Joel’s Scattered Thoughts

As I sit here folding laundry, I thought I’d note a quick lesson I’ve learned for dealing with five people’s socks.  Make sure each person’s socks are easily visually distinguishable when you buy them!  We started doing this last year and this year we really pushed it.  It makes laundry so much easier when I know that the grey socks with Kodiak on them are Evan’s, the pink socks with flowers are Callie’s and the ones with cars on them are Alec’s.  Beats the heck out of trying to pick out whose black socks are whose.  Just thought I’d pass on that little tip.

Geekdad has a post on how Teaching Kids to Roleplay is Only Natural. I haven’t had much luck playing games with my kids. Either the games are too simple and I get bored or the the games are too complex and they get frustrated. Reason # 4,991 why I’m a bad parent.

Get Rich Slowly had guest post a while back on How to Inoculate Your Children Against Advertising. I am trying some of these ideas. I know that advertising definitely affects our kids.

I’ve found that the best way of turning them down when they ask for something that they’ve seen advertised is to say “Sure!”. Then I make an estimate of the product’s price and tell them that when they’ve done their chores X days in a row they’ll have the money to buy it. Oddly enough that dampens their insistence that they’ll die without it.

I find that a similar strategy works decently to curb my own impulse spending. If I start pricing out things as “I will have to work Y hours extra to have this”, my feeling that I’ll simply die without the latest widget diminishes greatly. The biggest problem with this approach is that I actually have the money so if I don’t stop and think I can spend it foolishly before making the calculation.

I would like to figure out a better way of getting good lunches for my kids.  At the moment, lunches consist of a pizza pop, juice, crackers or a granola bar, and canned fruit or an apple.  I’m not too thrilled about the pizza pop but I got sick of throwing out sandwiches with one bite taken out of them day after day.  I know they’ll eat the pizza pop since it’s a treat. 

I’d like to set things up so that they’re eating less processed stuff but I’m not sure how to do it in such a way that they’ll actually eat what is served.  Throw in random school rules due to allergies, microwave availability, and the phase of the moon and it gets complicated.  One possibility would be to get something like a Laptop Lunchbox and figure out a couple of options for each of the compartments.  My biggest criteria is that I don’t want to spend a lot of prep time on the lunches - maybe 15 minutes prep total for the three lunches.  Anyone have any good sites/recipe books/suggestions?

It looks like One Laptop Per Child’s Give One Get One program is coming back.  I might look at getting one of these for my kids.  The biggest factor will be the timing of the offer.  If it doesn’t happen while I have some discretionary income, I’ll have to wait for the next time it comes around. 

After a long delay, I’ve finally updated our photo gallery.

How to make a duck tape bullwhip « Skip To My Lou looks like a fun idea. I wonder how long it will take before the first sibling gets hit with a whip and I have to take the offender’s whip away? (via GeekDad)

If that’s not authentic enough for you, check out How To Make Whips a Leathersmith’s whip guide.

My daughter just registered her first complaint about those boys not putting the toilet seat down after peeing.

This:

The University of Phoenix is supposedly preparing a complete middle and high school online curriculum available anywhere in the world.

looks very interesting. I wonder if it’ll be available when my kids hit that stage? Mind you the local school is pretty good so I doubt I’d pull them out, but you never know what will happen.

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . War of the Worlds | PBS

Evan managed to unlock a map tonight in Mario Kart Double Dash. You have never seen a more excited bunch of kids.

We’d bought a Gamecube about a year ago, but the kids didn’t play it much. We pull it out when cabin fever starts to overwhelm the kids. It’s good to see that it’s being enjoyed.

Get smart with these educational sites - Download Squad has three educational game sites described. They sound as though they’d be of interest to my kids - I’ll have them check out the sites and see.

Callie loves the poem “The Highwayman.” I was delighted to hear Big Bear Butt Blogger: Raid Song of the Week #11 - The Highwayman. Now I need to buy The Highwayman by Loreena McKennitt from the album The Book of Secrets so that she can listen to it at night.

Free They Might Be Giants Podcast For Kids | Geekdad from Wired.com might appeal to my kids.

Big Bear Butt Blogger: Raid Song of the Week #11 - The Highwayman is one of my daughter’s favorite poems. Nothing like a gruesome mutual suicide for love to soothe a six year old to sleep. Mind you, for a while there the best way to get my youngest to sleep was to sing him Cruel Mother, a song where a young lady kills her two children. I think I need sheltering from psychic harm more than my kids do. Won’t someone think of the parents?

Ancient Game Binge: Achi | Geekdad from Wired.com looks like a good game for when the kids are getting impatient while waiting. It would be easy to improvise this with a sheet of paper and a pencil or pen. Now if I can just remember the rules when the time comes…

LEGO Holiday Train | Geekdad from Wired.com looks like it would be a lot of fun. It’s not going to happen this year - maybe next Christmas?

The LEGO City Fire Station would make a great Christmas gift for my sons. Now to see if I can a) find it and b) afford it. There’s also the tricky issue of having the two of them share a gift. Mind you they do get along fairly well when it comes to playing with stuff like this.

ScanCafe will digitize your old slides, negatives and photographic prints at high quality.

I may do something like this at some point as a present to myself. There are a lot of kid pictures that I would love to have in digital format, but scanning them seems like too much work. Ideally I’d also grab some of my parents’ negatives from when I was growing up and get those scanned too. I bet my mother-in-law would love to get all the kids’ pictures that I have for when/if she gets back to scrapbooking.

Building A Basic Work Bench
I wonder how hard it would be to adapt this for a computer desk? On a related note, IKEA: Real furniture kids can build is a good idea for projects for kids. Too bad we don’t have an Ikea nearby - I’d be tempted to get some furniture of the kids to build on dull days in winter.

Weekend Project: Flubber, goop, silly putty, and play dough - oh, my! - Lifehacker looks like a fun activity.