Mama, what happened on September 11?

August 31, 2011 2 Comments

If you haven’t heard this question from your child yet, you’re likely to hear it any day now.  As the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks approaches, I’m seeing and hearing more commemoration than in the past eight years.

My son asked about September 11 two years ago when the newspaper vending box showed a solemn, patriotic event and he wanted to know what that was about.  The simple answer is, “Every year on September 11, we remember people who died when our country was attacked.”  That would be enough information for some young children.  As with any sensitive topic, the best approach is to answer only the question the child is really asking.  I am sharing the full “story” I told to Nicholas (who was only 4 years 8 months old but was already a very detail-oriented, tell-me-the-whole-story type of person!) as an example of what you might need to explain to a child, but be careful of heaping them with too many details.  In particular, think about whether your child is really asking, “Exactly what happened?” or, “Why did it happen?” Read more…

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Bullying: an article I wrote, and three I don’t have to write

August 29, 2011 4 Comments

Although I am discussing my work here, the point of view is my own, and this is not an official statement of the Pittsburgh Youth Study.

As the data manager of a long-term research study, I recently helped to write this academic paper: Bullying Perpetration and Victimization as Predictors of Delinquency and Depression in the Pittsburgh Youth Study.  What we found, looking at data collected from the 503 men we’ve been interviewing repeatedly since they were in first grade, is that bullies are more likely than non-bullies to grow up to be criminals, and bullying victims are more likely than non-victims to grow up to be depressed.  That’s not really surprising, is it?  But it’s good to add to the hard scientific evidence that bullying is a serious problem with lifelong consequences.  This whole issue of the Journal of Aggression, Conflict, and Peace Research was a special issue on school bullying, with 7 more articles on the subject.

I had been kind of thinking I should write something about bullying that might be read by people who don’t read dull academic journals.  But I felt very shy about it and afraid to admit that, well, I know there’s a problem and can prove there’s a problem but can’t claim I ever solved this problem for myself or anybody and tried so many things that didn’t work and when I even think about it I get so scared and what if– Read more…

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Masoor Dal (Indian Lentils) with Carrots

August 27, 2011 8 Comments

This started with a recipe I found on the Internet, but we’ve made some adjustments. The most interesting (though not authentically Indian) one is adding carrots, which turns this from just a high-protein main dish into a full meal. It’s easy and pretty quick to make. Read more…

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Spaghetti Sauce, August 20 Version

August 26, 2011 1 Comment

Food on Fridays

This is part of my ongoing documentation of spaghetti sauce variations.  Like the sauce I made around this time last year, this one contains the seasonal vegetables we happened to have on hand, but they were a little different this time.  This sauce has about the maximum basil flavor I can stand.

Here are the instructions/ingredients/method for approximately reproducing this batch of sauce: Read more…

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All-Ages Game Night: A great community event!

August 24, 2011 3 Comments

I ran an All-Ages Game Night at my church last month as both a social event for our members and a way to connect with our community (and maybe attract some new members).  It was easy to do, extremely inexpensive, and lots of fun!

My family loves games and owns enough to fill a large chest of drawers, so we simply brought about half of our games (see list below), the ones that are easiest to learn and don’t take a really long time to play.  We didn’t serve snacks at Game Night–food is distracting and expensive and gets the cards sticky–but we did serve ice water and lemonade using our real glasses.  It was a hot, humid evening, and our parish hall is not air-conditioned, so we set up fans. Read more…

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Links, Links, Lovely Links!

August 22, 2011 3 Comments

UPDATE: Visit my Pinterest board for more links!  I am going to try doing all the updates over there starting in 2013.  Pinterest can be used by anyone; you do not have to get a Pinterest account to see and click on the links.  If you have any trouble using the page, please comment on this post or e-mail becca [at] earthlingshandbook [dot] org.

Sometime two or three years ago I decided to have one post for collecting links to pages I thought were interesting but didn’t have so much to say about them that it was worth a new article.  Instead of putting up a new Links post every few months, I would keep adding new links to the top of that one post.  It worked just fine for a long time.  Then, about nine months ago, the software I was using (Online Quickblog) pulled an irritating new trick: Whenever I edited a post, it would “re-publish” it and change its URL to include the current date.  That was a major problem for anyone who had bookmarked the page, because it had vanished from its old location.

Since moving The Earthling’s Handbook to WordPress about five months ago, I’ve been meaning to write a new Links post including all the cool stuff I’ve found on the Internet since I stopped updating the old post!  (Once this is published, I will edit the old post to reflect the existence of this one.)

I will be updating this post as I find new interesting links.  Read more…

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When Robots Write About Grildebeest

August 19, 2011 1 Comment

Last month, I invented a new word for a future animal of my own imagining.  Today, on an idle lunch-break whim, I did a Google search to see if anyone else has been talking about grildebeest yet . . . and I found that one of those wily robots has picked up the topic.  Well, actually, it appears that what this robot did was to pull one sentence from each of many Websites and string them together into a paragraph of text to slap onto a page so that search engines would find it, even though the page has nothing to do with grildebeest or any of the other topics mentioned in the paragraph; it is a page where one can download an MP3 of a song.  I’m not linking to it because, if you want that song, you will find the page easily by searching for the song title.

But thanks, random search-engine-cheating robot, for the block of text which I can now edit (by cutting just a few phrases and editing some punctuation, most notably the use of semicolons where sentient humans would use apostrophes) into some silliness to brighten this stormy Friday! Read more…

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Thrifty All-natural Anti-bacterial Moisturizing Face Wash

August 17, 2011 5 Comments

A lot of skin care products contain scary ingredients and are pretty expensive.  Totally organic facial cleansers are really expensive and sometimes go bad before you can use the whole package–and a surprising number of them ignore organic-ness in packaging and put the stuff in a vinyl tube that slowly saturates it with carcinogens and endocrine disruptors.  There are some great natural soaps available at reasonable prices (Dr. Bronner’s soap looks expensive, but a few drops go a long way!) for washing the rest of your body, but some people’s faces don’t respond well to ordinary soap and get dry or dull-looking.

Luckily, there’s an all-natural, anti-bacterial, moisturizing, low-priced, minimally-packaged, easy-to-use alternative that’s sold in every grocery store, is often available from local sources, is so safe you can eat it, and even tastes delicious! Read more…

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How a kid can cook burgers indoors on a hot day

August 10, 2011 9 Comments

Last month, my brother commented on my article about the Grildebeest that a George Foreman grill is a handy way to cook things with minimal supervision and better energy efficiency than a stove.  I hadn’t considered buying one of those grills before.  (We have a small kitchen, so we try to avoid owning a lot of gadgets.)  Last week, the smallest size George Foreman grill was on sale at Target for $15 and I got a Target coupon for $5 off any size George Foreman grill, so I decided to give it a try.

It’s a cute little thing and very lightweight.  I was skeptical about its usefulness.  But I thawed some veggie burgers, I read the instructions (all about meat) and washed the grill, and my six-year-old son and I attempted to make dinner.  He was very interested in learning to use the new machine.

We cooked a burger for one minute.  Warm, but not very warm.  We cooked it for a second minute.  It smelled good, looked brown, and was too hot to touch.  We tried toasting a bun in the grill for one minute.  Perfect!  One burger ready to go in 3 minutes. Read more…

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Great lunch kit for school!

August 3, 2011 8 Comments

Nicholas will be starting first grade in three weeks, so we’ve got some shopping and organizing to do, but one thing we don’t need to do is buy a new lunchbox!  The one he used for full-day kindergarten is still in great shape for this year and likely for several years to come. Read more…

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