A Preface to 'Maybe a little Different'

I wrote the Maybe a Little Different, and after a day removed it. I feared offending my closest friends. At work tonight, my co-worked, who had read the blog asked me why I took it down, and reassured me that she was not offended by it. A second co-worker then handed me this book that she was reading, "Trees make the best Mobiles," by Jessica Teich and Brandel France de Bravo, and I now had in hand some reassurance that my musings where not off the wall, and that there was some founding for them. I have gotten through half this book tonight, and I HIGHLY recommend it.

Here are some great quotes from it:

• "They (baby) taught us that a tree outside the window can become a mobile, if we forgo the cheery, disposable stuff that litters the landscape of childhood in contemporary life."


• A Zen Buddhist saying, "Haste is a form of violence."


• "Very young children learn by doing, by living in the three dimensions. Television only offers two....There's no reason your child can't play on the bath mat when you're in the shower." (Isaiah's only 't.v.' time - to my mom's horror- is while I'm in the shower...but I think we'll be turning it off....there really is no need for it.)


• "Active toys excite and entertain, but they don't enrich. The best toys are those that can be used in myriad of ways, depending on a baby's skills and imagination, as opposed to the sole way predetermined by a toy designer. After all, the designer has a single goal: to create something complicated enough to warrent the price tag."