Wonderplanet

Williamsburg, 2013

A really funny satire on the peculiarities of the mommy blogosphere in the New Yorker this week. Paul Rudnick writes about a pseudo-fictitious mommy blogger named Jyll Cimmaron Stelton whose life mission statement goes something like this:

"I believe that childhood is a brief, perfect state of being, and so I’ve tried to enclose my family in a shimmering sphere of enchantment, a realm that I call WonderPlanet, right here in our Park Slope brownstone. On WonderPlanet, anything is possible, as long as everyone loves one another and Goldman Sachs comes through with Daddy’s Easter bonus."

My favorite part of it nods to that Retro Wife story in New York a few weeks back:

"Most of our days, however, are spent dressing up in hand-embroidered Swedish linen smocks, tulle tutus, and velvet tunics, and fashioning dance/performance pieces illustrating what I like to call “Ye Enchantable Historye of WonderPlanet.” Yesterday, when some neighboring children came over, Nebula chose to play the Darkling Shrew, a mother who neglects her children by selfishly pursuing a life of social work and city planning. The other children all played positive emanations, including Kindness, Quiet Time, and Really Listening. They surrounded the Darkling Shrew and punched her until she promised to quit her job and devote more time to Instagramming photos of them touching oversized soap bubbles."

Yeah, apparently I'm not the only one who thinks all of this glowy maternal perfection has gone haywire.

Picnicland

Prospect Park, 2012

We spent Sunday picnicking in Prospect Park with a group of friends. This is ground zero for New York babymaking.

I was joking to Will that Brooklyn is certainly hard at work repopulating itself. There were hundreds of children and hordes of pregnant women everywhere you looked. Just when I was thinking, hey, someone might let me cut the line for the bathroom at the Picnic House, I'd notice that there were 6 pregnant women ahead of me. Insanity. Bocce was played and the little people in our group ran around like banshees, happily playing in the dirt (who says urban life is without its outdoor pursuits.)

After packing up for the evening, we stumbled on a table at Al Di La in Park Slope, which I had been meaning to try for ages. Homemade pasta galore.