Neglecting my kids' cultural education

Only just this week, my kids saw Star Wars: Episode IV for the first time.

For that matter, I don't think they've been exposed to any Star Trek yet.

In this musical that DS1 and I are involved in, there's a death scene, and during rehearsals the peanut gallery likes to interject, "I'm not dead yet!" and "He's only... *mostly*... dead." DS1 has no clue what they are talking about.

Thank goodness for netflix and multiple queues. Though I'm not sure that the kids are quite ready for Monty Python just yet...

any other suggestions for what to inflict on my kids?

Conference Childcare

The abstract deadline for the winter AAS Meeting is Wednesday. Childcare grants for attendees are due November 15.

Which brings me to this item which I caught on the radio the other day. The crux of which is that annual meetings of the American Dental Association have drop-in, on-premises daycare available for parents who attend the meeting.

Having brought the family to at least one AAS meeting with me, I know what a godsend this can be. This bit from the article summarizes it nicely:

ACCENT president Diane Lyons founded her company in 1991. Before that, she was an event planner. She says she hated leaving her kids in hotel rooms with unfamiliar baby sitters on business trips.

LYONS: People didn't want to know you brought your children. They wanted your kids somewhere else, so you could be focused -- when really, it helps a parent to focus if you know your child is being well taken care of, and they're entertained.

Then again, the AAS is a lot smaller than the ADA. And I'm willing to bet that the AAS has a smaller percentage of women, who (rightly or wrongly) are more often in charge of overseeing childcare than men. So if that $50,000 figure doesn't scale well with demand, it might be hard to convince the AAS to subsidize childcare. Still, I wonder if this sort of thing might work out economically for the AAS. You could raise conference fees or apply for an outside grant or find a corporate sponsor.

Still, it is heartening to see that accomodations for childcare is becoming more commonplace.