Spinning Plates: Toddler Prepper Edition
Vol 1, Issue 2
It’s been months since our last issue of Spinning Plates! The long lag was a piece of subtle meta-commentary on the unpredictability of new parenting.
Jk, we were busy.
Sheila continues to dominate as a full-time CEO and mom. She’s setting the kind of work-life boundaries that bosses gesture about in workshops, right before sending you an email at 2AM like, “Just slack message me when you read this, I’m trying to see something.”
Meanwhile, Justin finished a whole-ass book while dadding, which you can (and should!) pre-order right now. It’s called Change Agents: Transforming Schools From the Ground Up, and it comes out in late October. At least one former United States Secretary of Education calls it a, “a must-read for any school or district that wants to become an even more vibrant place to teach and learn.” Seriously.
While we toiled at these other distracting things, we fretted about skimping on newsletter content. Sure, you may have seen Azad popping a b-girl stance on the grid, Basta’s young professionals shining in strikingly well-produced interviews, Sheila fanning the flames of literal revolution in her insta stories, or Justin shitting on Brett Favre via twitter … but that’s just what’s happening on the surface, you know?
Where can we get into the REAL real stuff?
Well … we’re back. And …
Sheila & Justin Review Classic Children’s Literature
In the last issue of Spinning Plates, we fawned over Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, an absolute banger of a children’s book. It was Azad’s first “favorite” … meaning she sat through the whole thing once, before throwing it across the room the next fifty times.* Brown Bear Brown Bear, another Carle classic, also #StillSlaps. (Be sure to read the first issue for a refresher on the rigor behind the #StillSlaps verdict.)
The Grouchy Ladybug, on the other hand …
Well … as one of Justin’s English professors said about brutalist architect Marcel Breuer’s Perelli building (now better known as Connecticut’s largest IKEA), “Even the masters have a bad hair day.”
Summarizing Eric Carle’s bad hair day is hard, as The Grouchy Ladybug is what happens when authors try to do too much.** The book’s shortest YouTube reading is over six minutes long; HUGE red flag for infant content, which should be measured in seconds.
Duration isn’t the only problem here. The titular ladybug, true to its name, is a dick, and not in a fun, cloying way, like on Succession. We meet it landing on a leaf next to “the friendly ladybug,” who is eating aphids, but willing to share. Grouchy says “I’ll literally fight you for ALL of the aphids,” after which the friendly bug is like, “don’t mistake the friendliness for foolishness, you can fuck around and find out.”
The grouchy ladybug neither fucks around nor finds out, and he flies away, DEEPER in his feelings than Drake after a breakup. Grouchy goes on to harass twelve other animals with a long-winded, repetitive taunt. Each successive foe is bigger than the last - from wasp to whale - and the grouchy bug retreats from each threat, before eventually going back and sharing aphids with the friendly ladybug after all.
This book sucks. The illustrations of animals are characteristically beautiful, but Carle - who once said, “I love color, and I have this one frustration that I cannot be even more colorful” - gives dry, monochromatic text more real estate than it deserves. Repetition can be fun in a children’s book - think the eponymous chant in Chicka Chicka Boom Boom - but watching a depressed insect with anger issues go further and further off the deep end, shockingly, isn’t great fodder for infant lit.
To summarize:
Fall/Winter 2022’s Hottest Accessory: The Toddler “Go-Bag”
The idea of revolution swims close to the surface in the Saremzadeh-Cohen household.
Whereas Justin’s revolutionary vision involves flowers growing from the decaying carcass of a burned out cop car, Sheila, as usual, lives in reality, having survived the actual violent consequences of revolution gone awry. The Saremzadeh family left Iran after the 1979 imposition of theocracy unraveled generations of social progress, erasing foundational rights faster than anyone believed was possible.
Thank god we don’t live anywhere like THAT anymore, amirite ladies?
Anyway, because we are alive and sentient, our family treats contemporary domestic political violence not as an abstract threat, but as a thing that is happening with increasing frequency. Sure, there are cartoonish examples like, oh we don’t know, the Unite the Right Rally and the Coup d’naw on 1/6/21. But every police murder, every school shooting - hell, any shooting at all - is an act of political violence, so long as our government refuses to play a role in curtailing it.
Our society has become the canonical boiling frog, where even the blood of our country’s children seems insufficient to alert us that something is terribly, terribly wrong.
So.
It is with that extremely serious preamble in mind that we’d like to introduce you to fall’s hottest fashion trend that nobody is talking about … yet:
THE TODDLER GO-BAG
Fellas … this October your infant’s look is not complete without a go-bag.
Period.
The TGB answers an important question on everyone’s mind: what if violent revolution pops off while I’m at Trader Joe’s?
You’ll still need everything in your more-or-less-obsolete “diaper bag”*** …
… but what if your errands require you to stock up on frozen appetizers AND commandeer a boat headed for international waters in a pinch?
If your family wants to weather the small, but increasingly legitimate, chance that the United States quickly descends into repressive chaos, you’re gonna need to make some unsavory choices.
Building a strong TGB is an easy place to start.
Don’t have a TGB yet?
Don’t worry. We’ve got you covered. We asked some influencers, “What’s in YOUR toddler go-bag?” Check out their answers below!
Mick Collins (Author, Astrologer, Justin’s Elementary School Classmate)
We like Mick’s list for its practicality. When we reached out to contributors with this question, everyone else was like, “So this is a bit, right? You’re doing a bit?”
Not Mick. She lowkey rattled off the actual contents of the actual factual TGB she has ready at all times. Literally. As an author and fan of speculative fiction, Mick is prepared for the literal worst, and now you are too.
Dorothy Jean Chang (President of Kode With Klossy, Deliberate Misspelling Enthusiast)
The actual kids, when prompted to respond:
Dorothy’s kids are a little older, so this is helpful guidance for anticipating older kids’ needs in exile. That her kids were so amenable to this peculiar creative task suggests that Dorothy’s family unit will be responsive and adaptable during full societal collapse.
Because even if the state decides to mobilize against its own citizens overnight, you’re probably still gonna want “a little bit of toys.”
Inspired by the pioneering TGBs of our friends, we made some minor adjustments to Azad’s existing go-bag, at the center of which is her first United States passport, which increasingly feels like a depreciating asset.
That document - on which a six-week-old Azad grimaces in a onesie reading “Abolitionist Baby” - represents a set of international movement privileges that her parents suspect may have already peaked. We can dream of a world without borders, but the one in which we live is riven with divisions of our own creation.
Sometimes, though, people rise up against those divisions.
Right now, in the streets of almost every city in Iran, burgeoning revolutionaries are chanting Azad’s name, which is the Farsi word for freedom. Just a few weeks ago, it would have seemed impossible that the three of us could ever step off a plane together in Tehran. (Two of us, after all, have “Cohen” as a surname.) Today, though, just about anything seems possible.
Because in a world where things can go so bad, so fast … it’s important to remember that forward progress remains a real possibility, however remote that chance may feel.
😂... y'all are my faves 💛...and hilarious