mothers

The Shadow Knows: Watching Superbad with My Son

When I was a kid, in the 70s, I used to swipe my older brother’s Mad magazines. A lot of the humor was over my head, but that only added to the allure: This was a peep show into an unknown world, and I was lusting to grow up. One Mad feature I did get, however, was the regular series by Sergio Aragones: “The Shadow Knows.” It was a simple cartoon of all sorts of folks in all kinds of daily situations, but their shadows behind them projected (literally) their true thoughts or motivations. Like this:

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Is 18 the New 8?

In her book released last fall, Deceptively Delicious, Jessica Seinfeld slips chickpeas into her chocolate chip cookies and purees butternut squash into her mac and cheese. The general premise is that kid food is fried and white. But if you can slip in something on the sly—say, cauliflower into mashed potatoes, or sweet potato into pancakes—then you can trick your kids into eating the stuff you want them to, minus the tantrums and tears. Jessica, who is married to the comic Jerry Seinfeld, has been in the news of late because Missy Chase Lapine, who authored a similar book, called The Sneaky Chef, insists that Deceptively Delicious is nothing but a riff on her ideas. The Seinfelds contest that. But whatever. The problem isn’t whether Jessica was the first mother to hide flaxseed in chicken nuggets and then write about it. The problem is, as Wall Street Journal‘s Raymond Sokolov

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A Virgin in Hollister

Being a parent for the better part of two decades, I’ve gotten used to accepting the fact that my kids are attracted to things that I don’t like. When my son Evan was about four, he was shopping with me in a second-hand children’s shop. Rummaging in the forgotten bits at the bottom of one of those boxes of toys that shopkeepers sometimes keep in the corner to keep kids occupied, he eventually unearthed a shopworn plastic figurine of Hulk Hogan. It wasn’t for sale, but we bought it anyway, and the minuscule Hogan, which innocent Evan sweetly named Kimby, instigated a love of larger-than-life heroes, rangers and comic book characters that has stayed with him in various expressions, even now, as he enters the downside of his teen years. In other words, no matter how much I advocated early on for Pooh Bear, he had his own ideas. The

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