We’ve all heard about the importance of reading to our children as soon as they claw their way out of our wives’ vaginas. When you’ve got a small baby, any old video game magazine will do – babies just need to hear phonetic sounds and hopefully see a couple of colorful pictures. Later on, though, toddlers need something interesting to keep them involved. Anna Dewdney’s Llama Llama Red Pajama is a sing-songy rhyme about a llama with maternal separation anxiety. Your toddler will love it, and you’ll love teaching your children about mommy’s midlife crisis. You and your child will bond in fear of awakening mommy’s inner beast.

WARNING: It’s 3:44am and 8BitDad is in full-on editorial mode. And so…

Scratch one off 8BitDad’s source lists: Huffington Post. Not officially, but the magic 8-bit-ball says that all signs point to yes. This isn’t breaking news, but AOL, Inc. got bored one crisp February morning and acquired The Huffington Post. The rest of the internet more or less decided the sky is falling, and maybe it is. Maybe it’s not. But one thing’s for sure: ever since the announcement on February 7th, HuffPo’s fatherhood tag has gone to hell.

We’d been referencing Huffington Post articles found in the above-linked fatherhood tag, but ever since AOL’s announcement, look at the titles we’ve had to work with: February 9th’s “Five Simple Sex Tips for Parents,” and February 25th’s “Get the Mother!”

In Charlie Carillo’s defense, he does spend three lines (depending on your font size) talking about fatherhood in his article. But from title to target, the story is about a humorous side-effect of motherhood. In the three-line shout-out, Carillo mentions that dads are usually painted in the news “stereotyped as befuddled, irresponsible louts who vanish either physically or emotionally soon after the children are born, leaving the mothers to thank or blame for everything.” Forget thanks, we can’t even get the blame for things anymore! Sheesh.

Let me be the first to welcome The Huffington Post to the rest of the internet’s party…and here’s to a long future of motherhood stories tagged “fatherhood.”

Cheers!

A father and daughter met up after an 11-year hiatus – and somehow, Twitter helped make the connection.

Out of all of the world’s tweets, 58 year old Daniel Morales, the awesomely-named @putodanny, posted one from a prepaid phone – asking if anyone had seen his daughter, Sarah Rivera. Someone got a hold of the 27 year old Rivera through Facebook, yadda yadda yadda, and bang – reunion.

Rewind. Morales had last seen Rivera in 2000, just before she went to go live with her mother. Morales moved to Puerto Rico. Sometime later, Morales ends up on the streets of New York, and in a program called Underheard in New York. “Underheard” says that they’re “fighting homelessness 140 characters at a time,” and have given four men (of which Morales is one) a prepaid cellphone with a month of unlimited texts. They’ve also set the four men up with a Twitter account.

Fast forward to last Friday, Morales and Rivera have a tearful reunion. Morales even met his grandchildren for the first time. Rivera and Morales are overjoyed, and somehow, Twitter helped make it happen.

Well, and a lot of good people too, I guess.

Sauce: CBSNews.com

Any dads out there ever go strolling through the toy store with the kids and COMPLETELY MISS the LEGO aisle? When I was a tyke, the LEGO aisle was the first place I wanted to visit when it came time to blow my allowance on cheap plastic garbage from China.

I recognized a few years ago that I started passing by the LEGO aisle, losing interest in the highly-detailed model sets that seemed less like LEGO and more like snap-together models of Toy Story figures. I’m not sure when LEGO began making a brand-new specialized piece for every tiny detail of the sets (instead of the old interchangeable blocks) but I’m pretty sure it coincided with the success of the LEGO video games. I guess once they showed kids that their LEGO people figures had smiling teeth instead of passive grins, and could bend their arms to crack a whip, the simple brick-and-block models had to go. Bummer.

That’s why I was so jazzed to find the fresh line of Creator model sets by LEGO. Finally, LEGO sets that look like LEGOs!

Your kid feeling tense? Hard day in the sandbox got him down? How about introducing your child to the ol’ magic fingers? Desmond Williams, of green-parenting site Inhabitots, talks about massaging your kids, and how it may (or may not) work for your family.

An occasional massage might just get your kid to wind-down and go to sleep. Or, you might use it as a Sunday-afternoon relaxation technique. Williams discusses massaging with a family acupuncturist, and suggests a couple of ways to incorporate a loving touch while your kids are young. Also today, Tom Matlack of our often-referenced buddies Good Men Project Magazine, talked about some of the more subtle importances of physical touch with your children. It seems undeniable – the more you touch your children (in a positive way – no hitting, jerk-ass), the better they turn out.

And just think, a massage was probably how you got your baby’s momma to the point of conception anyway – so I’m sure you’ve got your technique down already. You might want, however, to modify your routine to be on *this side* of the acceptability meter when dealing with your kids. Definitely skip the sensual oils and Marvin Gaye album.

All jokes aside, physical touch is important with children – even when they grow out of the infant phase. So, light a scented candle and read Williams’ suggestions.

Sauce: Inhabitots

With moms of Oscar contenders being encouraged hired to tweet about the show, Variety writer Timothy Gray suggests we pay dads a bit of attention. “It’s appropriate because 2010 was filled with meditations on life with father — or without him,” says Gray. He mentions that many of the 2010 “best picture” nominees deal with father issues, including “The Kids Are Alright,” “Winter’s Bone,” “True Grit,” as well as the mind-melding “Inception.”

Gray discusses the possibilities of why cinema examined fathers in 2010, suggesting that maybe the directors, who grew up in a Darth Vader “Luke, I am your father” (oops, sorry about that spoiler) generation, now are fleshing out the issue themselves. Is it a re-evaluation of the role of fatherhood? Is it an answer to other gender politics? Are we looking for a father figure in an economically-and-politically-lost time? Has it been going on and we’ve been missing it? Who knows.

Gray mentions, among many others, more 2010 movies from other categories that deal with father issues, such as: “Iron Man 2,” “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” “Shutter Island,” and “Tron: Legacy.”

Was 2010 the year of the dad in cinema? Or was it just when we, the viewers realized that fathers played such a big part in movie plots?