Blog Archive
Ouch -- it's time to truly face it. Summer is over.
The kids are back to school.
If you were one of the scores of parents grabbing a camera and catching those nervous first-day smiles this morning on the playground, don't forget to send it to our Back-to-School Photo Gallery for a chance to win a prize! We'll do a random drawing on Sept. 12 to pick our winners. You could get anything from a $25 Mayfair Mall gift card to a parenting book to a DVD for your kids.
We can't wait to see your shots!
And fingers crossed for no homework on the first day!
Today on "The Morning Blend" we talked about web sites and cookbooks that feature fast and easy recipes for busy families.
In doing my homework for the segment, I wanted to branch out from just the sites I typically use (Recipezaar.com and Allrecipes.com) and look at some other options.
A few I really liked:
Since this morning, a few members of our MilwaukeeMoms.com discussion boards have suggested a few others:
I think SuperCook.com is especially cool because you enter the ingredients you have on hand and it provides you with recipes. I went on and listed six things (chicken, tomato, garlic, olive oil, asparagus and parmesan cheese) and this site came back with 21 possible recipes I could make using those ingredients.
That'll work! It's already on my list of bookmarks.
If you have favorite web sites for recipes or fast dinner ideas, please share! We can all use the help.
Today on "The Morning Blend" we talked about the serious problem of kids and cyberbullying. In getting ready for the show, I did a lot of reading about the topic. Parents, if you haven't talked to your kids about this, you need to do it.
Soon.
Maybe I'm just especially naive, but I had no idea how many different ways kids are bullying each other using today's technology tools. Kids are getting each other to confess secrets over e-mail or instant messages and then sharing them with the entire school. They're finding out each other's passwords and sending out vicious e-mails to other kids under a false name. They're creating mean web pages and fake MySpace accounts -- all in an effort to hurt each other.
It's pretty rough stuff.
The part that makes it extra difficult to deal with is the fact that it is around the clock harassment of children. The 24/7 nature of this means that a child could wake up in the morning and have an inbox full of nasty e-mails -- all from anonymous e-mail addresses.
Kids don't know how to deal with this, and very often they are not turning to their parents. A 2004 study done by i-Safe showed that 58 percent of kids said they would not tell their parents if they were being harassed online. What they often do instead is retaliate against the cyberbullies -- and then the whole thing escalates. And now the victim is playing bully too -- not good.
The experts say the best thing you can do to avoid this is to really monitor your child's online behavior. Know what sites your child is visiting and what kind of communication goes on there. Check the history on your computer, and watch your kids for signs that what they're seeing online is making them upset. See if you can start a dialog about it with them. Kids need to understand that it might seem harmless or even fun to do this, but it has serious implications. Some kids who have been the victims of cyberbullying become so distraught they commit suicide.
There are lots of web sites you can check out to learn more about this, but two I really like are CyberBully.org and StopCyberBullying.org. Both provide great tips for kids and parents to manage these situations and hopefully avoid them in the first place.
A few months back we were at a family gathering on my husband's side and one of my nieces had something to share.
"I hit 1,500 last month," she confided to me with a little grin.
In advance defense of my stupidity, let me say this. All my nieces play soccer, so I was trying to figure out if this was her 1,500th goal or something like that.
"Wow, congratulations," I said. "How long did it take you to reach that goal?"
"One month" was her puzzled reply. She was confused, I was confused. Then she held up her cell phone. "I sent 1,500 text messages."
Then the other nieces quickly chimed in their latest stats -- again, having nothing to do rapidly moving feet and everything to do with rapidly moving thumbs.
I couldn't wrap my brain around that. At that rate, she was sending about 50 text messages per day. Figure she's awake 16 hours per day and that's three text messages per hour. Although it was during a month when there was school, so I'm assuming most if not all were during before and after school hours.
Silly me, I thought those were busy thumbs. Last night I found out that my 16-year-old nephew did more than 4,000 last month. That's right, more than 4,000.
How can this be? What on earth are they saying to each other at all these different points during the day?
And then a thought occurred to me. This 24/7 constant contact is ruining one of the premiere activities that I remember from my youth -- looking for people.
To those of you not raised on cell phones, let's take a trip down memory lane. Remember how you would head out to the high school football game on a Friday night and spend half an hour (or more) trying to find your friends in the stands or at the snack bar? Maybe you'd find two of your friends, but the other three had taken off somewhere and magically you had a goal for the night -- find the friends.
We could spend whole nights doing this, trying to remember if they were going to try to meet up with Julie or Jackie or Janet. Or were they going to Gilles and then trying to meet up with Mike and Steve?
Combine speculation with lots of free time and you had yourself one exciting evening as you traveled from place to place to place.
Half the time at the end of the night, you still hadn't found your friends. (Turns out they were just in a really long line for snacks at the football game!) But you had a lot of fun trying.
So what's it like to be a tween or teen today and you always-always-always know where your friends are? Like a sophisticated GPS, you get updates on their comings and goings three times an hour -- whether you care or not.
I gotta ask, where's the fun in that?
I'm no economic scholar, so I'm not even going to try to talk about what's going on in the financial markets and with the big boys in the worlds of investing, mortgages and insurance.
What I do know -- what we all know -- is that what we pay at the pump, the grocery store and the checks we write out to our utility companies are all going through the roof, in increments of 10 cents here, a quarter more there. (Or $84 per month more on my We Energies bill. Whatever.)
It seems like every time I go to the store lately, the prices on the basic grocery items I always buy are inching up on me. It's just small enough that if you don't really look at the label on the shelf and think about what you paid last time, you might not even notice it. When it's all added up at the register, you notice, but you don't necessarily see that couple of cents on each individual item.
Just for fun (sick fun, I admit), I decided to track one item on my grocery bill. Just one. There's a certain kind of granola I like to buy, mix it into some vanilla yogurt and eat it every morning for breakfast. (My husband says this mixture looks like a bowl of bird poop, but I digress.)
Anyway, a bag of the granola is 12 ounces.
In July, it was $4.79 per bag.
By August, it had increased to $5.09.
Today, it's $5.25.
In two months, it's up nearly 50 cents.
That's just for that one item -- one of 30 that I bought on my shopping trip this week. In fairness, I didn't track the others to see how much they've risen in two months, but I would imagine that most, if not all, have increased by some percentage in the past six months.
This price creep has me thinking: How soon until I consider my granola a luxury item? When it hits $5.50 per bag? $6? What about when the staples hit these kinds of number? Milk's close to $4 per gallon. What will happen when it hits $5? It's near that in some parts of the country.
While everyone else is worrying about the big powerhouse financial giants, we're worrying about those of us who are not. Think there's going to come a time when they worry about us?
Just heard about an interesting web site today to share: Eco-Me.com. It's a company that sells chemical-free products and kits to create chemical-free products that you can use all around your house and even on yourself.
The product line includes a starter home-cleaning kit for $26 that includes the following:
1 natural fiber storage bag
2 spray bottles for mixing spray cleaner and polish
1 jar for mixing scrub cleanser
1 natural bristle scrub brush
1 handy mixer
1 microfiber cleaning cloth
1 bottle Eco-Me Home Cleaning Essential Oil
Easy to follow instructions show you how to mix ingredients right from your own kitchen.
You need to add the following pieces to the mix: oil, vinegar, water and baking soda.
The kit also includes Eco-Me's Home Cleaning Essential Oil for removing dirt,
mildew, mold, water stains and other household grime. The natural
essential oils (a mix of tea tree, lavender, lemongrass and rosemary)
are antiseptic and antibacterial. Eco-Me says they smell great and provide an additional cleaning boost.
From these products, you can make an all-purpose cleaner, a wood cleaner and a scrub cleanser.
There also are products for your body and your baby's body (including ingredients to make natural wipes), as well as your dog and cat.
We see discussions about this topic (how to keep the toxic out of the home) a lot on our discussion boards, so I thought it was worth sharing here. If anyone tries this stuff, let me know how it is!
Our annual fall quest for honey crisp apples and apple cider doughnuts led us to Awe's Apple Orchard in Franklin. After getting our goodies, we headed out to check out the pumpkin patch next to the store.
At
first the small snow-white pumpkins caught our eye, but then we noticed
something else. Big ol' orange pumpkins with lots and lots of warty
bumps on them. Some of the warts were just the same color as the
pumpkin skin, but others were dark green in color.
In some spots the warts were all strung together, making big rows of uneven, multi-colored bumps.
Pretty nasty looking when compared to a gorgeous, smooth pumpkin skin -- but I bet it could make for some fun carving.
An
employee at Awe's said the bumpy pumpkins are called knuckle heads.
They're a newer variety, and she said Awe's is one of the few places in
the area that has them.
So if you want to try something different (and kind of gross, too) for
your pumpkin this year, keep an eye out for knuckle heads. You can't
miss them.
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