Children usually dance, play and explore the world with reckless abandon, but when kids are serious about developing a skill like dancing they become far more focused than they ever have while sitting in class.
And even though they know their bodies may someday change into a less flexible form they keep practicing anyway, pushing their tiny bodies to the limit to express their love of dance.
Photographer Jordan Matter likes to shoot pics of dancers in motion, and his latest series Tiny Dancers Among Us shows us kids may not have the choreography down pat but they're able to soar much higher than most adult dancers.
Dino Ignacio took his daughter to Star Wars Celebration last week, and they went fully equipped. He made a batch of plastic datacards as the plans for the Death Star for his tiny Jyn Erso to deliver. In case you haven't seen Rogue One, Jyn Erso was the main character, and getting the Death Star plans to the Rebel Alliance was her mission.
Jyn is actually named Harley, and she and her father Dino attended Celebration in Orlando last weekend with a special goal in mind, to pay tribute to the dearly departed Carrie Fisher. Harley, in costume as Rogue One’s Rebel Operative, would locate as many Princess Leia cosplayers as she could, and hand them a specially-crafted copy of the datacard containing the Death Star plans.
When four-year-old Maelyn gets on the soccer team, her four parents are there to cheer her on. Wait - four parents? That's right.
Maelyn's mother and father are divorced, and both later remarried. But they're determined not to let that get in the way of parenting.
"Because of us, I will never believe co-parenting can't work," wrote Emilee Player (Maelyn's step-mom) in this viral Facebook post, "I know through experience it can work!"
Kids say such cute things it's impossible to stay mad at them for long, and if we could somehow bottle their cuteness many of the world's problems could be cured with a daily dose of kiddie cute.
But rather than bottle his 5-year-old daughter Harper's essence artist Martin Bruckner takes all the endearing, zany and just plain crazy things she says and turns them into cool illustrations.
Martin calls the project "Spaghetti Toes" after the conversation he, his wife and Harper had that inspired the illustrations:
His wife told Harper, “Please don’t put spaghetti between your toes.” Bruckner commented on how ridiculous that statement sounded. Later that night he caught himself telling Harper, “Did you drop the cheese in the tub again?” From then on, he decided to note down all the weird things they said, and Spaghetti Toes was born.
What do you do when you crave a cheeseburger, but your parents are asleep? An eight-year-old boy in East Palestine, Ohio, figured it out. He looked up how to drive on YouTube, watched a video about it, and then drove his parents' van to McDonald's! Oh yeah, he also took his four-year-old sister with him.
Witnesses told police that he expertly drove to the fast food joint, following traffic laws and staying under the speed limit.
“He didn’t hit a single thing on the way there. It was unreal,” Koehler said.
McDonald’s workers said they thought they were being pranked when he drove up to order a cheeseburger with money from his piggy bank.
“The workers thought that the parents were in the back, but obviously they weren’t,” Koehler said.
Police said the 8-year-old burst into tears when he learned that he did something wrong. He told officers that it was his first time behind the wheel.
The children got cheeseburgers, chicken nuggets, and fries before they were taken to the police station, where their parents picked them up. No charges were filed in the incident. -via Boing Boing
Despite what people who don't know the story behind these photos believe redditor Steec is a good dad, a caring dad, one who wants to shield his baby daughter from danger so she lives a long and healthy life.
But Steec's photos are making people think he's a careless creep and a bad parent- which is exactly what he wants them to think.
Steec is using his Photoshop skills to prank the internet, and when people inevitably fall for the prank and cry "for shame!" you'll be in on the joke and ready to put those tsk-tskers in their place!
Not only is it adorable, we are reminded that every one of us probably did this at his age; we just didn't get the proper documentation of it on video. Of course, redditors predicted that he might not be scholarship material in football, but he's bound to be an ace in dodgeball. Want to see what a difference two days makes?
Preparing for parenthood means going through dozens of different names looking for a winner, and that means doing some digging to discover new names and weigh your options.
Unless you're a futurist like my dad was you'll probably look to the past for inspiration, so why not go way, way, way back and search for naming inspiration in The Dictionary Of Medieval Names from European Sources?
It is a hefty work of scholarship that “aims to contain all given (fore, Christian) names recorded in European sources written between 500 and 1600, less the names of historical/non-contemporary people and names occurring only in fictional literature or poetry.”
It really is a treasure trove of long unused names that deserve to make a comeback, here are a few of the olde timey names that caught my eye:
2. Cherubina
This variant on the word cherub showed up as a name in Rome in 1527.
3. Aylward
There were spelling variations on this one, including Eilwardus, Aloardus, and Æðeluuard, but this one probably works best for the Kindergartener learning to write.
8. Everbern
For your dangerously cuddly cub, ever goes back to the Old High German for "boar," and bern goes back to the word for "bear."
10. Ysoria
The etymology is uncertain, “but perhaps related to Latin Isaura, an ethic byname derived from the region of Isauria in Asia Minor.”
16. Magner
Feel like Magnus is too common? Go for Magner, which can be traced back to the Old High German for "mighty army."
17. Alleaume
This name of a 10th century French saint means "noble helmet."
The 5-year-old girl loves shopping with her parents at Costco so much that she asked for a Costco-themed birthday party. "I really don't know what possessed her to want that theme," Kimber's mom Niki Walker said to TODAY, "She loves the pizza and the samples ... and the giant teddy bears."
Imagine the giant-sized goodie bags that the partygoers get! Check out more cute pics over at TODAY (warning: auto-play video with sound)
We posted about newborn baby Romeo meeting baby Juliet at the hospital recently, but we just can't pass on this follow up.
The two star-crossed babies were born only hours apart at the same hospital just next door to each other, and their respective parents had named them "Romeo" and "Juliet" by coincidence. After her initial newborn baby photo went viral, photographer Cassie Clayshutle did another photoshoot, this time with homemade props with Shakespearean motifs.
"What light through yonder window breaks?" That's just the photographer's flash.
Birth photography sounds like something mothers and fathers would rather not share with the world, and something that might be kinda hard to look at, but birth photography is actually pure visual magic.
These artistically candid images capture the beauty of childbirth, as well as the pain, the mess and the blessed relief after it's all said and done and mom gets to hold her bundle of joy.
The raw, unfiltered look at childbirth seen in the photos submitted to the 2017 Birth Photography Competition will make some people feel squeamish, but it's all part of being human- so deal with it!
Colleen Jordan recorded her two-year-old twin daughters Maddie and Scarlett acting out a scene from the movie Frozen as they watched it on TV. You think these little girls have seen the movie a few times before? They may grow up to be Hollywood stars! -via Tastefully Offensive
Most parents are lucky if the teenager they hire to babysit actually does a good job of keeping their kid safe and plays with them a bit, much less goes the extra mile to make the kid smile.
But the lucky folks who hired 15-year-old Keegan Carnahan hooked themselves a winner-because Keegan actually dresses up like a mermaid to entertain her young charge Alidy.
Keegan says she got the tail when she was 12 and "going through a phase", so when little Alidy came trotting out in her mermaid outfit Keegan "thought it would be a fun surprise to bring out mine for bathtime."
Alidy naturally thought it was a brilliant idea, and now people across the country are looking to hire Keegan to hire their kids...and star in their mermaid shows!
When Ana Barbara Ferreira, a teacher from Sao Paulo, Brazil, found out that one of her student was saddened after being ridiculed by a boy for having "ugly hair," she decided to user her head to solve the problem. Make that, use her hair.
"Yesterday, my student came to tell me that a boy said that her hair was ugly. She was pretty sad ... at that time, the only thing I could think to tell her was that she was beautiful and that he didn't know what she was talking about," Ferreira posted on Facebook, "Today, I woke up and remembered what happened and I decided to do the same hairstyle that she usually has."
When the student saw her, she came running to hug her, saying "Today, I am beautiful just like you."
