Lois Lowry’s young adult novel The Giver is a truly amazing book. Winner of the Newberry Award in 1994, The Giver tells the story of a utopian society located somewhere (somewhen?) in the future where lying is forbidden, competition is eliminated, everyone knows exactly where they belong, and death is unknown.
Or so it seems. […]

This is brilliant: a simple mnemonic device for kids to learn how to set a table correctly. FORK and LEFT both have four letters; KNIFE, SPOON, and RIGHT all have five. So the fork goes on the left, the knife and spoon on the right. What’s more, they’re in alphabetical order: (F)ork, (K)nife, […]

If you haven’t already, you must subscribe to the TWiT podcast Jumping Monkeys. Hosted by Leo Laporte (of TechTV fame, more recently the proprietor of the TWiT network of tech podcasts) and Megan Morrone (also of TechTV) discuss the joys and perils of parenting in the Internet era. They discuss current news stories, interview prominent […]

The Simple Dollar is a personal finance blog, but every Sunday they offer long, in-depth reviews of personal development books. This week, they reviewed The Read-Aloud Handbook, a book about (as you can probably guess) reading loud to your children. It looks like a fantastic book. Listen:
First, and this is the big one, […]

FinanceIsPersonal.com offers up some advice for cutting your grocery bills. The advice is good enough, but I doubt it will help much. One thing I disagree with is that Wal-Mart is cheapest — there’ve been a couple of studies that show very little savings on the overall grocery bill between Wal-Mart and other […]

As the step-father of a “tween” girl — and as a professor of Women’s Studies — I’m deeply concerned about the way “girly” expectations are not just imposed on girls but crammed down their throats (or, better yet, not crammed down their throats, because eating is totally outré for girls these days). Andrea Learned, […]

This is such a good idea: family business cards. The idea is simple: have cards printed up with all your family contact information on them — names, address, cell phone numbers and mail addresses, the whole shebang. Then hand them out when you met new people, arrange play dates or sleepovers, or need people to […]

At the end of last year, I became a step-dad. I’m the kind of person that has an intense curiosity about anything new I do. Being a modern, web-savvy kind of guy (read: “geek”) I set out to do some reading up on stepdadding on the Web. Alas, there’s not much out there. […]