I’m always thrilled at the ingenuity people show in coming up with cheap alternatives to commercial products. Wise Bread’s instructions for making your own moon sand are a great example: a little fine sand, a little cornstarch, a little water, and Presto! Moon sand. I’ll be trying this.
If your kids haven’t played with moon sand […]

I owe this tip to the Kirby vacuum cleaner salesman who visited last spring.  He annoyed the crap out of us and ust would not go away, but I did get one good idea out of it  See, the cleaning product they use in their super-duper $2000 carpet shampooers has a fabric softener in it, […]

So here’s something new I learned today: if you need to have a lipstick stain you want to remove — like, let’s say you have a dog, and maybe he isn’t very bright, and he likes to chew things, and maybe there’s a tween girl living in your home who has a tendency to leave […]

Parent Hacks describes a situation perilously close to what we deal with here:
Both my kids are notoriously tight-lipped about what happens at school. The general answer to “what did you do?” is nothing, and “what was your favorite activity today?” is I don’t remember.
A few weeks ago, I turned to my step-daughter at the […]

Productivity blog The Daily Saint offers some tips on Teaching GTD to Young People. GTD stands for “Getting Things Done”, a productivity system developed by David Allen and detailed in his aptly titled book, Getting Things Done. GTD emphasizes simplicity, keeping the mind clear by keeping lists of tasks that need to be done, and […]

“Always leave on a good note”. This is the advice Lisa Hendry of Productivity @ Home gives in her article Building Confidence in Children.The idea is to always let children finish a project, activity, or whatever with a success, however small — a homework problem done correctly, a goal scored, etc. That way they’ll remember […]

With Halloween coming on strong, here’s some tips to help keep yourself organized and make the most of the craziness:

Photojojo offers some great tips on Halloween photography. Favorites: Take costume pics at dusk, before the light disappears and the sugar rush kicks in making clear shots impossible. Light the outside of your jack-o-lantern with […]

No fair me taking credit for this one since I learned it from the kids’ mother; then again, she can start her own blog, right?
Here’s the hack: we always keep 4 or 5 juice packets (Capri Sun) in the freezer. She started doing it for the kids’ lunches — it would keep everything in […]

Here’s an idea I whipped up when we took a family vacation in August. We were in Utah, doing some hiking and visiting ghost towns and the like, and I was worried about the kids wandering off. The best thing would be an information card tucked into each one’s pockets, but getting thm […]

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, […]