard, in all his naked glory. A shot of Spencer in the swimming pool had become the cover for Nirvana's 1991 album Nevermind.
Nevermind was no small album -- 26 million copies sold -- and Spencer is now a 17-year-old. Spencer says that it's "kind of cool" being the Nirvana baby. Though he's spent some time in military school for bad behavior, Spencer will likely be graduating high school a year early this summer. I'm curious what his parents thought when they first saw that billboard for the first time. Were they mad? Did they wish that they had had a chance to give permission? Maybe they were excited about their young son's fame, or concerned about his privacy. It's hard to say, things being so much different then.
If you're a parenting blogger, do you take measures to protect your child's privacy?
Here's the good news: Disney is finally creating their first African-American princess. Here's the bad news: They just can't seem to get it right. The first version, The Frog Princess, was scrapped due to complaints that it was too stereotypical. The princess, named Maddy, was to be a chambermaid who worked for a spoiled white woman. Maddy is saved from a voodoo magician by a white prince, with help from her voodoo fairy godmother.
Disney's second version -- The Princess and the Frog --is still a musical set in New Orleans, but the company is keeping mum on most of the details. The heroine will be a 19-year-old named Tiana, and the film will be set in the Jazz Age. Disney says, "Princess Tiana will be a heroine in the great tradition of Disney's rich animated fairy tale legacy, and all other characters and aspects of the story will be treated with the greatest respect and sensitivity." Let's all hope they do exactly that.
%Gallery-28376%
Though my girls have gone in and out of the Disney princess phase, because one arm of our family is Ojibwe, we've never let them see Pocahontas. Unlike Cinderella, Ariel, and Sleeping Beauty, for example, Pocahontas was a real person, and Disney didn't do history any favors when they fictionalized the events that took place. Though Tiana isn't a historical figure, I really do hope that Disney pays attention to the opportunity they have in front of them, and turn out a movie that's sensitive, appropriate, and fun, all a the same time.
A new small study has found that television, even when only on as background noise, has a "small but real" affect on the way young children play. Researchers found that when playing in a room with a TV on -- they used Jeopardy, a program they thought the children would have little interest in -- children tended to stop playing and watch the TV now and then, shortening the intensity and length of their play. This finding is in conflict with former studies that found that young children don't pay attention to TV that they don't understand.
When my older daughter was only a toddler, she used to ask us to turn off the TV while she played. She said once, "It makes me watch it," meaning that she couldn't take her eyes off of the TV when it was on. It surprised me, because, like those old studies, I figured if she didn't understand it she wouldn't watch. Now we have a no-TV rule during the day, unless we're sitting down to specifically watch a program. A lot of parents really like to have television on as background noise during the day, however, to listen to as they go about their activities.
So will TV's influence on your child's play affect them long term? This study isn't broad enough to prove that, but plenty of research has gone into how TV affects children. KidsHealth does a good job of rounding up some of that research, and offers tips to parents who want to limit TV time in their home.
Every generation thinks they have it tougher than the one before. And, you know what? They probably do. Like the new iphone, every generation is expected to be smarter, faster, better, and thinner than the last. So it is with teenagers, teenage girls to be exact. It's no newsflash to anyone who's ever been a teenager that being one is full of pressure. I remember an ad I saw in a women's magazine when I was a teen that resonates with me to this day: You can never be too rich or too thin (bonus points to any of you who remember what product that ad was selling).
Current research shows that not only such magazines but now too the wonderful world wide web are contributing to making girls feel miserable with regard to being, well, as rich and as thin as possible. In the Generation Under Stress Report, two out of five teenage girls felt more poorly about themselves after looking at pictures of models, music stars and actresses in magazines. And the pressure doesn't end there. Girls also reported feeling pressure to act and dress more like adults, to be sexually active before they were ready and to invest in expensive material items like Ipods, cell phones and brand-name clothing and accessories (what teenager NEEDS a Prada bag?). Add that to the eating disorders and bullying and you have a recipe for disaster.
So what do we do? Send our teenage girls off to the convent? If you have the answer, please let me know--I am about to have a daughter and am feeling the pressure before she's even been born. Not too long ago I saw a onesie that said, "Does this outfit make my butt look big?" HELP!
Since 1992, author R. L. Stine has been scaring the pants off young readers with his Goosebumps books. The science fiction/horror series for the under-twelve set has inspired several board games, PC games and even a television series. Having already made tons of money for Stine and Scholastic, the Goosebumps series may soon be making even more.
Lately, my seven-year-old has shown an interest in playing a rather bloody video game. It's not exactly violent, but involves a skateboarder who bleeds profusely whenever he wipes out. I refuse to let her play because I don't like the way the bright red blood oozes realistically across the pavement. Of course it isn't real, but I am uncomfortable with the idea that she will become desensitized to the sight of massive amounts of flowing blood.
On a rare date night, my husband and I went and saw Dark Knight last weekend, to find out what all the excitement was about. Though I thought the movie was really well done and can understand all the buzz, it was hard for me to concentrate on it because of the boys sitting in front of me. It's not that they were too noisy or distracting, it's that they appeared to be 6 to 8 years old. As the movie grew psychologically darker and darker, I couldn't help but wonder how it was affecting them.
Wondering if the latest additions to the Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt clan most resemble their famous mommy or their daddy? You might soon be able to decide for yourself. Word is that the first pictures of baby Knox and Vivienne Jolie-Pitt will be available at 
Unless you've maintained one of your own, it's difficult to describe how addictive keeping a blog can be. Having a corner of the internet people visit just to read your words and thoughts on life and issues can make an ordinary housewife feel like an A-list celebrity. 
If there's one thing that's controversial among parents who blog, it's whether or not it's appropriate to post pictures of your children online. Some parents worry that it isn't safe, while others are concerned that their children will view it as an invasion of privacy when they get older. Still, there are plenty of parents out there (including 
Here's the good news: 
