Weekly Web Round-Up: Week of January 11, 2013

This is one awesome snow sculpture. Whoever made the Tauntaun for that kid is awesome. My dad and I used to make igloos, but a Tauntaun would have been sweet![/caption]   The National Father’s Day Council has announced that they will honor Former President Bill Clinton as this year’s Father of the Year. The council’s mission is to “promote the celebration, observation, and preservation of the holidays Mother’s Day and Father’s Day by focusing on the value of good sound parenting. The Council concentrates its energies on highlighting and contributing to charities and contemporary issues that affect Mothers, Fathers, and Families.”

Former President Bill Clinton with daughter Chelsea and wife, current Secretary of State, Hillary in 1993.

 

Earlier this week, Ellen Seidman of Love That Max included this video of Jeffrey Wright, a high school physics teacher in Louisville, KY, whose son has Joubert syndrome, on her blog. Take 12 minutes to watch this emotional, moving video created by one of Wright’s former students.   Slate asked its readers to write in with their experiences of being—or being raised by—a single mother. The takeaway from the readers’ responses? Children raised by a single mother have an amazing role model because their mother is doing everything alone, raising the children, paying the bills, taking care of the family. That’s not to say that children raised by both Mom and Dad don’t have great role models, but no one wrote in saying having a single mother was the worst thing that could have happened to them.

Dave Steel, who grew up without a dad around, doesn’t see it quite the same way. “Like other fatherless boys,” he writes, “my life was defined by my dad’s absence. In fact, never knowing my father shaped me as much, or more, as did being raised by mom alone.” Like the others, Steel goes on to write about the resourcefulness he gained out of necessity:

While other kids my age were given cars when they turned 16, or drove around in spare family cars, I developed and executed a game plan to acquire a car and driver’s license entirely on my own. I took the city bus to a grocery store, got a job bagging groceries, opened a bank account, enrolled in a driver’s ed school across the street from the grocery store where I worked, got my license, and bought a junker for $400. Doing all of this took a year, and the car ended up lasting four months.

We’ll end this week’s round-up with this parody of LMFAO’s I’m Sexy and I Know It called I’m a Daddy and I Know It that we found on WeGotKidz.com.