No Child Left Behind?One Soho child defaults on her admission to the Little Red School House, and the act reverberates around the world.
live from the sixth borough
Baby’s First BrazilianA sick new trend is sweeping the Sixth Borough. What are the implications for New York?
intel
New Park Slope Parents Site Prepares Families for Lactation, Preschool, DeathLook up “inevitable” in any online dictionary, and you’ll now find a link to the newly overhauled Park Slope Parents Website, parkslopeparents.org, a just-gussied-up HTML outgrowth of the popular listserv and “The Ultimate Destination for Those Rockin’ the Brooklyn Bugaboo.” (Actually, the real tagline is “Your resource for raising children in Park Slope, Brooklyn,” but you can consider this our official entry.) So what does online child-rearing in an overpriced, overfetishized sector of an outer borough entail? We went to the “Sneak Peek Week” site to find out.
Oh Mother
• So who’s to blame for yesterday’s sulfuric odor across Manhattan that today has tabloid headline writers gleefully trafficking in fart puns? The leading version is an emission from a swamp across the Hudson. New Jersey, we thought better of you. [NYP]
• A security guard employed at the Office of the State Comptroller in Albany is being charged with exposing himself to two 13-year-old girls this past Saturday — at the office. Kinda puts Hevesi’s indiscretions in perspective. [AP via amNY]
• A Bronx mother who had earlier claimed her baby was stolen at gunpoint on New Year’s Eve is now suspected of abandoning the 1-month-old in a Dumpster. The cops are frantically searching landfills. [WNBC]
• Meet Stavon Simpson, a slightly less evil mom. According to the D.A., she took the $186,000 life-insurance payout from the dead father of her child — bequeathed expressly to the daughter’s education — and decided it would be better spent on a Land Rover and things like the cable bill. Because the most important lesson is confidence. [NYDN]
• And, you still can’t get gay-married in New York, but you can get gay-divorced. One half of a feuding ex-couple cited the union’s illegality to get out of a separation agreement; in a Solomon-esque decision, a city judge has ruled that the contract stands even if the marriage itself doesn’t. [NYT]
intel
How’s My Strolling?
Because it’s not enough for New York parents to obsess merely over the right preschool and the right language lessons and all the other right things to do to get little infant Susie into Harvard, now there’s one more way to indulge neurotic obsessions about your child’s well-being: stroller license plates. Slap one on, as demonstrated in this photo that appeared in our inbox, and now every other nosy New Yorker becomes your eyes and ears, able to report your nanny (or perhaps your spouse) for maternal malfeasance. Speaking of which, doesn’t it seem there are a whole bunch of cars ready to speed up the avenue, at that stroller? Bad parent! Bad photographer!
The Swarm of the Super-Applicants [NYM]
