The United States has made great strides in matters of race and society, but some lingering problems remain. Take for instance, a father who was recently accused of kidnapping because his daughters are biracial.

Virginia dad Joseph was recently in a local Walmart with his three daughters. The trip went without a hitch – he cashed a paycheck, then buckled the three girls – a 4 year old and two 2 year old twins – into their car seats. Joseph then took a moment to make a phone call before returning home. But you know since this is Walmart in Virginia (and because you read the title), this story’s not going to end well.

He arrived home to find a Prince William County police officer there as well. Joseph and his wife Keana were told that Walmart security had called the police to make sure that Joseph’s kids…were his. The police officer had to check identification and asked the 4 year old daughter to identify her mother and father.

The police officer mentioned that the Walmart security guard saw Joseph in the parking lot with the girls and was suspicious. Later, Keana would call the Walmart and the security guard claimed it was a customer that was worried about the obvious race discrepancy going on. So obvious and so discrepant that when Keana asked why a red flag was raised over this, the security guard said that the whistle-blowing customer thought that Joseph and the daughters “didn’t fit”. When Keana asked “What do you mean by they don’t fit,” the guard reportedly said “Well, they just don’t match up.”

WHAT?!

Look: if you’re uncomfortable with white people and black people together, it’s time for you to take an online sensitivity course or something. There’s no amount of sticking your head in the sand that makes it okay to call in a possible kidnapping based solely on the fact that there’s a grown white man with non-white kids. Were the daughters screaming as Joseph was putting them in their car seats? The twin daughters are 2 years old – they do that. But it’s not mentioned in the story, and it’d still be a reach, but at least the security guard could say “look, this sounds stupid, but a customer said it looked like a grown man was struggling and forcing a kid into his car.” There’s no sentiment of that here. All I see is a “so a white guy’s walking with three kids and there’s no sign of anything afoul except that – you kn0w, they don’t match up.”

What truly doesn’t match up is that it’s 2013 and someone just accused a dad of kidnapping because his daughters’ skin color is different than his. My son’s skin color is nearly identical to mine and I’ve had shopping visits where it looks like I’m kidnapping him because he’s melted down halfway through a grocery trip and I’ve had to leave a cart of groceries in a store aisle, carry him outside as he cries and put him into our car and drive off. No one’s called the police on me because, I can imagine, everyone looks at me and thinks “thank god…that dad needs to get his screaming kid under control.” It’s terrifying to think that in this same nation, a father merely walking with his daughters can get a visit from the police if his skin color doesn’t “match” that of his daughters.

Maybe this is just one bad person “spoiling the bunch”. Maybe this story highlights one of the few narrow-minded people out there. But sadly, we’ve seen this before. Last year, a Texas grandfather was cuffed and detained while walking home with his black granddaughter. I hope it’s much longer than a year before we read another story like this, but I suspect it won’t be.

Walmart’s “looking into it.” Blah blah blah.

UPI‘s got a story up (spoiler alert: you don’t need to go there, I’m about to explain it here) about a Canadian school that’s done-away with Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.

The school - Astral Drive Elementary School in Nova Scotia – instead holds “Family Day” on May 15 to include non-traditional families.

Some of the non-traditional families include those with same-sex parents, single-parent homes and children who have lost their parents. This year on Family Day, students wrote the names of all of the people that support them on a tree in the school’s gymnasium.

The landscape of motherhood and fatherhood has been changing and evolving. So too should Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. While tradition is fun, and honoring parents for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day has been a mainstay in schools, it’s not a requirement. Astral Drive Elementary School found a way to not only honor mothers and fathers, but also those families who don’t have the same architecture as what we’d regard as “the traditional family.”

As more gay parents adopt, they wonder how they’ll be able to explain to their children Mother’s Day when there’s no mother, or Father’s Day when there’s no dad in the household. Something like Family Day is scary for traditionalists who might get wistful for the days of kids making dad a hardly-coffee-safe clay mug or mom a bouquet of tissue-paper flowers in class. But as our audience changes, the show must as well.

Recently, a dad blogger had posted a plea for advice about Mother’s Day. He and his partner felt uncomfortable sending their daughter to school the day of a Mother’s Day event where moms would be accompanying their kids. The blogger (whose name I’m withholding since this wasn’t discussed publicly) was afraid his daughter would feel left out, adding that she “is still too young to understand her unique situation.” A day like Family Day is a great solution.

Another father suggested a Lifetime article by Jerry Mahoney called ”Celebrating Mother’s Day, Minus the Mom“. This can also be applied to Father’s Day. Suggestions include giving each parent their own day, giving both parents both days and
celebrating the concept – where you still honor moms in-general on Mother’s Day.

With Father’s Day coming up, kids across the country (and world where it applies for their Father’s Days) are looking forward to honoring their dads with oddly-relevant gifts and mostly-not-forced sentiments in cards. But a portion of kids out there won’t have a father in the household – for many reasons. Maybe dad died in the line of duty. Maybe the child has two mothers. In the United States, 24 million children live without their biological father in the household (according to the National Fatherhood Initiative, via the Census Bureau). That’s a large number of kids who may not know exactly what to do on Father’s Day. And there might be a parent in the household reaching for a solution.

Thanks to this little school in Nova Scotia, we might have one. And bottom line: this is just one school’s initiative. UPI reports some parents being bent out of shape about it. Families can still celebrate whatever they’d like at home – but in school, this seems like a great idea.

We don’t often talk about kid’s books here since we don’t want to have to talk about all of them. But when we do, it’s something wonderful to us.

Ahmet Zappa’s Because I’m Your Dad is so simple that it’s that kind of wonderful. A kid’s book about a dad, written by a dad? We’re sold.

Because I’m Your Dad is a love song from father to son. “Because I’m your dad…you’re gonna get tickled,” the first sentence declares. And at that, the book already won me over. So many dads these days are trying to shed the old, tired image of the detached and overworked father who only has time to play catch. Modern dads want the world to know that they enjoy tickling and hugging their kids just as much as moms. Just the simple fact that Zappa’s book opens with the declaration that he’s going to tickle his kid – it hits a dad right in the feels.

The story goes on. Across other pages, there’s other declarations of love; “…you might have an unusual name,” “…I will miss you so much when I’m away,” “…you can sometimes stay up late with me to watch TV.” Skipping around, you get the picture that this is the modern dad: loving, involved, missing his children when he’s away, and having fun with them when he’s there.

Ahmet Zappa, son of musician Frank Zappa, is no newbie to writing. Among his other work, he wrote a young adult book in 2006 called The Monstrous Memoirs of a Mighty McFearless, and also wrote the story for the 2012 Disney movie The Odd Life of Timothy Green. He’s also reportedly (as of 2006) working on a movie adaptation of Fraggle Rock.

I’d be remiss to not mention Dan Santat’s illustrations. Santat, the creator of Disney cartoon The Replacements, created a wonderful world around Zappa’s voice.

The monsters, who play the story’s father and son, have a Where the Wild Things Are vibe – but are more colorful. The illustrations are big – and really bring the story to life. Each page only has one or two lines on it, so 90% of the page is Santat’s illustration. Whether it’s the little monster behind a drum set or the dad telling a funny bedtime story, these illustrations are perfect to help your child stay focused while you read. In fact, you might have to linger on each page long after the line’s done because your child will want to look at the pictures. And you might too!

We were able to use our 8BitDad forensics lab to dismantle the book and take a high-quality, detailed photo of what a typical two-page spread in the book looks like:

Copyright 2013, 8BitDad Forensics Photo Lab. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

As a testament to how much my own son liked Because I’m Your Dad, he made me read it twice in a row the day we received it. I remember thinking “well, maybe he’s too old for this one now,” but it’s a quick read and obviously my son loved it. The publisher gives a suggested age range of 1-5 years, if you’re a numbers kind of guy.

Here’s a little trailer for the book, which admittedly won’t tell you much:

That trailer may not clear things up for you, but here’s what you need to know: Because I’m Your Dad is a sweet story and a quick read, and a perfect bedtime story for dads (or moms) to read to their little ones.

With one hand, my son is smacking the kid next to him on the top of the head, and with the other hand, he’s forking salad off of my wife’s plate.

Before I can say “stop” for the sixty-third time today, I look over at the boy’s father and he gives me the universal sign for “don’t worry about it,” and says “he eats salad, that’s great!”

The other mother is talking to my wife. Other Mom says “you guys are lucky. If it’s anything healthy, Joey won’t eat it.”

Other Dad mouths “watch this” and turns to Joey. “I’ll give you a dollar if you eat that watermelon.”

My son is eating their other son’s watermelon right from under his nose. Joey’s negotiating fractions of a slice to cents on the dollar.

I don’t know how we went four years without having to sit at a family table at an event. I suppose we’d just left our son home with a babysitter for the weddings, baptisms and other shirt-and-tie stuff we’d been to since he was born. This Saturday event, a baptism brunch at a country club, was the first time we had an assigned table and had our son with us. Even at my sister-in-law’s wedding, there was a kid’s only table in another room. So this was new to us.

I used to dread having to sit at a family table. Before you have kids, sitting at a family table at an event is the equivalent of sitting at the kid’s table as a teenager at Thanksgiving dinner.

And on the way to this baptism, my wife and I thought that we would end up stuck opposite an older couple with inexplicably young and perfectly angelic kids. We thought we’d end up apologizing for our son over and over, after he pulled the tablecloth off the table and stomped on dishes until they were piles of porcelain sand. We imagined having to flee from the room with a semi-nude child screaming that he’s the Hulk and covered in food, while other families shook their heads.

But, it seemed, our first time at a family table was actually going to be alright. As we sat down, we noticed our son was dressed in exactly the same outfit as one of our tablemates’ children.

We smalltalked through the parts about how we knew so-and-so, as someone in the background gave a speech about blah blah blah. Then, we got our parenting on:

“So what time do they go to bed?”

“Did you know that you limit the volume on your iPhone so they can’t change it?”

“Have their allergies been bad lately?”

“Did you get those pants at Old Navy?”

Parenting stuff.

Other Dad and I walked outside and watched our kids play for awhile and talked about guy stuff. My wife and Other Mom sat at the table inside and talked mom stuff.

At one point, a barefoot toddler ambled past us. the four of us looked down and mentioned that we didn’t know who her parents were or what it was she always seemed to be eating when she’d pass by. In my best baritone, I sang “and then I don’t feeeeeeeel so baaaaad.”

I’m no longer scared to be sat at a family table. Sometimes I forget that all parents share this kinship of being somewhere between absolute control and begging for mercy. We all fear that our kids will end up setting something on fire, and when they don’t, we give silent nods of congratulations.

At the end of the day, it wasn’t like we solved some great parenting mystery. We didn’t even become besties, or friend each other on Facebook. But we had a successful day sitting with (and at many times without) kids at a table at an event. And as a father, I appreciate the simple successes; I didn’t need my son to sing “Tiny Bubbles” to a room full of old, Greek people. I just needed him to not go nuclear and create a path of destruction.

Mission accomplished.

Child-humor cartographers and heads behind How To Be A Dad, Andy Herald and Charlie Capen, made co-sleeping official with their book The Guide to Baby Sleep Positions: Survival Tips for Co-Sleeping Parents. In it, we get 30 diagrams of possible nighttime positions you’ll find your baby in.

If you’re not already familiar with How To Be a Dad, just head on over there and check it out. It’s okay, we’ll wait.

The Guide to Baby Sleep Positions is a humorous look at what co-sleeping parents go through night-after-night, based on the success of the past Baby Sleep Positions posts on How To Be A Dad. Have you ever awoken and caught your baby making snow angels in your bed? Awoken to see him sitting next to you, watching you sleep? The terrifying and chaotic moments of co-sleeping are commemorated in this book in diagrammed-graphics, accompanied by humorous summaries, side effects and tips for coping:

Live by the guide or die by the guide.

Bottom line: this is a funny little book and great as an affordable gift for new or expecting parents. It’s a book that anyone that anyone with kids will get a chuckle from, but most relevant with the younger, new parent crowd.

When we last checked in with dad blogger Mike Adamick, he was making a crab cam with his daughter. That wasn’t the only trick up Adamick’s sleeve, and the proof is his new book, Dad’s Book of Awesome Projects: From Stilts and Superhero Capes to Tinker Boxes and Seesaws, 25+ Fun Do-It-Yourself Projects for Families.

Try to say that three times fast. Preferably while making your child a duct tape crayon wallet.

You might know Adamick from a variety of places. His work has appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, The New York Observer, The Los Angeles Times and KQED radio. Or not. It happens.

What you’ll need to make a Hidden Book Stash

But thank the stars Adamick parked his content into a book. And a seriously cool one at that. Dad’s Book of Awesome Projects has DIY stuff for dads of any handiness level. And some of the projects actually include multiple ways to do them – for example, while making the Superhero Cape, readers get the choice of a making one from fabric and making one from an old t-shirt.

Each project consists of a quick blog-type intro, a “here’s what you need” section and a numbered “here’s what you do” section. Sometimes there are also “dad tips” that might give you an alternate way to do a step – or just offer you a kind warning.

There’s some – dare I say – awesome projects in the book. Simple stuff like the superhero cape or homemade goo slime, intermediate stuff like making a bow and arrow, and difficult stuff like a backyard swing set. No, seriously – Adamick tells you, in simple steps, how to make a swing in your backyard. If that makes you feel timid, you can also just follow the instructions for his rope swing instead.

The best thing about Dad’s Book of Awesome Projects is that no matter your handiness level, no matter whether you’re more at-home in a workshop, garden, art studio or a kitchen, there’s something for everyone – and even the difficult projects are presented in a way that isn’t terribly daunting. Though I generally don’t know my way around a toolbox, I saw a couple of projects I felt comfortable taking on. And what’s even better is that many of the projects are inexpensive as well! We’d all love to be the guy that made his kid a roller coaster in his backyard, but most of us only have enough scratch for a drink coaster.

More context on how to make the Hidden Book Stash

And let’s talk about how important it is for kids to make things. Creativity is so important for kids and having cool projects in Adamick’s book – many of which request some form of recycling and repurposing – is a great way to get kids thinking about the origins of the products and stuff they see and use on a daily basis. And, if nothing else, Adamick can teach you the proper way to melt old, broken crayons into one big one (in a cool shape), so the book’s worth the cover price just in that lesson alone.

Crafty dad? Artsy dad? Not so much? Know a dad who’s looking for more DIY projects to do with his kids? This book’s perfect for them. With everything from indoor terrariums to outdoor seesaws, Dad’s Book of Awesome Projects doesn’t disappoint.

Pick it up wherever it is you buy books today!

In our series Old Games for New Kids, we suggest a great past-generation game to play with your new-generation children.

Katamari Damacy (2003)
by Namco – PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, Vita, Xbox 360

(Okay, I realize this series is about “old” games and I’m talking about a series that’s available on all of the current systems. But since this franchise reaches back to the PlayStation 2, it’s fair to say that you’d be “old school” enough to yank the ol’ PS2 out of your closet and set it up in your kid’s room.)

If you yourself have never played the Katamari Damacy series, you’re missing out on a real treat. In every game in the series, you play the Prince, whose father is the King of All Cosmos – a foppishly dressed dude in charge of making stars. So, he has you, a little green prince, roll a ball around, picking stuff up (which you use to make stars…don’t ask). Literally, that’s the whole game! But whereas you start in small areas like a bedroom, picking up paperclips and candy, you later find yourself outside, rolling up whole buildings and oil tankers. As your ball gets bigger in a given level, you’re able to access more areas. The bigger your ball of stuff when the timer hits zero, the more pleased your dad-king is. And if you roll up hidden items in the level, you get extra royal rainbows!

Check out an old IGN trailer for it:

This is a great game for kids: it’s colorful, it’s wacky, and there isn’t a lick of violence. Also, the incredible soundtracks were a mainstay in our son’s nursery for play times, which we think is why he’s so odd. What kid wouldn’t love to play a game where they get to roll up everything from pencils to chairs to cats to cars to airplanes? The simple two-stick controls might be harder for little ones to perfect, but that’s what makes Katamari Damacy fun; when they’re younger, you can have them control the movement stick while you control the directional stick. That way your kid is moving the ball, but you’re steering. As they get older, they’ll enjoy the open-worldness of it, and being able to pick up every day items in this colorful setting.

Now, there is, in fact, a Katamari Damacy game on Sony’s Vita handheld that was released in 2012. But if you’re a little justifiably nervous about handing your Vita over to your kid, the series has also seen releases on the PlayStation 2, 3, PSP and Xbox 360, which really, all have the same core gameplay, with small tweaks in each release. Katamari Damacy games are a great time for any age player, but for kids especially: they’ve got a lot of character and are easy to progress through using a simple skill set. If you’ve got an old PlayStation 2 collecting dust in your closet, it might be time to consider hooking it back up for your kid, though if you’ve already got a 360 hooked up, Beautiful Katamari should be priced just right at your local used game store.

United Kingdom dadvocacy group Fathers 4 Justice invite you to dress like Batman between now and Father’s Day – June 16.

Every week between now and Father’s Day, Fathers 4 Justice will be giving away t-shirts to the best photos of people dressed like Batman and submitted to the F4J website. It’s part of their Dress 4 Justice program supporting fathers across the United Kingdom.

All of this is in honor of Frank Peacock, a UK dad who is, as F4J explains, you’re joining in spirit “as he battles to see his son against the injustice of the secret family courts.” Peacock is committing to dressing as Batman night and day until Father’s Day.

Fathers 4 Justice is a United Kingdom-based advocacy group whose aim is to fight for father’s rights and ensure that children will get to have relationships with their fathers. They often protest in superhero costumes to signify that fathers are heroes to their children.

F4J will be posting the best submitted photos on their website (linked below), and you can submit your own there as well!