Baby Names - Attachment to kitty a little too...attachedFiled under: Gear, ToddlerNolan has

Attachment to kitty a little too...attached

Filed under: Gear, Toddler

Nolan has been carting around his bedraggled kitty since he was about three months old. "Kitty" was actually once a very handsome faux feline, complete with a beanbag for warm-up in the microwave.

Now, woefully, he is a one-eyed, rumpled eyesore. I can't get him away from Nolan long enough to wash him, so currently his mottled fur is covered in spaghetti sauce and banana-strawberry vegetable juice. He smells like death but Nolan loves him.

Kitty gets thrown over the edge of the crib every morning, to signal Nolan's daily arrival into the land of the awake. Kitty must accompany Nolan in his high chair, in the car, at storytime, for walks in the park. My kid seems to be increasingly attached to kitty, and now insists that kitty come with him into the bathtub every night, with disastrous results for the cat.

The other morning I left for daycare without kitty in the car, and we weren't more than 5 minutes away from the house, when a pathetic little voice in the backseat started reminding me,"Keee.Keeee." Of course. Kitty. And we had to go back and get him.

Does your child have a favourite stuffed animal? I am hoping the Internet will tell me that Nolan will cease to carry this thing around by the time he is 16.

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Parents outraged by explicit sex education lesson

Filed under: Middle school, Public school, 8-9 years

Some students in a Chicago school recently got more sex education than their parents would have liked. Standard sex ed classes usually include information on dating, peer pressure, contraception and sexually transmitted diseases. But at Wolcott School in Thornton, Illinois, 8th grade students were asked to read aloud from a list of "frequently asked questions" which included explicit information on specific sex acts. Parents and students say this went beyond the mechanics of 'how to do it' and veered into 'how to make it good' territory.

After some of the children complained to their parents, the principal ordered the health teacher to apologize. This isn't good enough for some, who feel the teacher's lesson was voyeuristic and want him suspended or fired.

Even organizations who are pushing to get more comprehensive sex-ed programs into Illinois schools feel the lesson was too much. Jonathan Stacks, from the Illinois Campaign for Responsible Sex Education, feels the material was not age-appropriate and "way over the top." "This is really getting into the aspect of pleasure . . . and the mechanics of how to have good sex," Stacks said. "It goes way beyond what the national medical associations recommend for a comprehensive program."

The teacher claims it was all a big mistake. The handout the children were given was taken from a British web site that promotes education about AIDS and HIV prevention. Instead of choosing the material designated as "mainly for young people", he took the information from a link titled "general questions about sex."

If you give the teacher the benefit of the doubt and allow that maybe selecting that material was a mistake, you still have to contend with the fact that he did not stop the lesson when it became clear that the subject matter was inappropriate for 14 year old children. I think he should be fired. What do you think?

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