Do you recall The Camp Gyno? Now HelloFlo, a company that sells menstrual supplies, is back again with a new ad about a girl’s first period, and the party her mom throws to celebrate it. Technically safe for work, but be warned that there are plenty of jokes and imagery you might not want to share with your boss or co-workers. You'll never look at Florida the same way again. -via Buzzfeed
It’s the sweetest thing in the world to come home from work and see your kids happy to greet you back. This Fathers Day compilation shows babies bursting into smiles when they see Daddy home after a long day at work. That’s a lot of joy to pack into one video! -via Daily Picks and Flicks
In honor of Fathers Day, Smithsonian has rounded up some research on fathers and fatherhood that has surfaced in the past year. Some of it is common sense, although it’s nice to have common sense confirmed scientifically, but there are some findings that we may have never considered before.
1) Do the dishes. It’s for your daughter: Dads who want their daughters to aspire to prestigious careers should make a point of handling more chores around the house. That’s the suggestion of a study published in the journal Psychological Science, which concluded that when a father helps out a lot at home, his daughters are more likely to break out of the mold of traditionally female jobs and instead seek more high-powered careers. Researchers at the University of British Columbia said they found that girls raised in homes where chores were shared evenly between both parents tended to have broader career goals.
2) Finally, a reason to eat brussel sprouts: It’s not just pregnant women who need to eat healthy for the benefit of their offspring, According to a study at McGill University in Canada. it’s important for prospective fathers to load up on vegetables with folates, such as spinach, sprouts and broccoli, says a recent study based on mice. If a father's folic acid level is too low when he and his partner conceive, he may increase the risk that the child will have abnormalities. It’s long been recommended that women boost their folic acid level during pregnancy, and now, it may turn out that men need to do the same before trying to conceive.
There’s more at Smithsonian. Some of these studies may apply to you or someone you love, at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Flickr user Daria)
BatDad is back at Neatorama with this Vine compilation for Father's Day. He may be BatDad, but that doesn't mean his wife and kids are cutting him any slack. Via Geeks are Sexy.
Math professor and philosopher Joel David Hamkins gave a guest lesson to his daughter’s second grade class. How does someone dedicated to “the philosophy of the infinite” present a math lesson to a group of seven-year-olds? By coloring pages!
We began with vertex coloring, where one colors the vertices of a graph in such a way that adjacent vertices get different colors. We started with some easy examples, and then moved on to more complicated graphs, which they attacked.
The aim is to use the fewest number of colors, and the chromatic number of a graph is the smallest number of colors that suffice for a coloring. The girls colored the graphs, and indicated the number of colors they used, and we talked as a group in several instances about why one needed to use that many colors.
They went on to map coloring, in which odd shapes must be colored so that touching border have different colors, using the fewest possible colors. Then he wrapped it up with Eulerian paths and circuits. In these lessons the fun part comes first, and the concepts underlying them follow as they go.
The high point of the day occurred in the midst of our graph-coloring activity when one little girl came up to me and said, “I want to be a mathematician!” What a delight!
Read how the lessons went at Hamkins’ blog. Hamkins also provides a printable version of the booklet he gave each child. -via Digg
When you send your kids off to school you’re putting their young lives, and minds, in the hands of many different official school type folks, from teachers to district officials to security personnel, and these folks usually started working in the school system because they liked working with kids.
But, just like any position that comes with a bit of control over other human beings, there are those who take the job because they like being in charge, and sometimes because being in charge means making a lot more money.
Scandals abound in this article which reveals 6 Shockingly Evil Abuses of Power by School Officials, including a case where kids at a vocational school in Rhode Island were being put to work in a sweatshop making and bagging jewelry, and a case of misappropriated school lunch funds in eight California school districts which resulted in $170 million dollars being funneled into staff wages and catered school board meetings, while the kids found the quality of their school lunches lowered through no fault of their own.
It's enough to make you wanna home school your kids!
(NSFW due to language, like virtually every article on Cracked)
Someone once told me it’s a good thing toddlers are so cute and sweet and loving because that’s what keeps you from killing them. Grant Snider of Incidental Comics has an 18-month-old daughter and is well aware of the extremities of that difficult, dangerous, but oh-so-memorable age. He created this wonderful comic for Fathers Day. You can buy it as a poster. -via Laughing Squid
When you are a parent, you find yourself saying weird things that you never in your wildest dreams thought you’d ever say. That’s because children have no context, no sense of what should be, until you tell them. The classic example is “Get your feet off my plate!” How is a kid to know they aren’t supposed to put their feet in other people’s plate until you tell them? The reddit thread accompanying this video is full of such phrases. -via Daily of the Day
Jeff and Hillary Whittington welcomed their first baby, a girl they named Ryland, in 2007. Within a year they learned Ryland was deaf, so they arranged for a cochlear implant. As Ryland learned to hear and speak, one of his first complete sentences was "I am a boy." He never changed his mind about that. In this video, Ryland’s parents explain how they came to see him as a boy, and how much happier he is now as the son instead of the oldest daughter. This mini-documentary was unveiled last week at the sixth annual Harvey Milk Diversity Breakfast in San Diego. -via Metafilter
(Photos: Mathery Studio)
These things apparently don’t come in adult sizes, which is totally unfair because I would use them. The design firm Mathery Studio created an area in the National Gallery of Victoria where kids can get creative. They made helmets and sandals with built-in crayon balls. Kids strap them on and mark up the walls, floors, and furniture.
To my knowledge, these devices are not yet commercially available, but I can imagine a big market for them. Probably not for the home, though.
-via NotCot
When Alexandra Beller attended dance class one day (warning: auto-start video) a little boy named Ivo taught the students a new routine. Watch these dancers move according to his inspiration.
There’s a certain stigma attached to being a nine-year-old who can’t ride a bike, and people often assume that you don't know how because there’s something wrong with you or your family, which can make you feel like you don’t fit in with the rest of the world.
I was one of those kids who chose to ride around on a skateboard and scooter rather than learning how to ride a bike, and as young Sabre Norris of NSW Australia proves in this amazing video riding a bike isn’t the ultimate skill a kid can possess.
This video documents her 75th attempt to do a 540 on her skateboard, the one where she finally successfully completed the trick, and Sabre's skills demonstrate how amazingly skilled some young athletes can be.
-Via 22 Words
(Image: CBS)
In 1927, Dorothy Gerber was straining vegetables through a seive to make them edible for her baby daughter Sally. Her husband, Daniel Gerber, owned a canning factory. He said that machines in the factory could carry out that process a lot faster. Dorothy proposed that he do precisely that.
Thus was born the Gerber baby products commercial empire.
To market his products better, Gerber held a contest to compose an image of a baby that could serve as a logo. Dorothy Hope Smith, an artist, made a charcoal sketch of a baby who lived nearby. This baby was Anne Turner Cook. Smith won the contest and Cook went down in advertising history at the Gerber Baby.
Cook is now 87 years old and every bit as lovely as she was eight decades ago. CBS News interviewed her about her life as the Gerber Baby. You can watch the video here.
-via I Own the World
Preschool graduation may seem a little silly, a little extravagant, but it can be awfully cute and good for a viral video. At this ceremony, every child was told to state his/her name and tell what they wanted to be when they grow up. Jathan Muhar is particularly ambitious, as his dream is shared by many full-grown men. -via Daily of the Day
A three-month-old baby starts to laugh, and Daddy gets tickled. Which makes the baby laugh, and tickles the dad even more, until everyone the room is laughing, including you from just watching the video. Nothing much else happens, but now you have a smile on your face, so that two minutes was well spent! -via Tastefully Offensive
