Helen and I bring you the first signs of what could be growing ultra-right opposition to Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, a new children’s book featuring gay guinea pigs. (Regular blog readers will know about this from my earlier post; since this video is crossposted at After Ellen, though, there’s sometimes a little overlap in order to inform viewers there.)

We then give you a parent’s-eye view of one of our favorite stores, IKEA. It’s not just good for parents in search of cheap furniture, we argue, but can be a whole day’s worth of activities for children as well. We also offer some suggestions to new parents looking for baby gear and anyone whose home hosts both small children and large pieces of furniture. We next recommend some additional tools to improve your furniture-assembling prowess and ensure that your bookshelves are straight, even if you aren’t.

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If the Veoh video above isn’t working (sometimes their server can be flaky), you can try it at Daily Motion.

Brought to you in partnership with After Ellen.

As many of you know, my partner Helen and I have a fondness for making toys from PVC pipes. We’ve done a PVC pipe construction set, a rain stick and even a wild musical pipe set that at least one reader has copied to great success.

Today, I wanted to assure you that we’re not the only ones who share this weird obsession. The folks at NASA who run the Hubble Space Telescope have in fact provided instructions for making your very own PVC model of the famous orbiting spyglass. It requires a few pipes of various sizes, some end caps, and a few craft supplies, and looks like a great rainy-day project to do with your older kids. It requires some drilling and sawing, and thus an adult presence, but there are also various bits to glue and tape that would be suitable for younger folks. Have fun!

Passing this announcement along by request—I have no affiliation or experience with the below group. (If you have similar announcements, please e-mail me directly as Cheryl did, rather than leave a comment on an unrelated post. If I get a lot of such requests, I may set up an online calendar.)

Considering Parenthood?

This may be the biggest decision of your life. Considering Parenthood is designed to help individuals, couples and co-parents to make the decision about whether they really want to parent or, if they have already decided to parent, what they can expect and what adjustments will have to be made. Participants discuss topics such as how we bring children into our lives, time, money, family, support systems, legal protections, the issues children with gay and lesbian parents face in our society and how to maintain healthy adult relationship while parenting.

The group size is limited to eight. The cost is $200 for the entire 6 weeks, or $35 a week. To register or for more information, contact Cheryl Deaner at 415-876-7006 or Cheryl@cheryldeaner.com.

Date: Saturdays, October 6 through November 9, 10:00-11:30am
Location: 842 Elizabeth St., San Francisco

Cheryl Deaner is a Marriage and Family Therapist, a parent, a founder of Our Family Coalition and the Alternative Family Project. Cheryl has facilitated Considering Parenthood classes and groups for the Lesbian Health Research Center, Lyon Martin Women’s Health Services, Parents Place and in her therapy practice.

Yet another in what is becoming a series of online games for kids that aren’t mean to be kids’ games (see also Tiny Drum Machine and Blue Man Art):

Floorplanner is a Web-based application for room layout and design. You can click and drag furniture, plants, rugs, walls, and other objects to plan the home of your dreams or just a nursery for your new arrival. My four-year-old, however, took a shine to it. Budding Bob Vila that he is, he even chose to play with it last night in lieu of his usual evening DVD. The rooms ended up looking like a collaboration of Escher and Picasso, but he was very proud of his design. I figure it’s more educational and less annoyingly squeaky than a Bob the Builder video.

You can register for a free account (or pay for a Pro version that lets Realtors and other professionals save multiple projects), but if you don’t want to bother with either, the “Try-It” demo works fine for kids. (Demo projects can’t be saved, though.)

(Thanks to Lifehacker for suggesting it for us grownups.)

Reader Erin was kind enough to send me some pictures of the musical PVC pipe set she made with her older daughter and her daughter’s friends, based on my Musical Pipes post. They gave the set to her younger daughter’s school—which is a great idea, since I admit it is a little large to keep in the living room. She writes:

Oh. My. Gosh. You would NOT believe how popular the instrument is! The kids are loving it. . . .

Thanks again for the fantastic idea. Sophie even used the chop saw by herself on one of the wood cuts. Talk about being proud of herself. . . .

I thought the kids would enjoy it, but had no idea that they’d love it as much as they do. The school will probably be permanently mounting it to a wall.

Erin was also the first interviewee in my Family Voices series. Thanks again, Erin, for sharing part of your life with us.

A PVC rainstick is the next in my series of Kids’ Toys from the Hardware Store. It’s a nice complement to a set of PVC musical pipes, and simpler to build. Again, credit goes to my partner the engineer for creating this; I’m just the journalist here.

Materials:

• About 2′ of 1 1/4″ PVC pipe (Shorten for a small child or lengthen for a taller one.)
• A dozen screws—this is the tricky part:
  #6 1″ round (pan) head wood screws with threads all the way up to the head (Round, not flat, head is necessary to avoid sharp edges. Full threading is needed because it is the top threads that will grip the pipe.) These can be hard to find. You may need to ask the staff at your hardware store.
• Two 1 1/4″ PVC endcaps
• Dried black beans

Tools needed:

• Drill
• Screwdriver
• Saw (if pipe isn’t already cut)
• Rubber mallet (optional; regular hammer will also do)

Instructions: Read more »

Lots of people seemed to like the PVC Pipe Construction Set I wrote about a few months ago, including Parent Hacks, GeekDad, and the FemiKnitMafia (whose son got one from us as a present). My partner, ever the engineer, thus set out to build another PVC creation, a musical pipe set inspired by those of Blue Man Group. (Call us the Blue Mom Group.) I’ll claim a minor role in design consultation, but give her full credit for construction.

When you whack the ends of the pipes with a rubber paddle (we use a flip-flop with the straps cut off), they make a pitched “doink” sound that entertains kids and adults alike. See video for a demo.

The project is slightly more complicated than the PVC Pipes Construction set, but should pose no problem to those with basic saw, drill, and hammer skills. You could do a full eight pipes and adjust the lengths to form a full octave; we went with the more manageable (and cheaper) five pipes in simple one-foot intervals. For just over $25, it’s an unusual item that could amuse kids at birthday parties and all year round. Make it educational and point out the correlation between pipe length and pitch. Read on to find out how it’s done. Read more »

As regular readers know, my family and I moved last month. My partner and I have in fact moved seven times in the fourteen years we’ve been together, and we’ve settled into a pattern: visit Home Depot a dozen times in the first month at our new home, and then set off on the first of several trips to IKEA.

We are both unashamed IKEA fans. We love their kid-friendliness, contemporary style, clever details, and of course the low prices. (And no, they’re not paying me to say that.) It’s also a great place to be a dyke. There are more LGBT families per square foot than almost any place but an R Family cruise. You get to feel burly loading all your furniture into the car, and then break out your tools to assemble it when you get home. (Yes, most of their stuff goes together with only the included IKEA wrench, but who doesn’t like an excuse to wear a tool belt? Besides, as I noted in my IKEA Assembly Tips, sometimes you need a few extra gadgets to do the job right.)

The Swedish giant is also good for relationship building. If you’re taking up with a new love, make sure the first thing you bring over (after the toothbrush) is an unassembled IKEA Expedit bookcase. If you’re still on speaking terms after you put it together, you know you have a keeper. If not, don’t bother unpacking the rest of the U-Haul.

Kudos to IKEA, too, for having their TV ad “Living Room” nominated for the Commercial Closet 2007 Images in Advertising Award. They’re one of two nominees that depict LGBT parents in their ads. TIME magazine is the other, with a print ad showing two moms and a baby, and the line “Are gay families different? (Other than making the statement ‘Go ask your mother’ twice as complicated.) TIME. Know why.”

Now if only R Family offered a trip to Sweden so we could visit the fount of all IKEAness. . . .

(Thanks to National Gay News for the ad-award tip.)

I was feeling a little butch and a little femme yesterday:

• Morning: Built forklift for son using wardrobe box, duct tape, and box cutter. I had promised to make him cool things out of boxes after we moved, thinking of houses and castles. He of course decided to test my skills with something more challenging. I rose to the occasion, though, with forks that really lift, an inside seat, and a door that opens and closes. I’d post instructions, but I’m not sure I could recreate the process.
• Afternoon: Baked Mother’s Day cake from scratch for sweetie. (Mint chocolate fudge, if you’re interested.) Yes, it’s early, but it was the only way I could do it and surprise her.

I’ll have to get one of those orange Home Depot aprons to wear in the kitchen, though, just to tie it all together.

Every young child I know loves to smear things on walls, whether food, paint, or merely dirty hands. Channel that impulse with a three- or four-inch paint roller. It’s not for children who like to bludgeon with such objects, but for others, it can provide a surprising amount of amusement, indoors and out. “Paint the house like Bob the Builder,” you can direct, while doing yard work or preparing dinner. Don’t let your child use real paint, of course, but rather moisten the roller just enough to leave a damp streak and create the sense of painting. Do set the requirement that younger siblings and pets are off limits.

(Read the rest of the series.)