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The World Through Two Year Old Eyes - False Advertising

This morning the girls sat down at the table to enjoy their breakfast. Erin brought to the table a box of Life cereal & some milk.

Kassidy looked at the box and proclaimed in her excited, yet sweet tone, "Strawberries! I want the strawberries!"

It took me a minute to figure out where the comment came from, but when I finally followed her eyes, I saw that she was looking at the cereal box. Shown in the spoon and in the bowl on the front of the box are lipstick red strawberries, floating gingerly on the top of the cereal.

It's surprisingly sad to see a young child learn the reality that the message doesn't always represent the product behind it.

The World Through Two Year Old Eyes - Citrus In the Toilet

I've gotten into the habit of taking my vitamins at night before I go to bed. One of the vitamins I take has a high concentration of B2. B2 has a unique ability to make urine a very deep yellow.

Like most people, one of my first priorities after getting out of bed in the morning is to relieve my bladder. This morning, Kassidy burst into the bathroom as I was finishing my duty, peered into the toilet and proclaimed, "Orange juice!"

"Daddy, why are you flushing the orange juice down the toilet?", she asked.

And I've always just looked at pee as a useless waste to deserving only of a flush.

Give Less Trashy Gifts This Christmas

We (you, I and the rest of America) will generate an additional 25 million pounds of trash this year between Thanksgiving Day and New Year's Day. A large portion of that trash is in the form of product packaging, wrapping paper and Christmas decorations (trees, wreaths, crappy garland that we have to toss after one year of use, etc.). When I learned that fac tonight on NPR (National Public Radio), I thought it worthwhile to share the commentators ideas, as well as a few of my own, on ways to reduce trash this Christmas:

• Buy a live potted Christmas tree and plant it outside in the spring
• Wrap gifts in something you're going to throw away anyway, like paper grocery bags (kids would enjoy making those ugly brown bags look festive). Heck, I wouldn't care if my presents (presumptious, aren't I?) come wrapped in newspaper.
• Give gift cards. :)
• Use gift bags instead of wrapping paper since many people (Grandma, I'm thinking about you) like to reuse them
• Forego Christmas cards for 1/2 the people on your regular list and call those people instead. They'd probably rather talk to you anyway.

That is the list of ideas I came up with in the final two miles of my commute home tonight. Here are sights with a few other ideas:

http://www.ciwmb.ca.gov/PublicEd/Holidays/NoWaste.htm - Some decent tips, some dumb ones, too

http://use-less-stuff.com/ULSDAY/42ways.html

http://www.buynothingchristmas.org/index.html (Wow, extreme, but maybe worth a try?)

http://www.etsy.com/ - A cool site for people to buy (and sell) handmade products of all types. Who wouldn't want a couple of these guys for Christmas?

http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv/dc_occasions_december/article/0,,HGTV_3472_5565877,00.html - Some decent tips that are more practical for those who might just want to dip their toes into the green Christmas water

 

 

Peanut Butter Cups

As a kid, and even a college student (and even at that point I was still a kid by Henry Link's definition), my Grandpa & Grandma Wood always had peanut butter cups at their house when I visited. I love peanut butter cups.

I never gave it much thought as a youngster and I suppose that I just assumed my grandparents always kept peanut butter cups in their house. I think I know better now.

Thank you for all of the peanut butter cups, G&G. But more importantly, thank you for the memories that always bring a smile to my face.

 

When will I know I've succeeded raising my kids right?

I don't have a clue, really. But one quote that I recently read provides at least a beginning foundation upon which I can define some goals:

"Psychologically I should say that a person becomes an adult at the point when he produces more than he consumes or earns more than he spends. This may be a the age of eighteen, twenty-five, or thirty-five. Some people remain unproductive and dependent children forever and therefore intellectually and emotionally immature.” - Henry Link

Christmas gift ideas

Since several of you have asked for gift ideas for the girls, I've put together this short list of ideas.

http://www.jasonsherrill.com/articles/950.aspx

 

Christmas tree fun

I shed my scrooge cap and decided to host a dead tree in my house this Christmas season. We burned a few gallons of gas to drive to a tree farm in Applegate, MI with Sammy & family on the Friday after Thanksgiving. The farm is for sale, so I think they're letting the trees grow wild since few of them appear that they've been pruned recently, but we did end up finding one that passed Erin's criteria. What else can I say about cutting down a Christmas tree? You're right, nothing interesting, so here are the pics.

 

 

First Halloween outing for the girls

Halloween 2007 is now officially over and the girls are now recovering from their sugar hangover (is it possible to have a hangover from the one Hershey's Kiss that I let them eat tonight?). They (we) trick-or-treated in Dryden with Mary Rose and while expected they'd be bored after two houses, they surprised us by visiting about 20 houses. Kassidy wore out before Sydney, so Sydney's candy bucket weighs a bit more, but there's plenty of butt fertilizer for us all to enjoy for the next week.

Here are some pics:

 

 

 

Are you feeling stupid? Maybe you didn't get enough sleep when you were young.

Here's an article with fascinating research results on how lack of sleep physically alters kids' brains. This is one of the most interesting paragraphs in the entire article:

"Dr. Avi Sadeh of Tel Aviv University is one of the authorities in the field. A couple of years ago, Sadeh sent 77 fourth-graders and sixth-graders home with randomly drawn instructions to either go to bed earlier or stay up later for three nights. .................

.................Sadeh needn’t have worried. The effect was indeed measurable—and sizable. The performance gap caused by an hour’s difference in sleep was bigger than the normal gap between a fourth-grader and a sixth-grader. Which is another way of saying that a slightly sleepy sixth-grader will perform in class like a mere fourth-grader. “A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development,” Sadeh explains."

Another little tidbit of research that will make you think:

"Convinced by the mountain of studies, a handful of school districts around the nation are starting school later in the morning. The best known of these is in Edina, Minnesota, an affluent suburb of Minneapolis, where the high school start time was changed from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30. The results were startling. In the year preceding the time change, math and verbal SAT scores for the top 10 percent of Edina’s students averaged 1288. A year later, the top 10 percent averaged 1500, an increase that couldn’t be attributed to any other variable. “Truly flabbergasting,” said Brian O’Reilly, the College Board’s executive director for SAT Program Relations, on hearing the results."

Halloween is just around the corner

We finally got around to carving our pumpkins tonight. Here's a quick photo summary of the events, in reverse chronological order, leading up to pumpkin carving.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What's with the DonorsChoose widget in the sidebar?

DonorsChoose.org is an organization that helps school teachers find funding for classroom projects that regular school budgets cannot cover. It's pretty simple and works like this:

1. Teachers post their project funding requests
2. DonorsChoose.org validates the request
3. Regular people like you contribute money to fund the project

I've found some projects that I think are worthy of funding and I'm inviting you to help these teachers create new opportunities for their students. If you don't like any projects that I've selected, that's ok, there are thousands of other projects that need funding and I'll bet that at least one will be near & dear to your heart.

Second vehicle rolls 200,000 miles this weekend

While driving south on M-24 in Lapeer, the Intrepid became our second vehicle to roll 200,000 miles.

 

Repairs in that 200,000 miles:

• Replaced EGR valve twice
• Replaced transmission output speed sensor
• Replaced power window motor on driver's side front door

Slick site helps you stay on top of price drops after you purchase

PriceProtectr.com is a nifty service that helps you take advantage of price protection guarantees from about 30 online retailers, like Amazon.com and Target.com. To use the service, you simply paste a link to the product you purchased, enter the price you paid (if it's different from the price that priceprotectr.com retrieves) and then add your email address. If the price changes within 30 days, PriceProtectr.com will email you so that you can contact the store to get your price difference refund.

The site saved me $9.00 last week by notifying me that the price of The Dip had dropped $3.00 since I ordered it two weeks ago (I ordered multiple copies to give away).

Orange Juice & Pulp in Space

I like orange juice that contains lots of pulp. I always have to shake my orange juice vigorously before opening since all of the pulp settles to the bottom if it's been sitting for more than a few minutes.

If I were in space, would I ever have to shake my orange juice?

Jason's Favorite "Must Have" Products for the Kitchen

Playing around with my Amazon Associate's account tonight, I learned that I could create an aStore to highlight all of my favorite goodies. So in the spirit of Oprah's favorite crap, er things, here's my list of favorite goodies.