maqupi

These are a few beautiful, heartwarming or just funny illustrated books that our family gathered during the years. They are not as famous as they deserve. I (we) love them because the stories are quirky and surprising and can be at times very deep; they are great for "aloud-reading", making funny voices, adding emphasis where it is needed, letting your child to learn & shout punchlines at the right moment; illustrations are stunningly beautiful and have the rare quality of being "fun-to-look-at" repetition, repetition, repetition that young children love they bring back memories (ok, this applies only to my family, but I promise it will work for you as well, only the memories will be different I guess) The Troll by Julia Donaldson and David Roberts . A troll impatiently waiting under a bridge, a crew of lousy pirates and a surprise finale. A surreal story by the uber-famous author of the Gruffalo, we even turned it into a play for our ...

We all agree that parenting is stressful & exhausting. The thing is, when we meet other parents we have to endure listening to how hard it is for them, with little concern for us. How can we be unquestionably certain that it is us, and not them, having a terrible time with those monsters that claim to be our offspring?  I can help by providing absolute quantitative metrics for parenthood-derived stress, so that when we meet obnoxious parents at softplay or whatever, hard numbers and solid stats will speak for us. Here we go. The Peppa Magnitude Scale  measures the stress caused by watching several consecutive episodes of the same children's show. Three Peppa Pig episodes give a score of 3, and so on. Beware, the scale is exponential so a score of 8 is twice as stressful than 7, and 32 times worse than 3! Scientists do not agree entirely on which shows qualify and the debate is still fierce. Sure hits are Peppa Pig, Teletubbies, Waybuloo, Baby Jake. Mouthful ...