Media Macaroni

At Olive’s zombie-loving peak, in the days of spending all screen time on Plants vs. Zombies, she started making some awesome PvZ fan art.

Sure, it’s paved the way for other games, like the current fav Doodle Jump, but Olive still enjoys her zombies. I knew I wanted to get her something zombie-related for Christmas, and ThinkGeek delivered with this adorable Dismember-Me Plush Zombie. That’s right, I said adorable. See?

His little arms and legs come off and can be mixed and matched, and there’s sweet little rickrack for his entrails when you rip his body apart. Adorable!

Olive is also getting Groovy Girls bed from her grandparents for Christmas, which is going to be just the right size to tuck in her zombie. Sweet dreams, little undead man. Merry Christmas!

If you’re like me, you enter a store, any store, at this time of year and you leave with the Carpenter’s “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” stuck in your head. And there it stays for days. Here are some tunes to cure this Carpenteritis.

Ben Rudnick & Friends’ It’s Santa Claus puts a little twang in holiday classics like “Let It Snow” and “Rocking’ Around the Christmas Tree” with a totally kid-friendly vibe. It’s music that’s different enough from the radio versions you’re hearing over and over again, with accordion and mandolin thrown in for good measure, yet you and your kids can still sing along. You can grab it off iTunes for less than 8 bucks.

For some holiday fun for the adults, there’s the awesome Glee-worthy mash-ups of Santastic V: Snow, Man! How about a cross of the Jackson 5 and Cee Lo Green? Or better yet, inject some Cyprus Hill into Winter Wonderland? If the song name “Rudolph (You Don’t Have to Put On The Red Light)” makes you laugh, this album is for you. I say this is for adults because that’s who is going to find the humor in the mash-ups, but it’s clean enough to have on for the kids.

UPDATE: WHOOPS! I didn’t realize that the Cee Lo/Jackson appearance makes another appearance, the not-at-all-kid-friendly mashup. Grab the remote and stop it until after the kiddies are in bed!

Here are two great books that celebrate the smarts of girls.

My Name Is Not Isabella by Jennifer Fosberry, illustrated by Mike Litwin

In this book, little Isabella shakes off her own identity to pretend she is one of the great women of history.

“My name is not Isabella!” said the little girl.

“Then who has been sleeping in my daughter’s bed?” asked the mother.

“I am SALLY, the greatest, toughest astronaut who ever was!”

The illustrations show Isabella as she imagines herself to be Sally Ride, Annie Oakley, Rosa Parks, Marie Curie, and Elizabeth Blackwell. The back of the book fills in the details on the accomplishments of these great women. (Review copy provided.)

Oh No! (Or How My Science Project Destroyed the World) by Mac Barnett, illustrated by Dan Santat

I knew that I would love this book from the moment I first laid eyes on the cover. Don’t you love it already? Reading it doesn’t disappoint. The book features a girl supergenius, doing so well at the science fair until the robot she built went on a rampage and started destroying the city. She reflected that maybe she shouldn’t have given it that superclaw, or a laser eye, or the power to control dogs’ minds. She lamented that she didn’t program it to feel pain. She could have, you know, as her genius is obvious from the robot’s capabilities. The book is chocked-full of awesome adventure, made even more awesome with Dan Santat’s epic illustrations. (Copy provided by Olive’s grandparents who bought it for her for Christmas - thank you! I should probably disclose my kidlit crush on Mac Barnett, though.)

We’ve reached a major milestone in our house. Yes, Olive lost her first tooth. Yes, the baby started crawling. But more important than either of those two things is this: Olive can now genuinely beat me at a game. Not just beat me, but score, say, ten times my average score. The game? Doodle Jump.

It should be so simple really. All you have to do is tilt the iPad/iPhone making sure the little doodle guy lands on a platform as he jumps higher and higher into the sky. It helps to get little boosts like springs, jet packs, and propeller beanies (or variations on these things depending on which themed skin you play, like the Christmas one above). If you can get high enough to reach those things, which I often can’t. And there’s monsters that you can shoot at or jump on. I know this from watching Olive do it. If I ever reach a monster I do all I can to get around it without incident.

She’s a little show-off about it, too. She’ll look around while she’s playing, and even play one handed. I don’t know how this has happened, but I am a proud mama.

If you’ve reached this milestone, tell me what was the game, and how badly were you humiliated?

UPDATE: The Christmasy scene pictured is part of the regular Doodle Jump game, but today we discovered the Doodle Jump Christmas Special! Of course I dropped $0.99 to buy it for the girl.

We love Taro Gomi. Of course, there’s Everyone Poops. But we also love his board books, like My Friends and Bus Stops. I remember first seeing Taro Gomi’s activity books when shopping at Barnes and Noble one day and buying one as an impulse buy. A near $20 coloring book is quite an impulse buy for a (then) 3-year-old, but it’s just that cool.

So of course I responded with glee when Chronicle sent me his latest, Play All Day. I’d say this is a great Christmas present, but it’s actually a great one to pick up before Christmas. Play All Day is chocked full of punch-out fun, including finger puppets, games, zoo animals and a cool pop-up city.

But ’tis the season for giving, and Play All Day has punch out treasure boxes, great for housing other homemade gifts, picture frames. and ornaments. It tickles me to see the ornaments that Olive made hanging from our tree.

Right now Amazon has it for less than 14 bucks, which I think is a steal for this awesome activity book.

Touch screen devices are perfectly suited for the youngest users if they’re given the right apps. Here are three worthy of your little one’s little fingers.

Splish Splash Inn ($0.99)

Enter the Splish Splash Inn where animals are waiting to be counted behind every door. When I first played this game I dismissed it as a simple, cute counting app. The real fun begins, I realized, when you start touching the animals. Some play notes (I can play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the starfish), some have percussion sounds, and others, like the electric eels, just have super fun animations.

My Very First App ($0.99, plus additional in-app purchases)

Fans of Eric Carle rejoice! Even a simple memory game is given a boost with Eric Carle’s beautiful illustrations. I actually like this game the best on the easy level, where you slide the top and bottom panels to match the color with the object. The only drawback is that any additional card sets (shapes, animals) will cost you an extra $0.99 via in-app purchases. I’m not a big fan of in-app purchases in kids’ apps, especially after reading about The Smurfs! Just make the thing cost 3 bucks and be done with it.

Tickle Tap Toddler Pack 2 ($3.99)

To this day, Tickle Tap App’s Sound Shaker remains my favorite app for little kids, so when Tickle Tap comes out with new games, they’re worth a look. This pack comes with five games, and some are better than the others. Boogie Bopper is more directed derivative of Sound Shaker, where you can tap on dots to play a song. Find Fins is a simple hide-and-seek game, and Word Wiggler matches letters to pictures. All of these are fine, but the two I’m most interested in are Bug Builder and Color Collector.

With Bug Builder, you choose a shape and then color it. Then you tap the screen and watch your shape transform into a funny little bug. Since Olive discovered this app, my photo gallery has filled up with pictures of all different kinds of bugs.

I think Tickle Tap overreached with Color Collector, but it’s a fabulous concept that I keep thinking about. Using the phone’s camera, you center a colored object in the center of the circle to “collect” that color. When I first played this I expected this to build up a photo library as well, however they went with more sophisticated technology. The app attempts to recognize the color of the object you’ve taken a picture of. This would be amazingly cool if it worked well, but when dealing with little hands and less than optimal lighting conditions, the app either can’t assess the color or identifies the wrong color (it told me my orange chair is read). Even with these problems, it’s still so cool. For slightly older kids, the challenge of the collecting could be made into part of the fun.

Tickle Tap continues to push the boundaries of what these apps can do in a kids’ universe, which makes this app worth checking out.

I was provided review copies of all apps.

While downloading some apps last night I happened on a wonderful holiday surprise, the Angry Birds Seasons app!

There are 25 levels, each unlocked on the corresponding day of December, making it the best advent calendar ever. And if you’re reading this and downloading it late, you get all the levels for those missed days right away. As a bonus, all of the Halloween levels are in there, too.

I am also excited for Angry Birds plush toys (the pigs are awesome), but they unfortunately won’t ship until January. Bah Humbug!

‘Tis the season to be angry!

Previously: Little Birds, Why So Angry?

Yesterday at the holiday pop-up Wired store (in the old Tower Records space), Ken Denmead of GeekDad fame was hosting a GeekDad family event to highlight some of the fun projects in his book Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share.

Olive had a ball. There was pirate cartography, where she used brown paper, stick-on jewels, and glitter to make her own pirate map (geek dads know the way to a geek girl’s heart). There was also a great demolition derby with Lego plates hot-glued to RC cars. Kids build up the sides of the car with Legos and put them in an arena formed with pool noodles duct-taped to the floor in a big circle. Whoever could knock the most Legos off her opponent’s car was the winner.

Olive enjoyed making her own comic. In this book, this project is designed to give kids a way to make slick photographic comic panels. It involves building a lightbox, altering Lego minifigs, and some pretty cool software.

The software is called Comic Life (Plasq, $24.95-$29.95), and it has numerous comic page templates with a varying numbers of panels. You can drag digital photos into the panels and add text boxes and talk bubbles. At 5, Olive needed some help with it, but this is something that older kids could do on their own.

Of course, the whole point of the book is that these projects are great for dads (and moms) and kids to share. The projects are lots of fun, and the book is highly recommended!

I’m pretty excited to see that Phineas and Ferb have a talk show now. Sure it’s only two minutes long, but it’s a good two minutes. They’ve interviewed Seth Rogan, Andy Samberg, but the best so far is Jack Black, especially when the three start rocking out.

I love that Jack Black is wearing the same shirt he wore on Yo Gabba Gabba. Every celebrity should have a kids-show-appearance wardrobe designation.

(via GeekDad)

I’m am so please to have Media Macaroni as a stop on the virtual book tour for J. Otto Seibold’s Other Goose: Re-Nurseried!! and Re-Rhymed!! Childrens Classics. I drooled over this book at Book Expo, and the day the review copy arrived was like Christmas had come early.

I’ve been a fan of J. Otto Seibold, creator of Olive, the Other Reindeer, long before I had an Olive of my own, and of course Olive, My Love is on my list of all-time favorite picture books. He is the perfect person to re-nursery the rhymes of Mother Goose, that, in the words of this so-called Other Goose, “have grown quite dusty over time. I mean what good is a pocket full of rye anymore, I ask you?”

The book is oversized and luscious. I could spend a day talking about the hilariously weird animations as I get lost in all of the wonderful details like a pickle soaking in a fountain, the horse liveblogging Jack B. Nimble’s jump over a candlestick, and a happy sponge on Mother Hubbard’s counter.

The rhymes are good fun, too. My favorite is a take on Jack Sprat, a nursery rhyme I’ve never liked. J. Otto Seibold re-imagines it as a cool art couple, The Splats:

Jack Splat paints abstract.

His wife paints country scenes.

Together they fill the canvas up

and live the life serene.

Love it. That Mrs. Splat has an anchor tattoo is just icing on the cake.

Like other meta-work, true enjoyment of Other Goose comes from being well-versed in the nursery rhymes being parodied. If your child doesn’t know nursery rhymes that well, you might pair this book with another oversized rendition of nursery rhymes - My Very First Mother Goose, classically presented by Iona Opie, illustrated by Rosemary Wells. Stylistically, the two books couldn’t be more different, but both belong on your shelf.