kids

In Honor of Halloween: What Movies Scared You as a Child?

My family was recently chuckling about an overnight stay at The Curtis-a DoubleTree by Hilton in downtown Denver a few years ago where each of their 16 floors is dedicated to a different theme. Their 13th floor is “horror” and for Halloween they converted in into a veritable haunted house with a haunted elevator ride, hallways dripping with cobwebs, staffers dressed up in creepy costumes like a clown and Freddie Krueger, and redrum “murder” scrawled across our bathroom mirror with spiders and bugs all over the sink. One of the rooms had a bar with a creepy lady serving up treats and shots…in the head. Sounds scary? It might have been for young kids but we had so much fun interacting with the playful characters that we spent our entire evening laughing! I&...

Don’t be spooked, let your little goblins eat the candy corn

Across the nation, parents like me are bracing for the annual sugar rush known as Halloween. I’ve got pounds of mini-treats to pass out to neighborhood goblins and ghouls. But many parents struggle to balance our kids’ mania for sweets with a nagging feeling that all that candy can’t be a good thing. Everybody knows: Candy rots kids’ teeth. Candy ruins kids’ dinner. Candy makes kids fat. Any and all sugars will pitch the fragile child into a lifelong battle with diabetes, obesity and heart disease. But a lot of this worry about children and candy isn’t about candy at all. It is about whether children have a right to their own pleasure. Consider the lollipop, the ultimate symbol of children’s innocence. The sweet lollipop is a few licks from the ill...

Activities To Teach “Thankfulness”

It’s the holiday season! What better time is there to teach and encourage thankfulness within your home or classroom. Kids and particularly preschool aged children are notoriously known for being self-centered. Thankfulness, empathy and sharing are all skills that crucial to nixing that preschool aged egocentric behavior, but these are also skills that aren’t inherent, they need to be taught and fostered. Teaching a child how to be thankful doesn’t only result in a child with good manners, but a child who is thankful tends to be happier, more content and less stressed and depressed. Personally, I can say that is true as I feel much happier when I make a conscience effort to be thankful for all my blessings instead of focusing on all the challenges I’m facing. So, what can you do at home or...

The tools every parent must know to keep your kids safe on the Internet

One of the parents from my daughter’s class, Chris Roberts, created this checklist for ensuring our younger “web surfers” remain safe. I think it’s a great list, so, with his permission, I am sharing it here for safe explorations.  For the younger children – 12 and under: 1.    Create separate user accounts for each child on the home computer. 2.    Enable strict content filtering on the computer. 3.    Install anti-virus, malware software, etc. 4.    Establish a select list of sites they’re allowed to visit. (We talk about the sites they want to visit, spend time on them together, and then I go through the sites and click through as deep as I can to understand the site content, culture, links, and ads...

“I’m not good at Math!” How Engineering for Kids’ Fall Camps Can Help! (With Discount)

Is it Fall Break already?  If you are completely caught off guard with Fall Break already here – worry no more.   We’ve got a great solution to keep your kiddos entertained.  It’s fun, engaging, and educational – and most likely, will fit your schedule. What is it? Engineering for Kids Fall Break Camps.   It’s art, engineering and everything in-between.   Kids will build, create, innovate and collaborate with other kids.  A team of engineers started Engineering for Kids a year ago and has since been blasting off, building, creating, making, and engineering with hundreds of kids in our area.    Instructors care deeply about exciting kids about Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) and doing it in a deliberate way.  ...

“You poked my heart” cute kid video goes viral

In the latest kids-say-the-darndest things on YouTube, three young children argue whether it’s “raining” or “sprinkling.”  The boy becomes increasingly frustrated until the culmination around the 1:30 mark when the girl emphasizes her point by poking the boy’s chest. Here’s the thing, kids: you’re all correct. I’m thinking their next weather report should be a lesson in synonyms. Watch video.

How worried should parents be about location and geotagging services?

Recently, while chatting with my sister about posting photos of our kids on sites like Facebook and Instagram, she told me that she’d heard that other people can sometimes divine the location where the photo was taken. To prevent strangers and lurkers in the seedy underbelly of the Internet from figuring out where she lives while viewing pictures of her cute-as-a-button 3-year-old, she says she turns off the location settings on her phone when she’s not using it for navigation. I vaguely remembered a news report on the same issue a while back. Ironically, even though I’m all over social media – I have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google+ – I still want to pretend like I have some control over my privacy. I disabled the location sharing setting on my variou...

Mama Drama: Summer Nights vs. School Mornings

Dear Mama Drama: My kids are back in school, but are still on summer time bedtime and wake up schedules. This is causing a lot of stress and crankiness around our house. They can’t get to sleep earlier in the evening and are groggy and slow in the mornings. We need help! ~Stuck in Summer Mama Dear Stuck in Summer: Switching sleeping and waking schedules can be a challenge when the weather and long evenings still tell our bodies it is summer – which of course it is. 🙂 Rest assured you are not the only family struggling with this issue. Talk with your kids about how things are going with this transition to get them on board and hear their perspective. Let them know how you would like the routine to work and then work together to make a plan that everyone can live with. Here are some ideas to...

12 YouTube science channels to keep your kids learning this summer

YouTube is brimming with quirky, entertaining and educational science programs. As much of it is produced for a general lay audience, there’s plenty of appealing content for precocious kids and parents.  Here are some of the best YouTube science channels to check out. 1. AsapScience Whiteboard illustrations explain every-day questions like if video games make you smarter and if plants think. During the Olympics, learn more with videos on topics like why Olympic records are always broken. Not all the content is kid appropriate though. For example, there’s a video on if sex affects athletic performance. The video merely acknowledges people have sex and focuses on non-titillating questions like how many calories sex burns and its effects on energy, anxiety levels and alertness, but ...

Kids: You Say You Want a Revolution?

I’m beginning to understand why ideas and education are the first things to be controlled in oppressive regimes. Education leads to…thoughts. Ideas. Connections. Expression. Discussion. And yes, Revolution. I, being the Head Mama around here, am in a position of Exalted and Sovereignly Great Dictator. Especially when the playroom and bedrooms look like they’ve been ransacked by a bunch of gremlins with a penchant for making cardboard box civilizations and scattering the contents of every toy container to the four corners. Today is particularly oppressive for the kids, as I am leaving to take care of some business for a few days, and Head Daddy is large and in charge when I’m gone. He needs a clean and tidy house like I need Dove Chocolate and Cherry Coke. I have them on a...

What I wish someone would have told me before the emergency room

Let me first say that I am not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV, but if someone would have told me some of these things, it may have saved us some dough and my kids some trauma. `Tis a Flesh Wound My son was jumping on the trampoline at my brother’€™s house. Bless their hearts, they made the effort to put the safety net around their trampoline. But, it was the metal stairs that lead up to the trampoline that my son cut his head on during a mad, three-kid-scramble to climb out. I was at work, my husband was at school, my sister-in-law did the right thing by calling us. Of course, we hurried over to their house to attend to our son. Although the cut wasn’t deep, it was bleeding a lot. We took our five-year-old to the emergency room. By the time we arrived, the bleeding had stopp...

Erratic bedtimes linked to child behavioral problems

Children who go to to bed at irregular hours are more likely to have behavioral problems, according to a recent study. The research, which appeared in the U.S. journal Pediatrics, found that lifelong problems could result from erratic childhood bedtimes, but that the effects could be reversed with implementation of a schedule. “Not having fixed bedtimes, accompanied by a constant sense of flux, induces a state of body and mind akin to jet lag,” said Yvonne Kelly of the University College London. Inconsistent bedtimes can disrupt natural body rhythms and cause sleep deprivation, impairing brain development and the ability to regulate some behaviors, the research showed.

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