This week: In Like a Lion

Whoever said that April is the cruelest month didn’t live in central Texas in March. It’s lovely. Too lovely. So lovely, in fact, that event organizers can’t resist crowding just one more lively diversion into an already-overflowing calendar. March is, after all, the last safe bet that a public event won’t require heat exhaustion tents every twenty paces. The result? We’re cursed with too many tempting weekend activities. Oh, the agony of choices!

Here are three you can wring your hands about this weekend:

The Zilker Kite Festival (Sunday, March 7; rain date March 11)

If there’s nice weather and a good breeze, the kite density at this event practically eclipses the sun. It’s glorious. And it’s within walking distance for a lot of Mathews families. Find out about it here.

Explore UT (Saturday, March 6, rain or shine)

Corral your little longhorns and head on over to campus for the 11^th annual Explore UT event, a day of nearly 400 activities, performances, lectures, and exhibits. Family-friendly and hands-on, the day is designed to acquaint Austinites with the university’s many treasures. Geek out over fossils and seashells, march with the Longhorn Band, or make ice cream with liquid nitrogen. Don’t miss the Children’s International Festival on the South Mall. Click here for all the info.

It’s My Park Day (Saturday, March 6)

Get grubby and earn some serious peat cred. The Austin Parks Foundation is coordinating a citywide volunteer effort to show some love to our green spaces, parks, and playgrounds. Some events have music, art projects, picnics, and more. There are jobs for little people, so bring the fam. Learn more and find an event here. (Dig spending time with Mathews gardeners? Sign up here to help improve the Clarksville Community Garden.)

So get some rest! Eat your Wheaties! Stock up on sunscreen! It’s going to be a busy March.

See you next link!

This week: Back from the brink

When it comes to sweets at the holidays, otherwise completely sensible, moderate, restrained adults have been known to overdo it ever so slightly. (It’s, ahem, no one you know.) Especially with those exotic confections that only surface at the holiday season. You know the ones I mean—compound dessert creations so absurdly studded with hyphens that even their names defy digestion. Seven-layer-toffee-cheesecake-nutbars. Cream-filled-walnut-butterscotch-ginger-squares. Crispy-malted-chocolate-mocha-caramel-butter-rum-maple-spiced-macademia-something-or-others. Washed down with eggnog, naturally. It’s enough to make you shamefully neglect your blog for weeks on end in a glassy-eyed sugar fugue of rationalizations and procrastinations. Or so I’m told.

And kiddos are especially vulnerable to the holiday roller coaster—the food, the family, the gifting, the lack of routine. Which I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, given that today is the last day of holiday break. How’s the weather out there on the ledge?

So what, then, of January? Does recovering from holiday indulgence mean regimens of denial? A month-long grapefruit fast? A devout swearing-off from plastic toys, the Disney channel, and (evil, evil) peppermint bark?

Swinging on that pendulum makes me dizzy. Instead, this month, I’m going for balance. For the whole family. No crazy diets, no hard-core workouts, no forsaking of small pleasures. Just a common-sense return-to-sanity approach to ease us all into the new decade.

So here’s a toast to:

Eating sustainably. The Austin Farmers’ Market makes its official move to the green at Republic Square Park on Saturday, January 16, from 9 am until 1. With music and scones to distract them, the little ones won’t even notice those gorgeous turnip greens you just bought.

Moving sustainably. Yoga is great for young and old this (or any) time of year. Gentle stretching, some balance poses, deep breaths…it’s the perfect antidote to the tumult of December. Some studios in town with classes for kids: Yoga Yoga, Austin Kula Yoga, and Star Kids Yoga. And don’t forget that Ruta Maya has a family yoga class on Saturday mornings that’s free with a purchase from the coffee bar.

Giving sustainably. Time to unload the excess and start the year with an orderly, manageable environment. Plus, now’s a good time for kids to work toward balance not just in their lives, but also in their community. Clean out the closets and donate some gently used items. There are lots of folks in need; SafePlace is just one of many local charities that would appreciate kids clothes, toys, sports equipment, art supplies, books, etc.

Wishing you a happy, healthy, and peaceful 2010.

See you next link!

This week: The giving season

I wish I were kidding, but it’s practically December. Maybe this doesn’t come as a news flash for you, but those of us still emerging from a Halloween sugar bender are blinking uncomprehendingly at the calendar, trying desperately to account for the last three weeks or so.

And with the avalanche of shopping ads that will inevitably bury us in the days to come, one’s thoughts naturally turn to gift giving. I for one am a big proponent of a sincerely delivered note of thanks to the teachers and other dear staff who make our Mathews experience so special. I don’t think anything is more gratifying than having someone take time out of their busy season to express their appreciation with a kind word.

Of course, the National Retail Federation begs to differ, but who cares?

But let’s say you don’t bake/can’t knit/won’t revise your pre-recession buying habits and want to deliver a small remembrance to a special teacher/librarian/coach/counselor/nurse/office staffer/principal/custodian/crossing guard/lunchroom attendant without a soul-sucking/expensive/ad-fueled trip to the mall. Can it be done?

Yes! First of all, you can shop locally. The Austin Independent Business Alliance has designated six local business districts (South First, North Loop, etc.) to help promote uniquely Austin vendors. At their site, you can click any of the districts to get a list of locally owned businesses in that area. Boutiques, studios, bookstores…all brimming with merchandise you can feel good about.

Second of all, you can buy handmade. This movement is really taking off. People want to feel more of a connection to the items they purchase these days, and buying from a craftsperson means you’re sure to give a one-of-a-kind gift. The Web’s handmade juggernaut is Etsy. Search for a teacher gift there, and prepare to be overwhelmed (in a good way) with personalized stationary, unique felted paperclips, utterly affordable Post-It holders, fun bookplates, and so much more. You can even use their Geolocator to find Austin crafters!

There are lots of good ways to say thanks this season, and plenty of them don’t involve opening your wallet. But if you’re so inclined, there are ways to support local businesses and independent craftspeople while you share the holiday love.

See you next link!

This week: Pages by ages

Remember my post not long ago about the weekly bestseller list for children’s books at The New York Times site? Retrace your websteps, because we’re headed back there for the special section on children’s books that appeared in the NYT’s magazine a couple of weeks ago.

From a survey of recent young-adult fairy fiction right down to reviews of books about winter for the picture-book set, this is an excellent place to start your holiday book shopping for the junior bibliophiles in your life.

Included in the special section is the annual (since 1952, no less) list of best illustrated children’s books. (You know it’s year-end when you start seeing the “Best Of” lists. I was in denial that November is coming to a close, but now there’s nowhere to hide.) Each book in the list is reviewed so you don’t have to judge it by its, er…cover.

Keep scrolling so you don’t miss the last book on this year’s list, All the World, by Liz Garton Scanlon. She’s an impossibly talented Austin author, so show some local love and read this very favorable review.

See you next link!

This week: The perfect find date

Two great calendars to tell you about this week—one virtual and the other ink and paper.

The first is TodayInAustin, calendar heaven for the digerati among us (you know who you are). They aggregate and republish links to over 100 Austin sites so that you can know what’s happening today in art, music, food, dance, film, sports, kid stuff, and more. And this site has left you no excuse for not being up-to-date on local events, because you can get a daily email, subscribe to the RSS feed, read the blog, visit them on Flickr, add events to your Google calendar, import data into iCal, and have events beamed directly to a chip in your head. Kidding about that last one. I think.

For the rest of us, there’s the Austin Events 2010 calendar, printed on paper (yes! they still make those!) with some gorgeous photos of our fair city. It has dates and information for local events, including the Texas Book Festival, SXSW, the Capitol 10K, the Pecan Street Festival, peach season in Fredericksburg, and so much more. You’ll find the calendars in stores around town, or you can order from the web site. I gave some as gifts last year, and people love ‘em. Which just goes to show that sometimes the only “platform” a good calendar needs is some wall space and a thumbtack.

See you next link!

This week: Cloud Formations

I know. I’m combining weeks. It’s cheating. But we took a brief family excursion to Washington, D.C. (more on that in a minute), so I gotta catch up. But this should count for two weeks, because it’s just that fun.

My friend Heidi turned me onto Wordle, a fascinating little app that converts text to word “clouds.” Words that you use more often in the text have a higher profile in the cloud, so you get a sense of which themes and concepts are most prominent. Wordle was developed by a software engineer at IBM, and he keeps a blog to keep aficionados up to date. The site also has a gallery; you don’t have to upload and share your Wordle, but you might find it fun to check out how other people are using it. (Be forewarned that some Wordles in the gallery are for adult eyes only.)

Back to Washington, D.C. My second grader kept a travel diary of our few days there, and I decided to type in the journal text to see what Wordle would come up with. Here’s the result:

I find this hilariously revealing. Clearly, the airplane made the biggest impression. I’m glad that museum made it in there somewhere. But the best part is a tall, succinct fun. Despite being made to pose for pictures at hundreds of landmarks and walking what he considered to be unacceptable distances, he apparently had fun. Yea!

I wanted to show you this Wordle in black and white so that it would be readable, but the site lets you choose all kinds of format options, from fonts and colors to the orientation of the words in the cloud. Lots of them are really beautiful.

In fact, I think I’m going to frame this one as a momento for him. It’s a great little snapshot of all his favorite spots, including the subway, the carousel on the Mall, and the Air and Space Museum. Oh, and the airplane. In case you missed it.

See you next link! 

This week: Small Screen, Big Questions

“Mom, can we rent Monsters vs. Aliens?”

We’ve made our weekly pilgrimage to Blockbuster to choose a DVD for the weekend.

“Um…” I stall, squinting at the characters on the case, trying to determine which little animated creature looks likely to perpetrate gratuitous violence or use adult language. “Well…” I hesitate, scanning the teaser copy for clues about gender stereotyping or contempt for authority figures. “Hmmm…” I waver, searching the heroine’s face for indications of anything vaguely role-model-ish.

My almost-eight-year-old peers up at me expectantly. “I don’t know,” I say. And it’s true. I honestly don’t know.

It was so much easier when they were little. Then I could winnow down their choices to a shelf or two of relatively innocuous stories and shows. For anything else, I’d say, “That’s for kids a little bit older than you.”

Well, now they’re the kids who are a little bit older. I have a pretty good sense of what I’m comfortable with and what they’re comfortable with. But it’s not always easy to judge a video by its cover, and I’m often left playing in-aisle amateur detective about whether a release is right for us.

If you’re in the same boat, you’re going to love Common Sense Media. They have all kinds of tools and resources for parents and educators who are trying to shepherd children through the media thickets (think grade-by-grade guides, expert interviews, student discussion guides, family media agreements, discussion forums, etc., etc.). There’s some great guidance about everything from advertising to social networking. Some random topics I spent a morning reading about: YouTube 101, Taming Gaming at Home, Talking about Cyberbullies, When Good Role Models Go Bad, Media Protocols for Playdates, 7 Things You Should Know about Web Filters…it’s truly a gold mine for parents like me: I’m ambivalent about so much media exposure for kids, but I know it’s better to manage it than to ignore it.

Now, back to the aisle at Blockbuster. Common Sense Media has a gazillion reviews of movies, books, web sites, music, and TV shows. I literally sat down with my cell phone, went to the site, read the review out loud, and then decided that Monsters vs. Aliens was probably okay for my second grader. At which point my second grader informed me that he wasn’t interested. “Too intense,” he said, opting instead for a collection of Phineas and Ferb episodes. Wow. Instead of making an arbitrary call, I was able to offer some reliable information that let us both practice being savvy media consumers.

And the site really lives up to its name. No politics, no agenda. Just a level-headed look at the media fare our kids are being offered, with suggestions about how to talk about it, digest it, avoid it, or embrace it. Obviously, reviewers have their own biases, and parents have their own criteria, but this site provides some valuable tools and information to help parents and kids make decisions they’re comfortable with.

P.S. On the heels of the movie release of Where the Wild Things Are, The New York Times has an interesting conversation among child development experts about children’s movie experiences. Check it out.

See you next link!

This week: Ghosts in the machine

Forget roads and bridges. Maybe some federal stimulus dollars could go toward R&D for a Halloween costume that transforms from a pirate to a firefighter to Darth Vader and back again. Because between now and October 31, I’m gonna need that more than a bridge.

Yes, they’ll tell you that they’re absolutely, positively, without question, cross their heart, very very very SURE that they want to be Tinkerbell and that they’ll never, ever, ’til the end of time, in no way want to be anything other than Tinkerbell. So, devoted parent that you are, you’ll shell out to buy the costume or spend hours wrestling green tulle so that she’ll have the perfect Tinkerbell costume on Halloween. And there’s a word for a parent like you: sucker.

If experience is any guide, they’ll choose the night before Halloween to tell you that under no circumstances will they consent to be whatever they swore to be—just as the shelves at Target are picked clean except for random accessories and costumes of obscure supporting characters (“It says here he’s Boba Fett’s cousin’s landspeeder’s driver! Isn’t it great?!”).

Luckily, the craft store is still open. And you, resourceful parent that you are, have the ultimate wellspring of homemade Halloween costume ideas: Coolest Homemade Costumes. Actually, there are a few good sites for homemade costumes, including ones with no ads and no, ahem…adult costumes. But for sheer variety, you can’t beat this place. Want to dress your child like a John Deere tractor? Here are TWELVE different versions, complete with photographs and instructions submitted by parents. You can even submit your own homemade masterpiece.

Believe me, it’ll save your sanity this year when your kiddo pulls the ol’ bait and switch. Next year you’ll be older and wiser and you’ll…still fall for it. Spooky how that happens.

See you next link!

This week: Turning over a new (fly)leaf

Add it to the long list of indignities your second child will blame you for: hand-me-down books. By the time our now-kindergartener came along, the bookshelf in the kids’ room was groaning under the weight of books bought for and enjoyed by her older brother. So we didn’t exactly bolt out to BookPeople or the library for a whole new round of junior lit, know what I mean?

But maybe we should have. A lot of great children’s books arrived on the scene between 2001 and 2004: Just Another Morning, The Day the Babies Crawled Away, and Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! are just a few.

Sure, classics are classics, and there’s no reason to think that younger sibs won’t enjoy Green Eggs and Ham as much as your first one did (or as much as you did, for that matter). But sometimes you’re interested in what’s new or what’s caught the attention of book editors and other parents.

So click on over to The New York Times, where they list the week’s top ten (best-selling) picture books, chapter books, paperbacks, and series books for children. Each has a recommended age range listed, and you can click on the linked titles to read their NYT reviews.

Of course, not every best-selling book is one you’d necessarily find appropriate for your kiddo. (L.A. Candy, by reality celeb Lauren Conrad? Probably not a future Caldecott winner. Just a guess.) For more guidance on finding the good stuff, try The New York Times Parent’s Guide to the Best Books for Children: 3^rd Edition. It’s a few years old now, but it’s still a tremendous resource—well-organized and quite thumb-through-able. You can find it here on Amazon, and several library branches have a copy.

So blow the dust off the bookshelves. Donate some old favorites and make a little space for some new classics.

See you next link!

This week: Byte at the Museum

Woo hoo for Austin Museum Day! I hope lots of families were able to get out and enjoy some of the nearly 30 museums, art libraries, and gardens that were open free to the public last weekend.

We spent the afternoon at the Bob Bullock Texas History Museum learning about everything from musket balls to oil derricks. If you haven’t been there lately, be sure to check out their Forgotten Gateway exhibit; it explores immigrant arrivals in Galveston from 1845 to 1924, when that city was one of the nation’s busiest ports of entry. I know the second graders are going to be researching immigrant stories later this year, and seeing the exhibit would be a great way to jumpstart their thinking.

Anyway, if you weren’t able to make it out to Museum Day, you can still while away a Sunday afternoon at a museum with your kiddos—online, that is. My very favorite museum site for kids has to be the Smithsonian. Start out on the home page just to get your bearings and pique their interest (for example, click on the Night at the Museum 2 link to find out all about the movie, including a treasure map of the artifacts in the film, interviews with the director and stars, and even a little feature on five films that memorably depict museums…oh, moms and dads, remember Ferris Bueller in the Art Institute of Chicago?…wow, Matthew Broderick looks so young…).

SNAP OUT OF IT! Okay, see what just happened? You need to FOCUS if you have a destination on this site—otherwise, you’ll be there for days. Which is of course fine…next summer, when you have the time. Meanwhile, you’ve got to get to the students section. Once you’re there, you’re pretty much on your own. Trying to link to all the interesting stuff would be like trying to make a list of everything in the world. Here’s a hint, though: start out on the Explore by Topic page. You cannot go wrong, people. You’ll be astounded by how much cool stuff is there.

Oh, and don’t forget to start lecturing the kids about how they have no idea how LUCKY they are and how when you were a kid you had to look at boring old encyclopedias with no games or downloads or interactive features. And then they’ll ask you whether indoor plumbing or television or Facebook had been invented when you were a kid and you’ll tumble down an I-can’t-believe-how-old-I-am thought spiral and need reassuring that, yes, you’re still hip and cool!! I’m sure there’s a site for that. Let me get back to you.

See you next link!