Readers of StepDadding might be interested in a post I wrote for lifehack.org as a kind of remedy for the rampant consumerism of “Black Friday”: Teaching Kids Charity and Clarity with Pre-Christmas Cleaning. The idea is one I got from my brother and sister-in-law (and they got it from who-knows-where) — go through your kids’ […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]