A long time ago I wrote a post lamenting the kind of dollhouses that were available on the market. At the time, Juniper wasn't even a year old, and things have gotten considerably better since then. In that old post I vowed to build Juniper her own dollhouse, and ever since my wife's cruel revelation about the woeful cardboard vehicles I make for Juniper, I have felt a need to redeem myself in terms of what I am able to make with my hands. So I decided to build Juniper a dollhouse that resembled our own home, a Mies van der Rohe shoe box whose lack of any ornament would make the job extremely simple.

The problem was, every time I visited one of those giant chain hardware stores, I would quickly grow intimidated and walk away before the guys in the smocks needled me into exposing my complete incompetence. All that talk about different kinds of saws really stresses me out. Besides, wood is freaking expensive. You'd think it didn't grow on trees.

I decided I was going to build the dollhouse out of scraps of wood that I could find wherever. Last weekend we were on the west side of the state, and I sniffed around the bargain bin outlets of Herman Miller and those other furniture companies over there. I found five heavy shelves that were the perfect length. They were $1.00 each. Then I needed to find some plexiglass for the window-walls, but all I could find were four sheets of translucent matte acrylic for $2.00 each. I spent a good chunk of Saturday morning with my dad in his auto body shop cutting the acrylic sheets and configuring the dollhouse. All week I have been using nap time to put it together, drilling holes in the acrylic and screwing at least 200 screws into the damn thing. I used toy blocks for the stairs and a leftover acrylic strip for the staircase. Just like our own floating staircase, they may look perilous, but they are solid:

All in all, the dollhouse cost me about $15 to make, including screws. But considering that my woodworking experience consists of about an hour watching the New Yankee Workshop and maybe half an episode of Bob the Builder, I don't think it turned out too bad. I love it when minimalist taste, thrift, and complete lack of craftsmanship all come together to form a happy trifecta:

I am debating whether to make it look even more like our place on the outside, or just leave it kind of abstract and minimal. I am leaning towards the latter. What I like about dollhouses is that they are spaces designed solely for a kid's imagination. She lands airplanes on the roof and lets Wild Things climb the stairs. I don't want to dictate any of the terms inside, or buy these chairs. She really wants a potty for it though, so I'll probably do what we did to decorate our real house: buy a whole bunch of cheap vintage stuff from the 70s and let her put the furniture wherever she wants to.

I have tried writing the first three paragraphs of this post three times now; all three versions were intended to explain or justify buying my daughter a $60 plastic dog. Then I realized I had no excuse. I did it. There is no denying it. I bought my daughter a $60 plastic dog, and to make things worse, I only did it because she tricked me into it. Last Friday I was sitting at the laptop while Juniper ate her lunch at the dining room table, and I clicked on an e-mail from Design Within Reach announcing massive discounts and free shipping on their failed line of kid's products. I clicked on the link just to see how cheap that stuff had become, and Juniper apparently had one eye on the screen the whole time, because she immediately shouted, "Juney wants that doggy!"

"Whatever, kid," I said, and we went about the rest of our day's business. Except she wouldn't shut up about the damn dog. That day we went to Eastern Market, a collection of old-school shops that sell fancy cheeses and free trade coffees and lots and lots of pork ribs. Everywhere we went at the market she claimed to see the Green Doggy for sale. "Ask that guy!" she said pointing to the butcher with a refrigerator case filled with fresh pig's heads, pigs feet, pig's snouts, and fresh coon, as though he might also stock an overpriced green minimalist molded-plastic Finnish canine in the back if you just asked him about it. So by late afternoon, after near constant chatter about the "Green Doggy" ("Is he a friendly boy? Where are the Green Doggy's eyes? Juney could ride that Green Doggy! He could sleep in her own room! What's the Green Doggy's name? Can we buy that Green Doggy?") I said the words I thought I'd never say: "Okay, Juniper, when your mother gets home, we'll ask her if we can buy the Green Doggy. We have to order it on the internet, though," I tried to explain. "They don't sell that doggy in Detroit." She wasn't having any of that shit.

"I want that Green Doggy now!"

When Wood got home, of course she agreed right away that we had to order the Green Doggy. "At least she isn't asking for that Dora the Explorer Magic Castle my mom had at her house last weekend."

"She knows me well enough to know I'd never agree to that," I said. "She seems to have located a vulnerability, a chink in my armor of cheapness. The dog used to be $99, and now there is free shipping."

"Just order the damn thing. It's not like you've ever bought her anything that wasn't a germ-infested piece of crap you discovered on the floor between aisles of kid's clothes at the Salvation Army."

"I bought her that Alexander Calder shark pull toy!"

"Yeah, but you won't let her play with it."

So Wood sat down with Juniper and explained that the Green Doggy lives far away in a city called Cincinnati, and right now they are putting him in a big box with lots of pillows and a mailman is going to carry that box all the way up here to Michigan. "It will take him many days to get here," she said.

The Green Doggy came yesterday during her nap:


She climbed on top of him.

She told him to run very, very fast all the way to her own room, where she proceeded to cover him up with blankets and talk to him for several hours.

Someone who had grown accustomed to being covered with blankets and talked to for hours, however, was not at all amused.

Yesterday I took Juniper to the Henry Ford Museum, and made the mistake of walking her through the 600-ton steam engines before we made it to the exhibit that I was there to see, the 50th-anniversary celebration of the Eames Lounge Chair, a vintage example of which we just revealed sits in our living room. I hadn't been to the Henry Ford since I was a kid, and I fell in love with it again. A Smithsonian for the upper Midwest, it has the Rosa Parks bus parked a few feet from the bloody rocking chair in which Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, itself not far from the car JFK was riding in when he got shot. Beyond these common objects grafted into history by the events that occurred within them, there are thousands of other common objects, long rows of automobiles and airplanes and bicycles built for ten and motorized roller skates, steam trains that dwarf every man, steam engines that propelled the first Ford assembly lines, airstream trailers and a R. Buckminster Fuller dymaxion house, all of it together such a wonderful celebration of American ingenuity and industry.

But I was there to see an exhibit about a chair I already owned. As Juniper sat in my arms and I read the placards under early Eames prototypes and molded-plywood splints, she began to whine, "Dada, can we see trains again? Dada, airplanes?" I was there for the minutia of the Eames exhibition, the letters Ray wrote to Charles on construction paper and the charcoal sketches of morphing shapes that would form the basis of so many famous chairs, but Juniper couldn't grasp why we would be looking at pictures of chairs when there were trains and dollhouses and airplanes to see. When we got to the star of the exhibit, the 1956 lounge chair owned by Herman Miller president D.J. Dupree, set under soft light on a spinning pedestal, Juniper looked at it and said, "That our chair. Juney go round and round?" I often spin her on the one in our living room.

Before I took her out of the exhibit to squeal at the most magnificent thing she had ever seen, the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile ("Dada, buy it? Juney drive it!"), I was struck by this 1959 ad showing a pajama-clad father sleeping with his infant child on his lap. The text reads, "Even if you don't have a two o'clock feeding at your house, we think you will appreciate the deep comfort of this rosewood and leather lounge chair designed by Charles Eames for Herman Miller":

For the last eight months, we have been living in a fishbowl. I don't mean that as some sort of metaphor about this blog and the way it allows you to peer into our lives, I mean literally, we live in a fishbowl. Two walls of our home are wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling windows. We throw no stones around here.

Last October, we were honored to learn that the lovely Grace Bonney of Design*Sponge fame enjoys this blog, particularly the pictures of little Juniper. I am nothing but an unphotogenic man who had one photogenic sperm that met an egg inside my photogenic wife. I am not an artist, or a designer. For weeks Grace has been peeking into the beautiful homes of talented artists and designers. When she asked me if she could allow her readers a peek into our fishbowl, it was with some trepidation that we obliged. If you would like to share a peek inside our home, be sure to head over to Design*Sponge today. And go back. Every day. Grace always leads her readers to people and places and art worth seeing. I just hope we can live up to that standand.

For those visiting from Design*Sponge, this is a blog mostly about parenting. In downtown Detroit. I can be a curmudgeonly, cheap, bitter asshole sometimes. I can also be ridiculously sentimental. We started using the goofy nicknames years ago because I didn't want people from high school finding the blog and making fun of me. I just turned 30. My real name is Jim. Welcome.

It seems that only when all your other needs are met, then you can start really worrying about how to decorate your house. Some experts say the cave paintings at Lascaux were incantations to gods, a way to ensure that the animals appearing on the walls would appear on the plains during the next hunt. But how can anyone know? I'd be willing to bet that those Gallic troglodytes were just well-fed and bored.

I have spent the last several weeks painting walls, rearranging furniture, considering new floors, and cleaning obsessively (anything to avoid writing). But I wasn't always this way.

I recently borrowed a scanner from my father-in-law (figuring he wouldn't need it during the second round of chemotherapy), and started scanning pictures from the last decade of my life. As I looked back on these pictures from college in the late nineties and beyond, it became clear that when surviving on $5,000 a year, you can't account for much in the way of good taste, either with how you dress or decorate your home. At least everything on my body or in my home looked exactly like what it was: two sizes too big and still smelling of thrift store. We did have a great affordable furniture store in town with a warehouse full of wild vintage crap and a showroom full of panther sculptures and brand-new purple velvet armchairs. One time Wood bought a "funky" vintage Swan chair repro for $15 and we didn't tie it down in the back of her truck so on the highway home we watched in the mirrors as it tumbled into the passing lane, shattering into pieces and rolling onto the median without disrupting traffic too much. We were lucky, however, that the salesman who sold her the Jacobsen-knockoff had thrown in a 1960s hairdryer chair, the kind old ladies once used to gossip in, nodding their curlered heads disapprovingly under steel bowls. It was free, and very heavy, and no threat to crush a tailgater's windshield.

That chair sat in her apartment under a patchouli-soaked Asian wall-hanging for years. When she moved she gave it to one of the aging prostitutes from the motel across the street who used to wait for rides home on Wood's front porch. We watched her drag it off into the sunset. She sure was excited. I'm sure it still has a good home.

But looking at the photos of myself in tapered thrift-store khakis standing in front of what passed for decoration in the houses I lived in with other men (posters with clever sayings about beer! inflatable furniture! ) and with my now-wife (matching maroon leather couch and recliner! A framed Klimt poster!) I am humbled. These were the days of empty liquor bottles on the mantle. I was so earnest and clueless. When poor, I guess I had more important things to worry about.

That is not to say that rich people are the only ones with good taste. I have stared long and hard at Walker Evans' photographs and understood that the dirt poor were the first true minimalists, long before Donald Judd was a pup and Wal-Mart made it affordable for everyone to be tacky. Because I had no sense of taste myself, it always seemed like the best way to decorate your house would be to take a middle-aged black woman to that store with the panther mirrors and velvet furniture and pick her brain for ideas, or drag one of those guys who sell Nascar tapestries out of conversion vans down by highway interchanges down to Big Lots and tell him money is no object. Either one could make a house so much cooler than some dipshit like me with a DWR catalog and some color swatches. I was driving alone to lake Michigan a few nights ago and I passed the house of the septuagenarian farmer who used to sell me pumpkins as a kid. His name was Gene Rhodes, and he still drives a 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood painted bright orange. His barn is orange. He only wears orange clothes. It was about 8:30 p.m. and I could see into about five windows of his farm house. In that brief moment it looked gloriously like hell's country kitchen. When asked about living with all that orange, Gene the Pumpkin Man once said, "I can do it and get away with it, so I do it. I always liked the color orange." I have hung out in trailers that looked as though they were decorated solely with items purchased (or more likely, won) at county fairs. These are the true visionaries, people.

Looking at the old photographs I've been scanning, it is easy to mock the decor, the furniture, or the subject's glasses, hairstyle, and clothes, particularly if you are the subject and consider your taste and wisdom to have improved with age. But I sometimes question this instinct. As with any derision, I wonder if it isn't sourced in some insecurity. That kid in those photos, he is still hungry. His needs aren't met: he has a hunger for sex and beer, ramen noodles and pizza, even poetry. Here is a boy so filled with passion for life he reads good poetry and writes plenty of bad. Nevertheless, he thinks it acceptable to read and write poetry! He makes translations from Greek and Latin on his own and gives them to his girlfriend because he's found some relevance in the ancient words. He dreams and yearns for things far greater than money. And yet he knows so little of the world and the compounded genius of others that he believes his ideas revolutionary, his thoughts new. This fire in his brain and in his belly obscures the ugliness of where he lives. He is still hungry for his future. Thread counts do not matter. All he needs is a bed to fuck and dream in.

As a new homeowner, I've spent so much time with color palettes, paused too long on HGTV while flipping channels. I have looked for midcentury pottery on eBay. Last Sunday I sat cramped in the backseat of our Volkswagen, my rib cage and lungs practically penetrated by the carseat, with the baby and the dog back there with me, while a vintage Herman Miller chair I picked up for $5 rested comfortably in the roomy passenger seat up front. This was the second such journey we have made from that side of the state this month. "I suffer for good design," I proclaimed halfway through the 120 mile journey. I have become a man who loves to buy beautiful things as cheaply as possible and make our home as beautiful as I can. I am always hauling unnecessary shit into our house. I have called Wood from a junk shoppe asking her what she would think about me bringing home some five foot letters from an old supermarket sign or a giant painting of the disembodied head of a sea captain looking wistfully out to sea at a lonely boat tossed by the waves. I have showed up with spider-filled dish stackers from old cafeterias and instead of a desk I use a 1960s scoring table recovered from a bowling alley that was being torn down. I now have more chairs than friends.

And yet I can remember a time when I didn't give a damn about a chair so long as it didn't collapse under me. I am sure that there will come a day when I will look back on pictures of this time of my life and think about how lucky I was to have the time and money to worry about furniture and the color of our walls.

As you may have figured from that video Wood posted, we're big on the alphabet around here these days. This week I was really getting sick of all the stupid alphabet books we had been reading, so I decided to make my own. Don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of Nikki McClure's Awake to Nap and Michael De Feo's Alphabet City, but despite the latter's lovely urban scenery, the subject verbiage itself is a bit humdrum for my taste. Like most alphabet books, the words tend to be either zoological or agricultural. I wanted to create a book for a kid, like mine, who is growing up in a dirty-ass city and who already knows the names of all the animals in the zoo and in the Big Red Barn. De Feo (who did create the beautiful paste-ups for his book) simply doesn't use very many words that aren't that different from those in all of the other alphabet books I've seen. The letter N, for example, is represented in De Feo's book by a nest. Every alphabet book uses a nest for the letter N. Juniper and I seem to be in agreement that nests are kind of irrelevant. I feel it is much more important for her to identify other things that start with the letter N, such as ninjas:

Now if our home is ever attacked by a group of numb-chuck-wielding, star-throwing ninjas, Juniper can shout out a warning that could save all our lives. The same is true for this one:

You traditionalists can teach your kids about all the zebras all you want, but my kid is going to know how to identify a zombie wearing underwear as soon as she sees one. And anyone who has seen a Romero film knows how important a few seconds of warning can be when fending off zombies. The same theory works for mummies, pirates, robots, economists, vikings, and yeti. You won't find them in any other alphabet books, but you will find them in ours. I also threw in some hard words like Gnome and Knight just to mess with her head.

Now I don't want to hear any bullshit about how my kid is going to need therapy or how I'm so politically incorrect etc. etc. ad nauseam. We get plenty of e-mails about that every week. If you have an inclination to point something like that out, just remember you're not as clever as you think you are. Seriously: yawn.

For the past few months whenever I see a painting or a stencil of something that would make a good subject word in an alphabet book, I have snapped a picture. I have so much gratitude for the amazing artists who are out there creating these beautiful works in our streets for little or no recognition, risking so much just to make our cities a little more colorful and interesting.

In a few days I'll probably post some pictures on flickr to show how I turned these images into an actual book, but for now if you have any interest in making one yourself, using or adapting any of the images, or just getting a closer look, click on the 4-paneled jpegs below for high-res downloadable images.

Juniper and I had a lot of fun making this (I knew which images to choose when she pointed at the screen and said, "who's THAT guy?"). Enjoy.

Original comments here

Given her lack of interest in playing with anything that wasn't one of my wife's breasts, last year I didn't really want to buy my 11-month-old kid anything for Christmas. We decided that instead of spending the money that most new parents spend on electronic talking baby leapfrog computers and Baby Einstein videos, we'd just get her some clothes and accessories from local designers. We found so much good stuff around San Francisco that last December I published my first "Holiday Shopping Guide for the Indie Sonofabitch Parent." Even though Juniper will probably have some plastic gewgaw wrapped up for her under the Christmas tree this year, I decided to update that shopping guide, because I believe supporting these kinds of artists and craftspeople is a really good thing.

Little did I realize how much the DIY/Crafty baby industry had grown in the last 12 months when I sat down to start working on this last week. There is no way this is a comprehensive list, and I imagine I will be updating it with your suggestions over the next few days (please feel free to let me know in the comments about all the great stuff I missed). I don't think this list treads too much of the same territory as Liz and Kristen & Co.'s shopping guide over at Cool Mom Picks. But you should check that one out, too.

I have focused on designers who have started businesses selling kid's toys, clothing, and accessories. I believe almost everything listed here is hand made. Many of these people are work-at-home parents supporting their families through their creativity and handiwork. I have intentionally left out Etsy sellers. Etsy hadn't really taken off for children's products last year, but now it is indisputably the best place to go for great products in extremely limited production. Where else can you find ridiculously cute handmade stuff like this or this? I love Etsy, and would encourage anyone who likes this kind of stuff for their kids to peruse all the children's categories, particularly clothing, toys, and accessories.

Almost every seller on this list has their own online store where goods can be purchased and shipped anywhere in the U.S. and Canada. I have done my best to divide the sellers into categories, but this first batch sells so many different things that they sort of defy categorization:

• Abe Jones- One of our favorites; beautiful clothing, truly unique tees, lounge sets that make great gifts; they have a wonderful collection of long-sleeved shirts and blazers, skirts and dresses.
  
• Attach the Baby- baby carriers & slings, blankets, nursing necklaces.
• Cherry Momma- tees, dresses, blankets, loveys.
• Dishy Duds Designs- Monster tees, hats, blankets, girls' dresses, and lots of other cool stuff.
  
• Go, Goose, Go- A great collection of unique and interesting items. I love the long-sleeved tees and the western pants.
• Hazel and Melvin's Room- Retro-feel boppy covers, crib bedding, diaper bags, sock monkeys, and sock monkey clothing. Handmade in Minneapolis.
• JackC Designs- We used to see these at Lavish in San Francisco's Hayes Valley; great onesies, blankets, and even A-line dresses that include the necessary matching underwear.
• Kokoleo- stuffed creatures, kid's clothes, bags, and personalized kid's stuff.
• Lucky Dog Designs- blankets, burp cloths, bibs, diaper bags, toddler aprons.
• Luna Lou- Great long-sleeved tees, baby blankets, bags, paper goods, and slippers.
• One Little Monkey- lounge sets, shirts, skirts, dresses, shorts, diaper bags, bibs, blankets, diaper bags and really cool toddler totes.
• Out of the Box- true to its name, this is a really great collection of stuff that falls out of the traditional etsy-crafter paradigm: tasteful kid's room decorations and paintings, pillows, bibs, baby booties, drawer handles and mobiles. Great online store for gifts.
  
• Tricky & Titch- screenprinted sleepwear, t-shirts, onesies, blankets, and hats.
  
• Zoomzabebe- hand-sewn rompers, hats, t-shirts, onesies, blankets, and bibs.
• Zoe B: Maternity clothes, customized wall art, baby tees, blankets and customized onesies.

• The Creatue Co-op- A really great source of high-quality stuffed creatures, with very reasonable prices. All handmade in the USA. They also sell hats and minis.

• The Monster Factory- Another great, very professional creator of unique handmade plush toys, also reasonably priced. They do a great job of creating fun and interesting characters for all their stuffed creatures. My favorite is Mr. Munk. He'd go great with one of the Little Executive tees from Xenos Designs.

• Bobab- plush "accessories;" I like the boombox.
• BiggerCritters- "Character is not measured by lunch box sales."
• Blobby Farm (Nebraska)
• Boys & Toys (Russia)
  
• Carryboo (Brooklyn)- check out undies man.
• Chika's felt animals (pricey, but lovely)
• Cinnamon Roll Gang
• Clarity Miller's Punk Rock Sock Monkey & Friends
• Cuddly Rigor Mortis
  
• Cupco Dolls- These are unbelievably cool, high quality creatures and characters--and they are really expensive---but they can be purchased here.
  
• Curioddities' Worrybones
• CutieCooties (Chicago)
• Daisy Sewing's pirate sock monkeys
  
• Fern Animal Friends
• Fiendish Toys (Australia)
  
• Fishcakes
  
• FunFun- Home of the Superninj
• Goblinko's Grunions
  
• Green Girl Art- The penguins are great.
• Heather's Softies from Miles, Etc- Heather made us our favorite softies ever.
  
• Heyday Fashion (North Carolina)
• House of Ingri
  
• Jenny Harada
  
• Kherry Momma
• Kissy Kissy (Australia)
  
• Lampe's Lumps (Michigan)
• Little Dear Fatkitties
  
• Lulu Groove Dolls
• Lumplings
• My Paper rane's plush olletion
  
• My Weird Little Friends
  
• Supermaggie's animals are really nice.
• Miss Monster
• Missy Broome's zipper stuffs- these are awesome.
• Mr. Pickles (Ohio)- has kid's tees to go with the pickle plushies.
• Murphy's Original Stupid Creatures
• Nest Studio
• Oddbabies (Chicago)
• Oneeyes (Netherlands)
  
• Bucktooth Mama (my favorite is Bluey Bear)
• Sewing Stars (Providence, Rhode Island)
• Shawnimals (home of the infamous Wee Ninja)
  
• Social Studies Design
• So Softies
• Spasmodica (Chicago)
  
• TeeTree's World (San Francisco) (unlike most plushies, teetree creatures are safe for infants, 100% organic and even chewable---we have given several of these away as gifts)
  
• Tokkisom (Bay Area)
• Veta (Juniper has the bear)
• Wendy June (Australia)
  
• Woollyhoodwinks
• Zid Zid Kids
• Zors
  

And while you're at it, make the world better for all these new characters.

• 1girl1boy- beautiful kid's tees
• 4daBaby- a huge collection of kid's t-shirts available in tons of colors. These guys will print your choice of many dozens of images or witty sayings on t-shirts in 14 colors, and unlike so many kid shirt designers, they do it on long-sleeved shirts that can be worn all year round. Juniper is wearing one here.
• Baby Rock Star- I'm not really into the whole "let's make my baby wear rock band parody shirts" thing, but I know I a lot of people think it's cute. Also see Babywit for more of that kind of thing.
• Berrit designs (onesies)
• Bub Love
  
• Bunny & Bee (San Francisco)
  
• Chickpea- Rebecca Pearcy's (Quenbee) line of baby tees
  
• Coko Couture
• Cuddlefarm
• Curioddities also has some creepy, haunting tees.
• Danger U.K. monster shirts- so awesome.
• Feather Weight
• Filth Unlimited- tees with slogans that should satisfy all your punk, rockabilly, metal, satanic, and generally proudly-irresponsible parenting needs.
• Firefly Designs
• Glug Baby- These San Francisco shirt designers have always been a favorite in the Sweet Juniper household; Glug simply makes some of the coolest kid's shirts around. The actual shirts they use will get very stretchy at the neck, but we love that they offer long-sleeved shirts. And I guess any shirt will get stretched out if you wear it practically every day.
  
• Gurelea
• Alena Hennessey Owl Shirt
• Harrilu
• Jonesy Goodstuff
• LBS Designs
• Lil' Awesome (Olympia, Washington)
  
• Little Beasts (another San Francisco t-shirt designer--- does personalized shirts, too)
  
• Miele Fresca- Another one of our favorites; Juniper has several of these shirts.
  
• Milobaby
• Might Politey
  
• My Perennial [available at Mahar Dry Goods]
• Reckon- the ultimate way to inflict hipsterdom on your unsuspecting kids. Werner Herzog shirts? What about Klaus Kinski?
  
• Sick on Skin (Toronto)
• Sidepony
• Squidfire's "Shrimpfire" Line- Among the coolest shirts for kids I've seen.
  
• Sticker Sisters- the "girls rock" shirt is not nearly as awful as it sounds. It is quite nice.
• Submarine Assemblage
• Sunwashed- We used to see these folks in San Francisco and we love their products.
• Turtle Papers
  
• Vintage Baby- Nancy Dene takes old t-shirts and reconstructs them as onesies. Love it.
• Wild Garden kid's shirts- really nice.
• Will Heron Designs
• Wonderland Q- cute chick onesie (cheep! cheep!)
• Xenos Designs (Los Angeles- love the Little Executive tees)
• Yid Kids- For God's chosen little people.
  

• Ramonster Wear- This goes first, out of alphabetical order, because these cowboy clothes for kids are so awesome I want to travel back in time to 1999 and pretend I like Merle Haggard and Lone Star beer and argue about whether it was Jeff Tweedy or Jay Farrar staying most true to the genius that was Uncle Tupelo. They do custom work, too.
  
• Amelie Muse- That yellow coat could almost get my cheap ass to buy it.
  
• Atomic Mama- Clothes made from retro-looking fabrics
  
• Beqi clothing
• Cranky Pants- hand-knit pants with great faces on the bum.
  
• Delilah Crown- Kristina De Pizzol's gorgeous, handmade children's clothing were always a big splurge for us whenever we'd visit her little boutique in San Francisco's North Beach. She made my favorite dress in Juniper's closet, and continues to make the most adorable clothes. Apparently she also has a habit of making me write like I'm totally gay.
  
• Go Baby Ponchos
• Hand Picked Pumpkin- Custom kid's clothing
  
• Innies-n-Outies- I am blown away by the quality and design of these clothes. They are a bit pricey, but if you have the means I can't think of many better-looking kid's clothes out there. Besides, everything is reversible, so it's like you're getting two outfits for the price of one. Every one of their lines if what Tea Collection wishes it could be. And unlike Tea Collection, these clothes are handmade in the U.S.
• Knuckleheads Clothing- Not sure if this is handmade, but it makes up for a lack of good boy's clothing among the DIY set.
  
• La Loma Studios
  
• Llamajama- lovely woolens: pants, sweaters, suits, and shorts.
• Lilliputians NYC- tons of nice handcrafted clothes
• Monkey & Me- All kinds of kid's clothes: jumpers, tees, onesies, dresses, pants. Nice stuff.
• Robot Parade (Massachusetts)- Really cool recycled jackets, also plushies
• Skipping Hippos Ponchos- Juniper would have frozen by now without them.
  
• Tartlette- Still one of my favorites.
• Textile Fetish- This is some seriously wonderful kid's clothing.
  

• Butterfly & I
• Chia Hats
• Genki Hats- Fun animal and character hats (many based on anime).
  
• Knittle
• Lemonheads Design

• Aunt Art- art accessories, chalk mats
• Bamboletta's custom dolls
  
• The Everpopular Damned Dollies
• Devout Dolls- 100% handmade dolls, including fairies, mermaids, and hipsters.
• Fish River Crafts- Wooden toys from Maine
  
• Friends With You- A decent variety of hip, handmade toys, in a whole range of prices
• Gama Go's Pillows (I like the boom box)
• Heather's Treasure Box- knit infant booties (the cowboy boots are my favorite); available at her eBay store and at Mahar Dry Goods.
• Hop Skip Jump's beautiful handmade dolls and animals
• Joy's Waldorf Dolls- You know, if you're into that kind of crazy.
  
• Lilly Bean Play Food- This stuff is incredible. Kids love playing with plastic food and even Melissa and Doug's wooden food, so why wouldn't they play with knitted plush food? And Lilly bean makes sushi, fortune cookies, fruit, vegetables, and enough kinds of other food to stock a better grocery store than anything in the city of Detroit. The food is available for purchase at the maker's etsy site and at Mahar Dry Goods.
  
• Little Red Pear- makers of softies and plush cutlery (!)
• Lullaboos- These are freakin' adorable. And expensive.
  
• Modernist Alphabet Flash ards- B is for Bauhaus.
  
• Old Soul Doll Company- I can't find a web page for this, but these dolls are made by Shari Enge, who incorporates nineteenth-century photographs into beautiful, haunting dolls [see photo]. She can be reached via e-mail.
• Our Children's Gorilla
  
• Jill Killjoy's Robot Loteria
  
• Indollgences at Gifts Define- really cool, well-made collections of handmade animals and toys delivered in a basket; I like the "babies" too.
• I.F.O (Tokyo)- handmade tees, cups, garden gnomes, and toys.
• Fabric Frog Designs' dolls- kind of creepy, but cool.
• Maine Wooden Toys
  
• Storyblox- customized blocks for your kids
• Urbanwildflower dolls- beautiful black dolls that aren't just barbies made from brown plastic
• Wool Tea Set at Mahar Dry Goods
  

• Alphabetworks- great alphabet art for kid's rooms
• Babylegs- Absolutely the most essential element of Juniper's wardrobe every day.
  
• Baby Leo Designs- These guys made Juniper's favorite baby blanket.
  
• Baby Starlet- Custom Moses baskets
• Bella Tunno- More bibs & such.
  
• Catbird Baby, Inc.- Baby carriers/slings
• Chickpea Diaper Bags- We use one. It's simply the best diaper bag we have ever encountered.
  
• Giddy Giddy Hair Clips [available for sale at Mahar Dry Goods]
• Javis Davis Custom Bedding- They made Juniper's bedding; they are a joy to work with and the product is top-notch.
  
• Kissycake bags- The chick who makes these is one of K Records' own All Girl Summer Fun Band.
  
• Mahar Dry Goods' kiddie suitcases (Juniper freakin' adores hers)
  
• Sheriff Peanut- Super cute bibs
• Thea Starr's baby blankets
  
• Tots & Tails Designs- Mostly blankets, but nice ones
• lark studio diaper bags, diaper cakes (?)
• l.j.bamboo- tons of cool bags, with stroller totes and "dad bags" too
• pitter patter creations- more diaper cakes

Did I miss someone? Of course I did. Let me know who in the comments.

We get 2-3 e-mails per week asking us where we get Juniper's clothes. I always have to be a bit sheepish with the answer. Her clothes are not all lovingly hand-crafted by a collective of hipsters sewing on antique Domestic sewing machines while listening to the new Joanna Newsom album in their Brooklyn studio space and then donating 75 percent of their profits to Guatemalan orphanages. Nor are most of her clothes from fancy San Francisco boutiques, unless they were on the clearance racks or Stefania bought them there. Almost everything she wears is a hand-me-down. Or something I found on eBay. See, I was never above bringing a notepad into those fancy boutiques, writing down the names of the best labels and then scouring eBay for the same clothes at a fraction of the price. Remember: I'm cheap.

In the past, we have also taken some heat for how we dress Juniper, one reader even telling me that she's going to be "a freak" because of our imposition of such a ridiculous wardrobe on her fragile little identity. But generally, the response has been positive.

But I have discovered a new source for Juniper's clothes that is keeping our child-sized hanger supply at perilously low levels: thrift stores. I am no stranger to thrift stores. I spent more time in law school shopping at Ann Arbor-area thrift stores than I did studying. But I never had any reason to look at the kids' clothes then, and let me tell you: kids' clothes at thrift stores are awesome. See, there aren't a lot of 18-24 month old hipsters around here to take all the good shit. That means I have a virtually unlimited supply of early-eighties Montgomery Ward sweaters, handmade dresses from the sixties, urchin pants and vintage polyester jumpers. I love reading her books that I remember having read to me in my childhood, and I love dressing her in clothes from the early eighties. And even better, they're all $1.00 each.

The other day I took Juniper to my favorite thrift store of all time, and just like her dad she was in heaven. The first thing she saw was a giant plastic rocking crocodile, which I let her play on for a few minutes while I looked at old un-PC children's books called Roberto the Mexican Boy & such. She rocked that crocodile with such a fervor that even the haughty transexual stockgirl was moved to crack a smile with his heavily-painted lips. It was hard to drag her off the filthy thing, but she was even more impressed by the aisle of dirty broken toys at the back of the store. Naked dolls, grubby playskool musical instruments, mangy giant sideshow prizes, they all looked just right to Juniper. I was so proud of her.

Generally, babies at thrift stores aren't even held to the same standards as babies at Wal-Mart. Whining babies at Wal-Mart are like stoic Buddhist monks compared to the venomous, tantrum-throwing Beelzebubs you see sitting in the seats of thrift store shopping carts. Juniper behaved like a champ. She even let me try some sweaters on her that looked like they might be too small. My only complaint was that when we were in the girls' dress aisle, she caught sight of the crocodile rocker at the front of the store, and started shouting, "Cock! Juney want cock!" over and over. I just shrugged my shoulders and said, "not now, Juney."

We shopped some more, but the presence of that rocking croc up front kept Juniper's outbursts R-rated to the point where I decided it would be best to check out before the Washtenaw County Sheriff showed up and started asking questions. On our way towards the register, with a shopping cart full of kids' clothes and kid screaming for cock in the seat, I nearly mowed down a total hipster and his hipster girlfriend perusing the mitten selection. "Sorry," I said, but they snarled and looked me up and down, dismissing me as some poor schlub who buys his kid's clothes at the thrift store. I wanted to give them a signal that I was actually there for the cool stuff, that I, too, liked ironic one-armed gospel preacher LPs and macramed beer cozies but who was I kidding? They were right about me. That's exactly who I am now.

My wife spent her teen years in a place called Holland, Michigan, home of the annual "Tulip Time" Festival, a mysterious place called "Windmill Island," the original Russ' Restaurant, and reputably more churches per capita than any other place on earth. The local high school's mascot is the "Dutchmen." When Wood was a cheerleader she wore red underwear under her skirt that said "Dutch" in white letters across her ass. Wood's mother grew up in Holland, one of eight children in one of the few Catholic families in town. Wood and her mother both frequently dealt with blonde, blue-eyed Dutch Christian Reformed people telling them that they were "Catholic, not Christian." This drove them both nuts. When I first started dating Wood, her mom and stepdad would constantly make remarks about the "goddamn Dutch people" in Holland. It brought a secret thrill to me knowing that my mother in law's good little Irish girl was dating one of them. Wood's parents would have been so much happier if she would have just brought home a black guy. But finally I was the bad boy. A genetically-ingrained frugality and loads and loads of fundamentalist guilt may not be quite the same as a leather jacket and a motorcycle, but I worked with them best I could to appear a mildly dangerous Dutchman.

And now my mother in law's granddaughter is part them. Moo-hoo-ha-ha-ha.

In some ways though, I feel my mother in law's annoyance with my people is completely justified. I find repugnant so much of my forebears' fundamentalist Calvinism and intolerance. As I've written before, the Dutch people in western Michigan "left the Netherlands because the government was granting rights to Jews and Catholics and their church had grown too liberal. They are perhaps the only immigrant community in North America who left their native land because the government there had grown too tolerant for them." Sure there are tons of cool people in the Netherlands today, and I can't help but wonder if the country is so awesome because they shipped all their assholes off to Michigan in the last couple centuries.

But the Dutch in southwestern Michigan are not without their redeeming cultural institutions, such as the aforementioned tulip festival and, well, the restaurant with telephones on every table so you can call the kitchen yourself and avoid having to tip the waitress. But above all else, the mecca of Dutchdom in Holland is Dutch Village, a theme park designed to resemble a late-eighteenth-century Dutch town. At Dutch Village you can have a pair of "klompen" (wooden shoes) made for you, you can shop for Delft pottery, or dine at the Hungry Dutchman cafe. I have tried some traditional Dutch breakfast dish called balkenbrij, which turned out to be cow and sheep and pig's livers ground into a hash and fried on the griddle, and the waitress told me everyone she'd seen order it had eaten it with maple syrup. I'm sure it warmed the cockles of my grandfather's ghost's heart to see me eating that. That dude just could never get enough liver.

It does cost $10.00 to get into Dutch Village, but the website has convenient answers to the following frequently asked questions:

What are your admission rates? Do you offer any discounts on admission? What if it rains? Do I have to pay admission if I just want to shop? What is included in the admission price? Am I allowed to bring a picnic lunch?

Apparently these are the type of questions that Dutch people ask. Over and over again.

A little more than a week ago, we visited Holland (Wood's mom still lives there). I ignored the little Dutch boy on my shoulder and forked over that $10.00 without even trying for the AARP discount, so Juniper and I were able to spend an hour or so in Dutch village. Wood went wandering around the nearby outlet mall, but later she snuck into Dutch Village without paying. And I'm the cheap one? Well yes, because when she did it I was so freaking proud of her. I haven't uploaded photos in a week, so I'm just getting to these now:

I like the little Dutch boy on this bathroom sign because he's clearly got to go himself. Either that or he already has, and he has just filled his pants. Remember back when people "Dutch rolled" their pants? That's what's keeping it all in.

It's just like Amsterdam, without the hookers and pot. If Amsterdam was built on ten acres in the middle of a vacant outlet mall's parking lot next to a state highway downwind of a Wal-Mart.

My mom has an identical picture of me as a baby sitting in this same stork's bundle. As far as my parents were concerned, this experience was all I needed to know about how babies were made. It's the most we ever talked about sex.

The best thing about the southwestern Michigan is that there is mid-century Herman Miller molded fiberglass everywhere you look and nobody knows that it's cool. consider this wheelchair. I would practically chew off my own leg to get to ride around in one of those. It's an Eames shell chair on bicycle wheels with a footrest. It's like a Duchamp sculpture you can get pushed around in and you never have to worry about your next door neighbor ordering it from Design Within Reach. When I'm old I am totally moving to Dutch Village.

Since this moment, in all of Juniper's dreams, wherever she goes, she is pulled around in a little cart by a friendly dog. I have no doubt about that.

One of the attractions is the Frisian Farmhouse, which is a historically accurate farmhouse filled with old Dutch crap, like the nineteenth-century Bugaboo above and this Stokke Kinderzeat prototype:

It's like a little baby prison, with a pisspot you can change every four hours or so. Modern Dutch design could learn a thing or two from the past. It's really too bad that only the good folks at Graco are still in touch with the important concept of baby imprisonment.

In the background of this picture, you can see some old ladies dressed up in traditional Dutch costumes. Dutch Village is swarming with these old ladies. There are some younger ones too, and they all have real Dutch accents. In the farmhouse I encountered a young college student from the Netherlands who tried to tell me all about the traditional Dutch wares around him. Judging by his stoic performance, they clearly don't encounter a lot of visitors to Dutch Village who are there solely for the kitsch value. He was so serious with me, staying in character, that I started asking all these questions like, "Did you do something bad in the Netherlands? Is that why you're here?" and "Do the bosses make you sleep here?" That finally cracked his shit up. Then he had to go do this klompen dancing thing that totally made me lose respect for him. You just can't take a guy seriously when he's wearing giant wooden shoes.

Juniper was so pissed that these piles of fake cheese couldn't be toppled over. Believe me, she tried.

One of the best things about Dutch Village is the ability to check out a goat and walk with it throughout the entire park. Unfortunately this goat weighed twice as much as Juniper and had his own singular agenda.

This old pipe organ provides the music for the klompen dancing. Juniper stood there long after the dancing was over, tapping her palm and demanding "more, more more." I almost bought her some size 4 wooden shoes right then, I tell ya.

Here is a sculpture commemorating Pieter, the little boy who stuck his finger in the dike to save the Wal Mart, the Steak'n'Shake, and the Pier One Imports.

Wood braved the crowds of yuppies at the annual Design Within Reach blowout warehouse scratch-n-dent extravaganza in Union City this weekend, and all she got me was this totally awesome shark toy designed by Alexander Calder for a third of its normal price:

Nothing I could write about Calder could justify the reverence I have for his artistic work; growing up I learned quickly to associate his name with those vibrant stabiles that bring so much life to public plazas, particularly La Grande Vitesse in the Grand Rapids, Michigan plaza that bears Calder's name, as well as the giant red Flamingo stabile that sits within Mies van der Rohe's federal plaza in Chicago, and Calder's Bent Propeller that was virtually destroyed in the plaza outside the World Trade Center on 9/11. And then there are his mobiles. The man invented the mobile. That means every nurseling for the last fifty years who has stared up at rotating, bobbing shapes above his crib has Calder to thank for the hours of entertainment. Sartre, in an essay on Calder, wrote that "a mobile is a little private celebration, an object defined by its movement and having no other existence. It is a flower that fades when it ceases to move, a 'pure play of movement' in the sense that we speak of a pure play of light."

Only recently did I learn that Calder began his artistic career by designing toys. In 1927 he designed a series of kinetic toys for the Gould Manufacturing Company of Oshkosh, Wisconsin that in their design bear witness to Calder's mechanical and artistic genius. Most of the toys are pulled by a string, and lurch along in various movements that mimic the movements of the creatures they were designed to represent: a frog, a seal, a skating bear, a kangaroo, a cow, a shark. Calder designed them to be pulled on axles that connected the wheels not at their center but at what are called "eccentric" points. Thus, the frog and the kangaroo hop. The duck bobs like real ducks do. And the shark lurches on its wheels, allowing its tail to shift back and forth like a fish navigating currents. Before embarking on his toymaking career, Calder graduated from the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, with a degree in mechanical engineering. One can't help but speculate that this early application of engineering principles to a few deceptively simple toys ultimately led to his intricately balanced and wonderfully playful mobiles.

But there is a clear transition, and it is wonderful to behold: Calder's experimenting with various toy designs led to the development of a complex miniature circus in his studio. Calder had long been fascinated by the circus, and in his twenties he paid his way through art classes by selling a number of illustrations of the Barnum and Bailey's Circus to the National Police Gazette. In the late 1920s, Calder developed his own one-man circus, with tiny performers made of "cork, wire, wood, yarn, paper, string, and cloth," carefully engineered to walk tightropes, dance, tame lions, lift weights, and engage in gymnastics and acrobatics in and above the ring. Acting as omniscient ringmaster, Calder would manipulate the wire performers while his wife wound circus music on the gramophone in the background. While struggling as a more traditional artist in Paris, Calder began two-hour improvised performances of his Cirque Calder that recreated the performance of an actual circus. The show soon became a popular diversion among the Parisian avant-garde, and Calder began charging an entrance fee to see the big-top circus that could be packed into a suitcase. I like to imagine Calder's rented Montmartre studio on some smoky conglomerated pre-War Parisian night, filled with the likes of Jean Cocteau, Picasso, Joan Miro, James Joyce, Fernand Leger, Le Corbusier, Thomas Wolfe, and Andre Kertesz watching the young American perform his wire circus.

As his reputation among the avant-garde grew, Dutch painter Piet Mondrian invited Calder to his studio, and it was there, in viewing a white wall with cardboard rectangles of varying colors tacked on it, that he was inspired to delve into the abstract. He felt the rectangles could be made "to oscillate in different directions, and at different amplitudes." The visit proved to be the "shock that started things," he said later. Within a few months he was making mobiles.

I was writing with greg from daddytypes last week about the Calder toys and Cirque Calder and he mentioned how much he loved Carlos Vilardebo's 1961 film of Calder performing his circus, and I remembered I had it on DVD somewhere in my collection of bootlegs, so I ripped it, converted it, and uploaded it to youtube in four-minute chunks. The video quality on my version was never great, so it's perfect for youtube. It is a remarkable film, not just for the ingenuity of its subject but for the gravity of seeing one of the true geniuses of the 20th century playing circus just like he did when he was an unknown young man:



That's part one. Here's part two; Part three; and Part four. It's a total of 18 minutes or so. My favorite part is when the lion shits and he covers it with sawdust.

Several Calder toys are still being manufactured and are for sale on the internet, including his elephant and cat puzzles, the kangaroo, the bull push toy, and, of course, the shark Juniper is playing with in the picture above. Those are expensive as hell, display pieces more than toys, really. But they are all the evidence I need that a well-engineered toy doesn't have to have microchips in it to be remarkable.

Six months ago, we didn't have much use for playgrounds; if we came across one with infant swings, I might let Juniper slump and squeal through the air, but there wasn't much else she could do. Nowadays, our life revolves around playgrounds: if we go anywhere in the city, we must make sure there is a playground nearby or there will be hell to pay.

We live near Golden Gate Park, the site of the nation's oldest public playground, built in 1887. When Juniper was four days old, we took her for her first walk in the park and ended up in the playground, watching the toddlers and older kids run around, and I looked at my four-day-old daughter and couldn't imagine how she could ever be old enough to play in any of the awesome vintage 70s equipment that filled the giant playground. Turns out she wouldn't be. Not so long ago, we took her there only to discover it was gone. A rental chain-link fence prevented entry, and through the fence you could see that all of the great old equipment had disappeared. The slides: gone. The swings: gone. The kick-ass hexagonal honeycomb space maze: gone.

I nearly shed a tear that day, knowing that we would no longer be living in San Francisco when the new playground would be completed, but also knowing that they would inevitably replace it with the sterile, formulaic, lawyer/insurance-company-approved plastic playground monstrosities that are ubiquitous on most playgrounds today.

In our informal survey of other San Francisco playgrounds, I have realized that, like dollhouses, playgrounds are almost universally void of good design. If it's not the uninspired, safe plastic structures that are little more than exersaucers on growth hormones, it's a typical clunky 80s wooden jungle gym. I did find an awesome 70sish playground in the Fillmore with this Calder-esque climbing structure and these vertical tubes. It struck me that playgrounds have so much untapped potential for great design. Innovation seems limited to adding things like 4-foot climbing walls and flashy moving parts that inevitably break. Is it possible for a playground to be functional, fun and beautiful?

I just finished reading a long-lost screenplay for Charlie Chaplin's tramp character written by James Agee in the 1940s. The film was never made (by the time Agee had written it, Chaplin felt he was too old to play the tramp) but it could have been. Reading the screenplay, you can't help but think, "damn this would have been an amazing film." This got me thinking about all the great creative acts that, for one reason or another, never came into being. To architects and designers, this must happen all the time, when unrealized projects and plans just can't be brought to reality for any number of reasons.

I did a bit of poking around, and learned that the great sculptor, designer, and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi created a number of unrealized playgrounds. They are an important, but little-considered part of his work, which Noguchi himself acknowledged as "the kernel out of which have grown all my ideas relating sculpture to the earth." Noguchi believed children's playgrounds should be "sculptural landscapes." Only one of his many playground designs was ever actually built in America, the Playscapes playground completed in 1976 at Piedmont Park, in Atlanta, Georgia. I have never been there, but if any readers have seen it or been there I'd love to hear their impressions. From the pictures I have seen, it looks really cool.

The first playground Noguchi was commissioned to design was a "play mountain" in New York City, which was rejected in 1933 by the powerful New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, a dude who apparently hated modern art even more than my dad. For nearly 30 years, Moses thwarted Noguchi's designs for several New York City playgrounds. His model for a swingset with multiple lengths of swing was originally designed for an unrealized Hawaiian playground, but was met with harsh criticism for its potential danger when he proposed it for another New York playground in 1939. The design has since been successfully incorporated into Noguchi playgrounds in Atlanta and Japan.

Conscious of the criticism that his modern geometric sculpture would cause injuries to children, Noguchi's next project was a more contoured, gentle landscape sculpture. Noguchi said it "would be proof against any serious accidents, being made of entirely earth modulations. Exercise was to be derived automatically in running up and down the curved surfaces. There were various areas of interest, for hiding, for sliding, for games." This playground was killed by NYC officials in 1941. Noguchi's next Manhattan project was a playground at the United Nations headquarters for the delegates' children. Noguchi took the project in 1952 because he thought Moses would not have jurisdiction to kill a project at the U.N. But Noguchi underestimated Moses, who called its design a "hillside rabbit warren" and made sure the playground would never get built by refusing to allow the city to erect a necessary protective fence on the East River-side of the playground. Noguchi described it as "A jungle gym transformed into an enormous basket that encourages the most complex ascents and all but obviates falls. In other words, the playground, instead of telling the child what to do (swing here, climb there) becomes a place for endless exploration, of endless opportunity for changing play. And it is a thing of beauty as the modern artist has found beauty in the modern world."

In 1961, Noguchi had a final opportunity to design a playground in New York City, this time for Riverside Park in collaboration with the architect Louis I. Kahn. After a long, drawn-out process of objections and re-designs, Noguchi's resolve and faith in his design and philosophy of playgrounds as "sculptural landscapes" was deepened. He said, "I later came to feel that children should not be restricted to fenced-in concrete play areas, and that some parks or parts of some parks, should become 'play gardens.'" But like the others, the Riverside Park project was killed by the bureaucrats.

Several Noguchi playgrounds have been built in Japan (one in Sapporo, and one at the Kodomo no Kuni in Yokohama), and they show how Noguchi's sensibilities for landscape and play developed through the course of his frustrating New York experiences to create something truly wonderful. The play mountain and playground at Moerenuma Park, in particular, built on a reclaimed landfill, are really a complete testament to his full vision. These pictures show how wonderful playgrounds could be if we listened to rather than frustrate visionaries like Noguchi, who actually saw playgrounds as projects worthy of great design: