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Parenting Press®Welcome to the August 2011
“News for Parents”
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IN THIS ISSUE
- WHAT’S NEW?
- FEATURES
- POTPOURRI
- COMING ATTRACTIONS
- Celebrate Roald Dahl
- Cut Costs and Calories with Home-Cooking
- Reduce Risk of SIDS with Breastfeeding
I. WHAT’S NEW?
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“Upcycling” and Repurposing for School Clothes
Back-to-school clothes on a budget? You bet! The “News for Parents” staff sometimes spends its lunch break trolling sewing and craft web sites and blogs, and here’s some of the fabulous ideas you can use for fall fashion—especially if your spending is limited to such necessities as shoes and coats.
Restyle a T-shirt into a cardigan. Courtesy of Craft Stylish, a Taunton publication that you’ll find online, here are the how-to’s for “upcycling” a solid-colored T-shirt into a girlish cardigan. What a novel way to turn a hand-me-down boy’s shirt into a lightweight jacket for a smaller girl! Make it a little longer than shown in “Craft Stylish” and let your daughter wear it over a short-sleeved or sleeveless top, with a skirt cut from old jeans. For a heavier jacket, use someone’s outgrown sweatshirt.
Cut a T-shirt into a skirt. Another option: use an adult T-shirt for a skirt. It’s so easy your kids can help! Lay the shirt flat, cut straight across below the sleeves, fold the top over about an inch, stitch, and then insert half-inch elastic that’s long enough to be comfortable around the waist. That’s it! Want something fancier? Shirr the waistline with the how-to’s at the “Sew Like My Mom” blog.
Turn stained into spiffy. If the T-shirts still fit, but they’re stained here and there, consider tie-dying to cover up the stains. Stencils and fabric paint and stamps with permanent ink are other solutions. Still another: appliques, which also cover up small holes.
Transform jeans into jeans skirts. You’ll find clearly illustrated instructions on the web site of the Sewing & Craft Alliance.
Elasticize long legs. If the child inheriting a pair of pants has legs that are much shorter than those of the original owner, consider inserting elastic cord in the pants’ hem allowance. The legs will balloon a little at the ankle like sweat pants do, but the hems won’t drag. If you’re trying this with jeans, it’s easier to insert quarter-inch elastic in one-inch twill tape sewn on to create a casing.
Shrink out sweater holes. You can’t really shrink away holes, but you can sure hide them! If a holey wool or cashmere sweater shows where it’s been repaired, pop it into the washer, run it on a long cycle with hot water, and then set the dryer on “Hot.” Chances are the sweater will shrink and felt so much that the mending won’t show. (Remember, this only works with garments that are 100 percent wool or cashmere.) Now you can pass it down to someone smaller than the original owner.
Wear hearts on your sleeve. With bigger holes, like those on elbows, consider patches if you can find some that won’t make the sleeve too stiff to be comfortable. Rather than the iron-on cloth ovals or the leather patches, consider felting a remnant of wool and hand-sewing it over the worn area. Be as creative as the sweater or jacket owner will let you be! (The “News for Parents” editor is a lefty, and she has discovered that all the hours spent leaning on her left elbow while at the keyboard wear out elbows fast. Her most recently patched sweater now has a heart shape cut from old wool slacks.)
Sew over skinned knees. When kids hit the ground, it’s the knees of their jeans that show it. If you don’t want to see skin showing through shredded denim, rip out a foot or so of the inside seam of the pants leg and position an iron-on patch on the wrong side over the worn fabric. You can sew around the patch for extra durability. If your kids don’t like the stiff iron-on fabric next to their skin, stitch around and across a square of felt for a softer patch.
Show off your travels. Holes in backpacks and tote bags can be covered up fashionably with souvenir patches collected by you, or someone else. (That’s what the editor did when her pooch chewed a hole in canvas, determined to get to some leftover trail mix.)
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Sexting and Other Cyber Traps
The back-to-school wardrobe is a snap compared to confronting cyberspace and what your kids may be doing at school, with free wifi, and at home.
For excellent definitions of sexting, cyberbullying, stalking, plagiarism, gaming additictions and many other technology-related issues encountered even by young children, turn to Cybertraps for the Young, by Frederick S. Lane. In 300-plus pages, Lane packs twenty-three chapters and appendices. Sounds overwhelming, doesn’t it? However, the chapters are short and the language, although oriented to adults, is easy to understand. Many sections are only a page long, so you can turn to a topic that concerns you whenever you have a spare minute or two.
Perhaps most appropriate for parents, school faculty and youth group leaders at this time of year is “Do Network with Friends, Teachers and the School District,” which suggests PTA-sponsored technology update evenings for parents, and inviting local or state police to describe what’s legal and what’s not to students. Another valuable chapter is “A Parent’s Guide to the Communications Revolution,” with its definitions of instant messaging, online chat, texting and social networking sites and its information on the capabilities of the equipment that is used by kids, even by pre-teens.
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Museums Offer Free Admission to Troops and Families
Kids’ museums, art and banjo collections, Mark Twain’s boyhood home and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum: examples of what are open free to active duty military members and their families this summer.
The Blue Star Museums initiative is a partnership among Blue Star Families, the National Endowment for the Arts, and more than 1,000 museums across America. First launched in 2010, Blue Star Museums are offering free admission to active duty military personnel and their families through Labor Day, Sept. 5, 2011. See the web site of the NEA, “Blue Star Museums” for Blue Star Museums participating in each state.
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31 Ways to Enjoy Summer’s End
Some kids have already returned to the classroom, but if yours haven’t, or if you have toddlers and preschoolers still at home most days, here’s how to fill the last summer weekdays, or weekends, with fun.
- Crowd your crew into a photo booth for a series of snapshots. If you can find similar pictures of older family members as children, frame both new and vintage photos together or in similar frames that you can group together.
- Make balloon critters or crowns. A trip to the library for a how-to book, and then a stop at the dime store or drugstore for some skinny balloons, and you’re ready to turn plastic into poodles, swords or headgear.
- Tour your town’s food carts. Find the ice cream truck, or the tortilla wagon, for an impromptu treat. Some cities have so many “roving restaurants” that you can sign up for an e-mail or a text on each day’s location for your favorite truck or cart.
- Make sun prints. Outside or in a sunny window, position something on paper with lots of ink: black or brightly colored. Some cotton fabrics work, too! Hold a large leaf, an arrangement of pressed flowers or paper cut-outs down with a piece of glass or screen, or use heavy objects like shells, rocks, cookie cutters or a string of beads for your design. After a day or two in the light, you’ll see how bright your design is against the now-faded paper.
- Create your own tour guide. What’s special about your neighborhood? About your town? About a place you’re visiting? Make a list of the spots you’d like to see and spend an afternoon visiting them, maybe on a bike ride, or carry a sack lunch to a different one each day. Snap a picture of your family at each one and add a few comments about what you see and what everyone likes best about the spot. In Seattle (where News for Parents is published), some people challenge themselves to find and climb every public stairway (we have lots of steep hills where steps are substituted for streets). Others create lists of the waterfront street ends, the places where streets dead end at lakeshore or seashore.
- Track down tiny museums. Ever heard of a toaster museum? A collection of crank telephones? How about space aliens or barbed wire? Your community may have something as unusual as these public exhibits, or it may have interesting private collections that can be visited. Yard art, for example: some people create sculptures by welding together rusty farm equipment parts, while others build towers and flowers with old glass bottles and jars. Our neighborhood dry cleaners has a window display of vintage irons and soap boxes; some restaurants have model trains that travel the walls of the dining area.
- Tour gardens. You can smell the roses and the mint, touch the lamb’s ears and peek between bamboo stalks at community gardens, conservatories, garden center display beds, college campus medicinal herb gardens, and the sensory planting beds at fairs and botanical gardens. Stop for a quick walk or a picnic lunch and a stroll.
- Feed the ducks. Or the geese. Or the pigeons and seagulls. Grab leftover croutons and pancakes and toss them one at a time at the park, the beach and wherever else it’s permitted. (Remember, many spots are posted with signs like “It’s foul to feed fowl.”)
- Wave at people holding advertising and political signs at street corners and in front of businesses, especially the ones who stand alone (think how much they’ll appreciate a friendly greeting).
- Dress yourselves up! Use what’s in your dress-up and costume box to transform yourselves into clowns, monsters or cartoon characters, or get formal, and hold a tea party for everyone who comes in fancy attire.
- Fill pie irons for an outdoor feast. See pieiron.com for recipes and how-to’s. If you don’t belong to Campfire, Girl Scouts or another group that lends pie irons and you don’t know anyone who owns them, check with your parks department and outdoor gear stores for rentals.
- Cook dessert in a cardboard box oven in your fire pit or one at the park. You’ll find lots of how-to’s when you type “cardboard box oven” in an Internet search engine.
- Decorate edible mud pies with worms. “Dish” into a different dessert when you crumble chocolate wafers for a layer of “dirt” atop chocolate pudding. (Even better if your dishes look like flower pots!) Pop in a sprig of mint for a “seedling” and then add your favorite flavor of gummy worm.
- Pitch a tent in your backyard. Play “camp” during the day, and if your neighborhood is safe enough, cuddle up in sleeping bags when it’s time for lights out.
- Take a tour. What facilities close to home offer “back stage” tours? Your local theater or ball stadium, perhaps? The railroad roundhouse? The historical museum’s costume restoration shop?
- Create rubbings. Tuck a pad of newsprint and soft pencils, chalk or art charcoal in your backpack when you go out for a walk and stop along the way to rub the patterns and type from manhole covers, bricks, plaques, tree bark and wood fences.
- Watch sunrise. Check your daily paper or an online site such as the U.S. Navy’s Astronomical Applications Department page for the official time of sunrise and roll out of bed at least a half hour earlier so you can see dawn break. (For Ames IA, on Aug. 15, sunrise is predicted to be 6:22 a.m. CDT, so consider setting the alarm for about 5:45.)
- Watch moonrise. You’ll find a schedule for your town at the same Navy web site as above. For example, it predicts that moonrise on the 15th in Bennington VT will occur at 20:26 p.m. EDT, or almost 10:30.
- Visit an observatory for a look at the stars. Or check to see if a local astronomy group schedules “open telescope” nights. (See Go Astronomy for a directory of U.S. observatories.)
- Visit a conservatory. The U.S. has many vintage glass structures, as well as modern conservatories where tropical and desert plants are nurtured. For locations near you, try gardenvisit.com and type “conservatory” in the search box.
- Research the history of the name of your street, neighborhood or city. (Guess what fictional character inspired the name of Tarzana CA? Author Edgar Rice Burroughs first gave the name to his nearby ranch.)
- Create your own film festival. Invite your friends in for a week of watching every edition of “King Kong,” or “The Three Musketeers” or all the Betty Boop cartoons you can rent!
- Host a “veggie mouth” contest. We’ve borrowed this idea from Park Seeds, which encourages snapshots of people using curled red peppers as their tongues, green beans as mustaches and carrots as cigars. (More ideas at Park Seed’s web site.)
- Organize a water balloon battle. Boys against girls? Kids against parents? West side of the street vs. the east side? You choose! Designate a line that can’t be crossed by either team and then get out the balloons (or maybe the super squirt guns).
- Build a volcano. A little vinegar, a little baking soda. . .and the how-to’s from an Internet site like About.com.
- Visit a dam or power plant. Hoover Dam in Nevada is one of the best known hydroelectric operations open for tours, but many smaller dams also offer tours. For more information, check with your water company or public utility district, or with the Federal Bureau of Reclamation.
- Hike to a waterfall. Check your library, your local paper or a web site for hikes appropriate for kids that include a stop at a waterfall.
- Take a lesson. Parks departments, community centers, and dance studios occasionally offer free or nominally-priced introductory lessons; so do craft programs and big-box hardware stores.
- Write a “chain” letter. Slit a couple of sheets of notebook paper into rectangles, using the lines as guides, and then write each sentence of your greeting on a different slip of paper. Fasten them together as a chain, and deliver in a box! (What a special way to create a birthday message!)
- Turn boxes into tunnels, garages and houses. Build an oatmeal box tunnel for your Matchbox cars and turn a shoe box into their garage. Lego people can live in salt box towers and dolls in cottages cut from the cartons in which your catalog order arrived.
- Draw a calendar. Map the time from Labor Day to New Year’s with a continuous calendar decorated with drawings or stickers for all the events you look forward to: school starting, fair time, harvest festivals, Halloween, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, the winter solstice—maybe even Leif Erikson Day!
II. FEATURES
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Tips for the month
Each Saturday, Parenting Press posts a new parenting tip and the previous week’s tip is moved to the archive.
As we prepare for a new school year, here are some timely suggestions from our tip archive on values.
August 6 — When Your Child Admires an Unsuitable Role Model
August 13 — Lots of Enrichment Activities: Good or Bad?
August 20 — Valuing Intelligence in Children
August 27 — Teach Your Child How to Say No to Alcohol or Other Drugs
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Family Fun Ideas — Field Trips to Farmers’ Markets
Fresh peaches and berries, locally-made ice cream and a scone or cinnamon roll: just a few of the reasons to plan an hour or so at a nearby farmers’ market. Yours may also have musicians and mimes performing, a bunny or lamb to pet, honeycombs to watch and cooking demonstrations. Shop for a snack as well as for supper! To find markets near you, or where you’re traveling, start with Local Harvest, which allows you to search by city, state or ZIP code.
A quick online search showed us that you’ll find produce, flowers, plants, eggs, honey and so much more on Saturdays in Nacogdoches TX and Rochester MN, on Mondays in San Francisco and Wednesdays in Park City UT. (For communities not listed on Local Harvest, try your county extension office.)
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Community Service — Food Bank Benefit
Our goal with this column is to suggest ways that you can model the concept of sharing and giving back to your community. There are practical advantages to community service, too. Kids can use these projects to meet school or youth group requirements for community service and to start building resumes that they’ll use when applying for first jobs or college.
This month, when you may already be sorting through outgrown clothes and books in preparation for the new school year, encourage your kids to organize a yard sale to benefit your local food bank. Given the emphasis on school-affiliated charities this time of year, your food pantry may be lacking all that it needs to provide nutritious breakfasts and dinners for children, adults and pets. Especially if there are lots of old dishes, pots and pans to sell, your kids can use a slogan like, “Buy our dishes so others can fill their plates.” A variation: the yard sale merchandise might be priced both in dollars and cents and in terms of canned and packaged goods. For example, used soccer cleats might be tagged, “$2 or one can tuna” and a glass vase, “$1 or one package pasta.”
III. POTPOURRI
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Special of the month — Warehouse Sale!
This special has expired.
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