Beauty

Made to Play! Handmade Toys & Crafts for Growing Imaginations is the new book by Joel Henriques, the creative father behind www.madebyjoel.com.

We all get in a creativity rut with lifes moving at warp speed, keeping us on your toes with the practical logistics of the day - school, work, homework, etc. But by keeping things simple and materials easy, the 35 toy and craft projects shared in this book can help families nuture their creativity through the long winter months ahead. The projects are straightforward and include concepts, templates, and materials list.

Our favorites so far are: “Exploration Cape,” “Wooden Bead Drum,” “Slotted Building Disks” and especially the “Scrap Wood Dollhouse and Furniture.”

Need a kick to get started? Check out Joel’s art and YouTube videos of him at work.

Available at Amazon.com and Indepedent Booksellers

We are also reading:

* Start Fresh: Your Child’s Jump Start to Lifelong Healthy Eating by Tyler Florence

* Meditaton for Multitaskers: You Guide to Finding Peace Between Pings
by David Dillard-Wright, PhD

* Boy Wonders by Calef Brown (Ages 4-8)

When you’re pregnant, there are things that happen to most people: like having a keen sense of smell or being suddenly turned off by a familiar food. Then there are things that happen to lots of people, but not everybody, like your feet staying a larger size after pregnancy, or morning sickness. Then there are things that you’ve probably never heard of. Unless they happened to you. Such as:

Fun With Hair: Along with the well-known hair-thickening properties of pregnancy (which occurs because hair on your head ceases to fall out), your hair can change texture, from curly to straight or vice versa. Hair can suddenly spring up where it never grew before (hello new moustache!), or it can virtually stop growing: many pregnant women notice they no longer need to shave their legs as often to keep them hair-free.

Leg cramps: Waking up in the middle of the night with screaming charley horses? Try adding more potassium to your diet (bananas, oranges) and drinking more. Which will be followed by more waking up to pee in the night. You can’t win. There’s another disorder called Restless Leg Syndrome that is exactly what it sounds like, and disproportionately affects pregnant women.

Your ladyparts turn dark: Nipples, areolas, labia, all can change from light pink to deep brown. An increase in blood and blood vessels is the culprit; “deep wine” is usually the description for the labia of a woman who is pregnant or has given birth. They may revert back to their old color or not.

Skin problems: Oh, so many things can happen. Your palms and feet can turn red and itchy. You get skin tags, you get freckles, you get moles and age spot. Maybe you’ll get a pregnancy mask, and maybe it’ll go away and maybe it won’t. You get zits, you get spider veins, you get varicose veins — sometimes even in your labia! Oh, good times.

What am I, Pinocchio?: Your nose can grow during pregnancy. Sometimes it reverts to its old size after you give birth, other times, not so much.

Image source: Flickr member ulybug under Creative Commons

In July of this year, the authors of NurtureShock, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, wrote a piece for Newsweek entitled “Creativity Crisis.”

They address the issue of creativity and how, for the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. They cite research from Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary who found creativity scores have consistently and significantly inched downward since 1990. Parents might be interested to learn that it is the scores of younger children in America – from K through 6th grade – where the decline is the most serious.

Increased time spent watching TV, on computers, and playing video games is most likely part of the problem. The article also points out that our schools are heavily concerned with curriculum items which leaves no additional time for activities specific to nurturing creativity in children. At a time when schools across our country have suffered due to budget cuts, we might need to pay close attention at home to our children’s creativity development.

We have shared many great titles throughout the year so far that are concerned with fostering creativity as a family:

* The Creative Family
* 31 Ways to Change the World
* Made by Hand
* Handy Dad
* Make it Wild: 100 Things to Make and Do Outdoors

Here are more great reads that will help inspire your children to enhance their growing creativity.

Create Your Own World! Doodle and Draw by Todd Parr
Kids are led on a journey to create a unique planet all their own with this immense coloring book with ample space for invention. Kids conceive and design food, creatures, clothing, games, nature and much more for their distinctive world.
Available at Amazon.com

Make These Toys: 101 Clever Creations Using Everyday Items by Heather Swain
Unplug with your kids for the afternoon and build basic toys using simple items from around the house. The projects are simple, the book has helpful illustrations, and your kids might just be inspired to add their own personal twist on boats, banjos, and tambourines.

Available at Amazon.com

Beautiful Oops by Barney Saltzberg
Children will love learning the lesson of “It’s okay to make a mistake” with this truly original interactive book. Spills, rips, bends, and drips are nothing less than an opportunity for beauty. As children learn to be creative forces in their work and life, having the confidence to move beyond mistakes is indispensable.

Available at Amazon.com

The watches work similarly to traditional timepieces. One of the faces keeps time. The other dial is set (with an easy one-hand winding motion, simple to do when your baby’s on the breast) when your baby breastfeeds, including a setting that tells you which breast the baby fed from last. That dial doesn’t move unless you advance it, making it easy to compare with the face above. “Oh my God, honey, it’s 4 a.m. and the baby hasn’t fed since 2. Wake him up! Wake him up!” No. Don’t wake him up.

Con Leche Lucia Watch, $99

It’s no secret to the parents of little girls that bubble bath is not kind to their vaginas. Immediately after a bubble bath, many girls feel irritated and itchy, a sensation that can linger for days and even sometimes develop into an infection of some sort. Boy parts, thankfully, aren’t as tender, but boy skin is: both boys and girls can suffer from dry skin or eczema after bubble baths.

As it turns out, the bubbles are fun, the stuff used to produce the foaming action, not as much. The culprit is usually something called sodium lauryl sulfate (a.k.a. sodium laurilsulfate, sodium dodecyl sulfate, sodium lauryl ether sulfate, this stuff gets around), which is a detergent and surfactant found in just about anything that foams, from cleansing products to toothpastes. It does make a nice long-lasting white foamy froth. It also irritates skin, particularly when kids sit in it for a long time.

So ditch the bubbles for bath bombs instead, which make a gentle, fun baking soda fizz that won’t hurt later. Good Clean Fun’s Dino-Fizz is a particularly kid-friendly option, with an intriguing smooth egg that foams away, leaving a little “hatched” sponge dinosaur floating on the water’s surface. That’ll get those kids in the bath without complaint!

Good Clean Fun Dino-Fizz, $2

I can’t be the only one to notice that a lot of nursing accouterments are a little…fetishy. I mean, those pumping bustiers? Paging HR Giger!

And why not? It’s hard enough feeling sexual when your body is dripping strange fluids and marked with new sags and stretch marks. Not to mention that Baby is getting most, if not all, of your attention in the Breastfeeding Era. Why not give Daddy and Mommy a lil thrill? Don’t hide those hard-working funbags behind some ugly nursing cami; wear a peek-a-boo Milkshirt under your sweater.

Yep, just like a vintage nipple-less creation from Frederick’s of Hollywood (hey! now there’s a breastfeeding solution!), Milkshirts have strategically located holes. Pull up your shirt and it’s business time. Whatever business you want to do, that is.

Milkshirts in black (also available in white), $20

Every parent worries about who can find their kid online. But Geoffrey Arone, co-founder and co-CEO of Internet monitoring service SafetyWeb, says that what can be an even bigger concern in the fullness of time is not who can get to your kid, but the traces of himself he leaves behind.

“This is the first generation of kids growing up with a log file,” says Arone. “You wouldn’t believe the things you can find about kids, just doing a Google search. If they won the spelling bee, if they played on a sports team, it’s out there. And so are networking profiles from years ago that they set up and forgot about.”

It’s a parent’s nightmare: what if on these old profiles, something your kid said or did comes back to haunt her later?

With such concerns in mind, Arone and company set up SafetyWeb to chaperone kids in a unique way. When parents visit SafetyWeb, they type in their kid’s email address. SafetyWeb then searches social networking sites for your kid’s profile, and for activity. If your kid uploaded a photo to Flickr, you’ll know. If your child made a new friend on Facebook, you’ll see it. Parents who decide to join SafetyWeb ($10 a month, $100 a year), get regular reports on what their kids have said and done online. Everything that’s in the public domain (not hidden away behind some kind of password), is visible, and anything that might concern parents, such as text containing curses, or Facebook friends whose profile reveals them to be much older than your child, is flagged in the reports sent to parents.

It’s not an invasion of privacy: The only things parents can see are what’s public. SafetyWeb won’t capture texts sent from your tween’s phone, and you won’t be able to see her email. SafetyWeb is about giving parents the knowledge they need to guide their kids through the Internet’s wilds.

“We can’t guarantee your kids won’t make mistakes, but if it’s in the pubic domain, we’ll find anything risky to your child’s safety, privacy, or reputation,” says Arone.

Your burgeoning belly garners you plenty of attention, so when your headlights are on it can make you want to run and hide. Many’s the pregnant woman cursed with erect nipples throughout the gestation, and there are many options to hold ‘em down.

While the low-tech simply use round bandages, there are a whole bunch of nipple pads on the market, to be worn inside the bra or pasted right onto your breasts: Bezi Bra Discs, Low Beams, Hollywood No-Shows, Sassynips, etc. Some are disposable, running about $2-5 per pair (what a rip!), others are reusable.

There are also bras with special “concealing petals” for the hard-nippled. Check out the offerings from Bali in a range of utilitarian black and white and Victoria’s Secret Ipex bras, which are both prettier and flimsier.

Oh, and by the way: if your belly button pops out embarrassingly too, there’s at least one product on the market designed to combat it: Miss Oops Popper Stoppers, a steep $13 for five bandage-like covers.

At what age should a child be able to remove his glass eye and use the socket as a bottle-opener? When is it appropriate to plunder the neighbors, after or before family dinner? How can one turn an unassuming minivan into a pirate schooner? All these questions and more are answered in this complete Guide to Pirate Parenting, probably the only parenting guide you’ll ever read that neither has an opinion on sleep training nor time-outs.

There is advice both out-there (how to remove an octopus from your child’s hair) and strangely sensible: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to be a pirate, and he’ll steal other people’s fish for a lifetime.” There are pirate-themed nursery rhymes, checklists to chart your pirate’s developmental progress, and even suggestions for pirate-compliant discipline methods, such as smacking your teen in the head with an oar. Somehow this seems like a much more appropriate bridal-shower gift than one of Dr. Sears’ enormous tomes.

Guide to Pirate Parenting, $11.99

Most modern baby gear is cute and practical, but hardly worth holding on to.

For something more meaningful and lasting, check out the baby collection from Beekman 1802, a 200-year-old upstate New York farm turning out artisanal soaps and linens. Handmade 100-percent pure cotton swaddling cloths and bath blankets are woven by an award-winning master weaver and available in four colors inspired by historical dying techniques. An 8×8 inch washcloth is also hand-loomed and features a waffle weave for absorbency and softness. Pair it with the farm’s baby soap (a six-pack of chemical-free goat’s milk bars laced with soothing calendula to calm delicate skin) for a unique shower gift.

Heirloom-quality construction makes these linens keepers that can be passed down from generation to generation — and offers a far better legacy for your wee one than a onesie.

Available at beekman1802.com.