Archive for the ‘Product Raves’ Category

In Praise of the Plastic Wastebasket

Monday, February 13th, 2012

In my bedroom, we have a nice wooden wastebasket that, more-or-less, matches my parents’ antique dressers.  It was a good find at Costco some years ago.  For the kids, however, I’m not interested in anything other than an inexpensive plastic wastebasket.  Sure, it’s tacky and cheap looking and maybe even bad for the environment, but there’s a very good reason I wouldn’t have anything else.

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Hot Lunches Without the Headache

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

For a long time, my kids would have nothing to do with sandwiches.  Me, I love a good sandwich — nice sourdough, some garlic sauce, lots of onions — but there’s no telling what your kids will like or dislike.  And mine didn’t like sandwiches.  So we had to come up with something else to put in their school lunches.  If only, we thought, there were some way they could have a nice hot lunch every day at school without us having to show up at lunchtime to cook it for them.  Luckily, we found such a way.

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Avoiding the Sun, Aussie Style

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

In addition to the issue of general water safety and that whole not-letting-the-kids-drown thing, there is another issue that needs to be dealt with these days — sun protection.  Sunburn is no laughing matter, even if it doesn’t always lead to skin cancer — it’s bloody painful in its own right.  As parents, it’s part of our job to keep our children safe and that includes making sure they are not exposed to too much sun.

If just staying indoors isn’t an option (and, truthfully, would you want to be stuck in the house all summer with your kids?) then sunscreen is an absolute must.  But for the parts that don’t get sunscreen, is a t-shirt and swim trunks enough?  Perhaps — and perhaps not.  A lightly woven, wet t-shirt doesn’t really offer that much protection.  So what can one do, short of staying indoors?
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