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• Ballpark Perks for Parents Rock (or Rox)

  There are few things I enjoy as much on a summer afternoon as a good baseball game. I admit to being more of a cultural fan than someone who has the slightest idea what the infield fly rule actually is, as I tend to be there more for the atmosphere and excitement than the actual game play. But sipping a cool drink under the warm sun, watching nine innings go by is one of the best ways I can think of to spend time in the nice weather. And I have been to exactly two games since my daughter was born. Part of it is my team actually ceased to suck there for awhile, so my season-ticket-holding connections were avidly seeking more tickets instead of trying to palm off the ones  they had.  But the major reason is Read More... Posted Apr 24 2008, 09:03 AM by Amy Kuras with | with no comments Filed under: Baseball, family activities, ballpark, brockton rox, minor leagues, parent perks

• T.V. Dinners - Eating While Watching Not As Bad As We Thought

  You want the good news, or the bad news first?  Okay, first the bad:  It's not ideal to regularly eat in front of the television.  Now, the good news: eating in front of the television is not as bad as we had previously thought. (Hear that?  That's the sound of millions of families turning up their television sets as they breathe a sigh of relief....) Read More... Posted Oct 17 2007, 08:38 AM by Alisyn with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: healthy eating, dinner, family activities, t.v., family life, eating with T.V., university of minnesota, kids eating habits

• Sunday Night is Family Night

  I remember Sunday evenings as a kid... Listening as my parents moved around in the kitchen assembling a meal of some kind while we kids cozied up and watched "Wonderful World of Disney." Sunday nights were a time of relaxing family togetherness, before the weekly busyness overtook us and left us frazzled, cranky, and all tired out by Friday evening. Read More... Posted Sep 30 2007, 07:04 PM by Rachael Brownell (Redsy) with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: busy families, family activities, rituals, sunday nights, cozy sunday

• Enter, Impregnate and Win!

  Couples in the central Russian region of Ulyanovsk will be given time off work today to go make baby. Those who wind up pregnant after this state-sanctioned booty call may qualify to win a UAZ-Patriot, which is a locally made SUV (buckle up!), provided mom gives birth on June 12, Russia’s national day. Winners of the grand prize (the SUV, silly, not a healthy baby) will be selected based on “respectability” and “commendable parenting.” Like working it for time off and a four-wheel drive? Ulyanovsk’s mayor started the incentive program a few years ago to build up his town’s dwindling supply of people. Last year, 500 couples signed up for the day off to get it on, increasing the local population by 78 (and one UAZ-Patriot). Break out the Stoli! We’re having some babies!   Posted Sep 12 2007, 11:30 AM by Madeline Holler with | with no comments Filed under: family planning, family activities, Russia, family values, population

• Family and Enviro-Friendly Bike Share Programs Sweeping The Globe

  If you are lucky enough to live in Paris, Barcelona, Stockholm, Oslo, Amsterdam, or a half dozen or so other European cities, you have probably been reaping the benefits of your hometown's bike sharing program for years.  But here in the U.S., such programs are just getting started in progressive cities like New York, Portland, OR, and Berkeley, and are off to a great start.  Typically, users pay a membership fee, locate the nearest bike via the web, ride off into the sunset, and then drop the bike off at the same station or a different one.  The programs are underwritten by companies that put advertising on the bikes.  The cost of the program pales in comparison to adding to freeways or extending subway lines, and is an environmentally friendly way to get around, not to mention a great way to get, and stay, in shape.  Kids bikes aren't yet part of the program, but kid seats and trailers can be easily attached and detached, making biking fun and easy for the whole family.  Grassroots bike share movements are popping up all over - does your city have a bike share program?  If so, do you use it?  If not, what would it take to get you on a bike? Posted Jul 20 2007, 10:19 AM by Alisyn with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: bikes, family activities, biking, environmentally friendly transportation, bike share programs

• Board Games That Might Not Bore You. I Mean, Are Great for the Whole Fam!

  If I have to play a game of golf with my kid, the one where I inevitably get the broken foamy club, or a round of Simon Says where every single command begins "Simon says," for the rest of my God-given parental life, then please kill me now. It's not that I'm a stickler for the rules or a game hater. It's just that as much as some of us want to let our inner children soar during Red Light, Green Light and Candyland,  quality family times can sometimes be mind-numbingly dull. Give me a board game that doesn't have 8,000 pieces that are sure to end up in someone's esophagus or buried in the carpeting, has a theme that doesn't feature licensed characters and something to do that will be fun for longer than 30 seconds. After all, we're TRYING TO BOND as a family here, people! Maybe staying relatively alert and engaged will be a bit easier with this list of new family-friendly games where the fun and challenge might actually include you. Cranium Zooreka looks to be a classic board game with funny twists and an eco-theme that even includes gorilla babies. Who can resist gorilla babies? I Spy With My Eagle Eye is one I think my toddler would love and seems like a great game to throw in the carry-on for trips. Nerdy Wordy would be fun for kids beginning to grasp spelling and reading and older and is sure to bring out the crazy logophile in every geeky parent. Posted Jun 27 2007, 03:03 PM by Jessica Ashley (Sassafrass) with | with 7 comment(s) Filed under: games, family activities

• Family Surfing: A Site We Like

  There's debate over the benefits of family video game playing and T.V. watching, but around our house, we surf together. The internets. You know, we use the Google to find stuff we like, and then gather around the monitor as a snuggly family, screen light reflecting off our pasty faces, and we laugh. I think I've seen almost every wacky kitten video ever posted on Youtube. The current favorite is Cute Overload. Lots of baby animals, pets wearing clothes, strange interspecies co-mingling, and so on. We wuv the widdle animals, oh yes we do. In fact, every time I try to sneak off to fold laundry or make dinner, I hear, "Mom! C'mere!" or "Sweetie, you've got to see this kitten and turtle. Awwwwww."  Someday I may actually get my laptop back to do actual work. And since many of these things have no audio, there's real human interactions happening too. How 1900's! I doubt this is messing with our child's social skills, unless people actually expect her to make eye contact. Posted Jun 27 2007, 11:05 AM by Kelly Mills with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: video games, internet safety, family activities, television watching, kid activities

• A Family that Drags Together, Stays Together?

  Family fun group activities to me have always meant playing Sorry, or swimming, or playing water polo, or reading scriptures (I was raised Mormon). But for the Plaizier family, fun means drag racing.  Papa Plaizier, a legendary Funny Car driver, is joined this year by daughter Ashley, while sisters Brittany and Courtney compete in a different class within the same sport. Shared family activities are sometimes difficult to cultivate, and when your kids are young (too young really yet for organized sports) it's hard to imagine the day when you'll be cheering on the sidelines of a soccer game.  But stories like this give me hope (and something to look forward to.)   Posted May 28 2007, 01:02 PM by Rachael Brownell (Redsy) with | with no comments Filed under: family activities, family sports, drag racing, funny cars

• Addams Family Becomes a Musical. Hooray!

  Producers have announced they'll turn the Addams Family into a musical. While some might feel this is a Hair-brained idea, that it will make a Miserables show, and that any commercial version of the Charles Addams drawings is only a Phantom of the great cartoonist's work, I was happier than a bag of Cats to hear about this. I even made my special Funny Face, the one I make when I get really good news. Too bad this one won't come out until 2009 or so. Nope, no need to slap me. I'll just go calm myself. Mommy needs a little sleep. Okay, back. I'm thrilled about this, because I love a good musical, and I bet Addams Family will lend itself better to the musical format than so many of the stories I hear about, like, "We're going to make a musical out of Sophie's Choice." The macabre always makes for a good song-and-dance number: the Buffy musical, anyone? By the way, in case you have a love of Addams Family things, the movies are not so good for little kids (or adults, despite the fact that I heart Raul Julia) but the board game rocks. We play it constantly. Posted May 25 2007, 10:02 AM by Kelly Mills with | with no comments Filed under: games, family activities, musicals, addams family

• MythBusters: Just Part of Raising a Geek

  As utter dork parents, we are doing our darndest to make our daughter the kind of kid who will play Dungeons and Dragons, correct her teacher during the physics lesson, join the drama club, and have thick tape holding her glasses together. In other words, we are grooming her for total geekdom. As my better half said recently, "It's gonna make the whole dating thing so much easier on us." Therefore I was pleased to see other parents encouraging the same kind of behavior. Geekdad from the ubergeek source, Wired, put in a plug for kids watching one of our favorite shows, MythBusters. We adore this program because the hosts are appropriately hilarious, cute, and dorky; they encourage experimentation and skepticism; and best of all, they blow lots of shit up. Heh heh, cool. I, like Geekdad, highly recommend this program for all ages. In fact, we just turned my engineer stepfather onto the show, and now he watches it religiously. Explosions and critical thinking for the whole family served up by funny people: what more could you want? I'll also give a shout-out to another one of the dork programs we watch as a unit, called How It's Made. It's a completely straightforward look at how, um, stuff is made. They cover everything from a crayon factory to fish husbandry with the same unflappable delivery and bad puns. It's low tech and literal and Canadian and we like it. See? You can learn things from television. Posted May 07 2007, 08:31 AM by Kelly Mills with | with 6 comment(s) Filed under: children's television, family activities, Wired, Mythbusters

• Baby Loves Disco: The Family-Friendly Dance Party is in Full-Swing for Spring

  The Baby Loves Disco dance party phenomenon is sweeping the nation, and chances are, if you live in a big city and have kids, you've heard parents extolling its groovin' music, breastfeeding-friendly "chill-out zones," and organic snacks. If not? Click here. This weekend, Baby Loves Disco heads south to kick off their Atlanta shindig at the Loft where there are plenty of tickets available. The rain in the Pacific Northwest can't stop (won't stop) the music. The shows in Portland and Seattle are sold out this weekend, but if you feel like road trippin', there are still tickets available for the San Francisco event on Saturday at Ruby Skye. Get 'em while they're hot! See you at the disco!  No, really! I'm goin'! Cuz there's nothing I love more than wrangling two kids hopped up on juice boxes dancing with scarves when they should be napping. No whining, baby. No whining on the dance floor... Posted Apr 17 2007, 11:01 AM by Stefania Pomponi Butler (CityMama) with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: baby loves disco, families, family activities, dance party

• TV Dinners Bad for More Than Your Brain

  Plopping the fam in front of the TV during dinner time does more than dull any type of conversation. It can actually make your kids unhealthy. A recent health survey shows kids who eat with their families in front of the television eat fewer fruits and vegetables. Turn off the tube, however, the veggie intake soars. And here I thought dinner-time TV was a bad idea because the only thing on at the time is usually umimportant things like the news. In short, the survey of 1,300 families with preschoolers showed that family dinner time = good -- while family dinner time + TV = bad. Just wait till the World Series and we'll see how quickly that equation changes. Posted Apr 12 2007, 10:31 AM by Mike Adamick (Cry It Out!) with | with no comments Filed under: family dinners, dinner, study, bad habits, family activities

• Can You Be a TV-Free Family? Just a Week?

  The Wall Street Journal's must-read parenting blog, The Juggle, is doing the unthinkable, the unconscionable -- going TV-free for a week. The reason? TV is a life-sucking force that leaves you up later and later and later until, finally, you're watching informercials at 3 a.m. and wondering who on earth will wake up with the kid in just a few hours. OK, so maybe it's not that bad. But it can be quite addictive. Just like The Juggle, my wife finds herself sucked into an extra 20 minutes here, 20 minutes there, and before you know it -- that cry-a-thon known as "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" has turned into "Iron Chef America" followed by the news and whatever else is on. "I've got to go to bed!" my wife says, rubbing her eyes. To counter this phenomenon, the Juggle's Sara is going TV-free for a week, and is inviting people to join her. All you have to do is make it to next Wednesday, filling your extra time with reading and family activities and whatever it is people without TVs do all day instead of "Grey's Anatomy." Can you do it? Do you want to? Posted Mar 28 2007, 04:01 PM by Mike Adamick (Cry It Out!) with | with 9 comment(s) Filed under: television, activities, addiction, family, family stress, family activities

• New Use for Old Toys: Rehabilitation

  Get out the wooden tops, jacks and marbles, Ethel - classic toys are finding new life as rehabilitation tools for seniors.  In various nursing homes and senior centers on the East Coast, a new program, administered by the Teacher Place & Parent Resources in Burlington, Vermont, uses classic toys to improve memory and hand-eye coordination. Providing a basket of toys allows families to have a focus for their otherwise occasionally tongue-tied visits.  Toys have a way of bridging gaps between generations and smoothing over differences and troubled history, especially old favorites that do not depend on wild videos and overcharged batteries to function. Games without clear winners and losers tend to build rapport rather than create tension, but I'm not ready to toss out my Sorry and Monopoly Games just yet.  I think learning to lose graciously (which I'm still learning) is one of life's most difficult lessons.  If I can eventually use some of these lessons to ease my folks on down the aging road, than I'm glad for them. Posted Mar 13 2007, 08:28 AM by Rachael Brownell (Redsy) with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: games, marbles, family activities, ball and jacks