If you’ve got kids just out of school (or close to it), then you’ve likely got your hands full with trying to find enough activities to keep them busy. The pool is great, and the library’s always a good option, but my favorite parts of the summer break were projects… and lots of them. My mom and dad always had a few interesting hands-on activities planned for my brother, sister, and me during the summer, and now that I’ve got two sons of my own, I’m always on the lookout for cool projects to do with them.

One source of ideas has always been Make: magazine, a quarterly release crammed with all sorts of DIYers and tinkerers and inventors sharing their ideas and providing detailed instructions for duplicating their work. Inside the pages you’ll often find reviews of kits that can provide hours, weeks, and maybe even years worth of education — these include electronics kits, robot kits, air rocket kits, photography kits, marshmallow gun kits… you get the idea. Where was this magazine when I was growing up?

With over seven years of content, Make: magazine has provided readers with more projects than they could ever hope to have time to complete. And if you’ve got kids, they haven’t ignored the younger audience, either — you’ll often find special projects in each issue that are perfectly suited for a younger group that might not yet have developed skills in welding, soldering, woodworking, and more.

For those parents who are unfamiliar with Make: magazine, you’ll be happy to hear that you don’t have to go back and order years of back issues to catch up with the magazine’s projects. Fortunately for you, the folks at Make: have just released a special, over-sized edition that collects some of the most popular kid-friendly projects from earlier issues and some new projects just for the special issue. And they’ve printed the issue in 3D! Glasses included!

So, just what kinds of special projects can be found in these pages? How about detailed steps to designing and creating over-sized cardboard creations (such as the 8′ tall T-Rex used as an example) using a free CAD application? How about instructions for creating your own 3D movies? How about super-detailed steps for doing your own silk screening on shirts, bookbags, and other stuff? How about a guide to making your own rocket launcher from PVC and disposable rockets from paper and tape? And the list goes on and on. You’ll find steps for making your own musical instruments, a marshmallow gun, glow-in-the-dark candy, and frozen chocolate bananas and dozens more projects perfectly suitable (and safe) for kids.

To make the special edition even better, the Make: team added even more projects by including more project descriptions along with a photo and a web link  at the top of each page for more detailed instructions. There’s even a handful of interviews with young makers at the end of the magazine that will hopefully inspire your own young makers to keep learning, keep experimenting, and keep making things. And parents will find a great article titled “Tips for Building with Kids” that contains dozens of suggestions for helping kids discover, observe, and experiment. And the final page has a HowToons special cartoon dedicated to the art of summertime water fights.

And I guess this is as good a time as ever to remind you that the Maker Faire will be happening this weekend in San Mateo, California. Many of the GeekDad staff will be there (including myself), so come by and say hello to us at our booth. It’s a fun event for all ages, so if you’re in the area and can make the trip with the kids, prepare to have your mind blown.

The special edition should be on bookstore shelves now (through Sept 1, 2012). You can find more information on the issue here.

“Say Happy Muhver Day!”
-Lucas (2012, almost 3 years old)
 

Being literal is not the same as being literate, but it’s funny.

Facepalm. He repeated exactly what I just whispered to him. His smile was sooooo big tho! So was hers. Precious.

Even though he chewed it up a bit, I was proud he got out the word “Mother’s” because he calls her Mommy. And his inclusion of my instruction to “Say” was quite simply hilarious and reminded me of all the amazing verbatim FAILs I’ve seen on the interwebs.

Happy day after Mother’s Day, folks!
 

–

My Kid Just Said Facebook Page
This is where YOU can post YOUR kid’s quotes.
 

How does a parent reconcile the greatness of sports with its underbelly? (photo: Kevin Makice)

Dave Duerson was one of the good guys. The NFL celebrated the former Chicago Bears safety for his play on the field with Pro Bowl appearances and Super Bowl rings, and honored his sense of community off the field with the NFL Man of the Year Award. After retirement, Duerson continued to serve his peers as a member of the union’s disability panel, detailing individual cases of debilitated former players. In early 2011, however, it became clear that Duerson himself had been debilitated when the athlete committed suicide with a bullet to his chest.

Last week, as NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell handed down player suspensions in “Bountygate,” another well-respected football star, Junior Seau, also killed himself. The two suicides are similar, with fatal wounds intended to preserve their football-battered brains for posthumous study. Evidence is accumulating that links concussions suffered playing the game they loved — and the sport I most enjoy watching with my kids — with declining mental health after the physical punishment has ceased.

More than any other revelation about the sport, the death of Duerson is forcing me to reflect on why I continue to watch NFL football. Giving it up would mean not just abandoning my 27-year-old fantasy football team and about three hours of potential euphoria each week, but also losing my connection to afternoons spent with my father trying to point the antenna to Milwaukee to watch blacked-out Bears games on TV. Now a father of three, I am challenged to reconcile this dark side of the game with the Sunday afternoon rituals in the fall where I encourage my kids to help me cheer for big hits.

Inspiration can be found in how other fathers handled their own disconnect between sports and parenting. In late 2007, author Jim Gullo faced a similar dilemma, albeit with a different sport and different scandal.

“We Would Cream Everybody”

Shortly after the Mitchell Report was released in December 2007, Gullo noticed that his then 7-year-old son, Joe, was arranging his growing baseball card collection in a disturbing way. Having listened to enough dinnertime conversation to understand the impact of widespread steroid abuse detailed in the report — 89 MLB players were named as users of performance-enhancing drugs (PED) — Joe scrutinized career stats on the back of player cards and made a pile for cheaters.

Troubled by the way baseball’s steroid abuse invaded his home, the elder Gullo began a quest to get answers from the sport he loved: Why would players seek help from banned drugs, and why was the profession so ready to ignore it? Gullo, an Arizona-educated journalist who previously worked for New York Magazine, wrote an article about the impact of steroids on the Seattle Mariner organization. Not satisfied with the response from MLB, he brought his son along on his journey, now chronicled in Gullo’s latest book, Trading Manny.

The title character is Manny Ramirez, a World Series MVP who in 2004 helped end the Curse of the Bambino by bringing the Boston Red Sox their first championship in 86 years. Ramirez was a dangerous hitter, winning the Sliver Slugger nine times, including eight straight seasons (1999-2006). A poster of the All-Star outfielder hung above Joe’s bed, and Ramirez was the recurring focus of the family trade speculation for the home team Mariners (“We would cream everybody,” Joe predicted).

That changed in 2009 when Ramirez, traded the previous season to the Los Angeles Dodgers, was suspended for 50 games as part of the league’s Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program. That first strike turned Ramirez into a journeyman, playing for two more teams before Strike Two made him one of just three players to be hit with a 100-game suspension. He retired from Tampa Bay in 2011 instead of serving more time. Now with the Oakland A’s as a minor-leaguer, Ramirez is enduring a reduced 50-game suspension to start the 2012 season in an attempt to jump-start his career.

The Gullos effectively gave up on baseball in early summer 2009, about a month after the first Ramirez suspension was announced and before lawyers leaked a report that listed 103 major-league players — including Manny — who failed their drug tests in 2003. Their disinterest lasted about a year, until a pilgrimage to the hometown of a former star, the draw of spring training, and a growing relationship with minor-leaguer Dirk Hayhurst helped restore interest in the game.

One key moment came when Hayhurst gave voice to an answer Gullo had hoped his son would hear:

I wouldn’t take steroids because it’s cheating. Baseball is just a game and just a job. Anyone who tries to tell you that this is a magical experience is lying. Baseball is an entertainment experience. You have to wonder why you’d do something to yourself just to make a bunch of money and get paid. At the end of the day, there are more important things than what you did in a baseball game.

Hayhurst, whose quest to make the majors resulted in a writing career, was the most successful of several attempts by Gullo to get a direct response from baseball.

Although the game is recovering, the Steroid Era is trapped in baseball history. It cannot be Skazinskied, a term Joe learned at baseball camp where an entire career is expunged from the record books. When he shares his knowledge of baseball with kids in the neighborhood, Joe inevitably qualifies relevant statistics by including steroids in the conversation. He continues to question aberrant performances he sees. On Philip Humber’s recent perfect game, Joe admits: “If he tested positive, I wouldn’t be that surprised.”

Ramirez has been dethroned. Joe’s favorite player is Prince Fielder, the Detroit Tiger first baseman who may come the closest to feats of the Steroid Era sluggers. “For Joe, the juice era set the standard pretty high,” laments Jim. “A guy who doesn’t hit 55 home runs these days didn’t have a good year.”

“It’s always cool to watch somebody hit a homerun,” says Joe.

No Ton of Bricks

Steroids threatened Gullo’s ability to endorse the sport to his son in a way other scandals had not. Past drug problems seemed isolated (e.g., Darryl Strawberry or Steve Howe). Steroid abuse was everywhere at once.

“The Mitchell Report was shocking in its pervasiveness,” recalls Gullo, “that so many players were named and they represented such a cross-section of the game. If we had found out that 45% were testing positive for cocaine in the 1980s, that would have been a shocker. They were isolated instances.”

Even the “greenies” (amphetamines) of Jim Bouton’s Ball Four revelations in 1970 were different. “Nobody hit 70 home runs on greenies,” claims Gullo. “Darryl Strawberry didn’t hit .385 and win a triple crown because he was a cocaine user. The steroids took away the level playing field. They made a serious impact on the stats, which is really the foundation of the game. We can no longer compare Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire to Jimmie Foxx.”

The most problematic aspect of baseball’s response to steroids is the perceived absence of treatment. “When Strawberry had a cocaine issue, he was suspended and treated. People talked about it that he had a problem,” remembers Gullo. “Nobody has done that with the steroids guys. A-Rod was not put into a counseling program.”

“This all combines to make the steroid era a lot more sinister than it is given credit for,” says Gullo.

What turns a mistake into a scandal is an organization’s inability to respond. An NFL investigation revealed the New Orleans Saints operated a bounty system to reward players for hard hits and injuring opposing players. Then Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams got an indefinite suspension for his part in the scandal, which included giving speeches about who to hurt and where to hurt them and urging his team to stay silent about bounties. Commissioner Goodell sent a strong message by suspending coaches and players alike, and while his decisions drew fire — and did not address how widespread the practice may be — the actions taken by the Saints have been widely denounced.

“Seeing football’s response to this Saints scandal is telling,” says Jim Gullo. “They came down like a ton of bricks to a perceived problem. We haven’t seen that kind of response from baseball [about steroids] at any level.”

The position of commissioner was created to protect the integrity of sports. In 1921, Kenesaw Mountain Landis became the first commissioner of baseball specifically to deal with the Black Sox scandal, in which players on the Chicago White Sox conspired to throw the World Series. Landis banned everyone involved, including those who knew of the payoffs but did not speak up (e.g., Buck Weaver). Goodell’s ruling is not as heavy-handed as that of Landis, but it is clearly more than a warning shot over the bow of the NFL.

The Mitchell Report, however, arrived only with a promise of further investigation. “Discipline of players and others identified in this report will be determined on a case-by-case basis,” said MLB owner-turned-commissioner Bud Selig. In the league’s eyes, according to Gullo, only two cases (Jose Guillen and Jay Gibbons) warranted sanctions: a 15-day suspension.

In Trading Manny, Gullo likened Selig to a shop teacher that looks the other way in response to student transgressions. “A different person in charge with a different mandate from the owners would have handled it in a different way,” speculates Gullo, citing how Bart Giamatti handled Pete Rose’s gambling. “Baseball has not dealt with its scandals as punitively as football just did.”

Cheating won’t be stopped with better drug testing, argues Gullo. “It’s the culture of the game, a culture that all of us embrace, from the fans to the commissioners office. It still feels like that culture is, ‘Don’t get caught.’ I don’t think my book would have happened if they had done more.”

“It Scares Me as a Dad”

The rituals inherited by modern sport are not limited to tailgating, fireworks after home runs, and marking scorecards in ink. They also include the closed fraternities of the locker room and hazing of new members of that club. Technology, medicine and economics evolve the context of professional sports, begging the fraternity to change in kind. While strong traditions have the power to connect generations through shared experiences, the other edge is a reluctance to give up what is familiar for what may be right.

Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Cole Hamels exemplified this old school mindset by admitting to throwing at rookie outfielder Bryce Harper on purpose. The honesty drew a quick five-game suspension from the league, but the intentional violence — which likely also included the retaliatory third-inning pitch thrown by Jordan Zimmerman that hit Hamel at the plate — remains in the fabric of the sport. For an implicitly violent sport like football, that line is blurred.

Whereas steroids damaged the integrity of baseball stats, and did physical damage to the individuals who took them, the game of baseball can easily be played without PED. Football, on the other hand, becomes a different game if it turns out the only way to prevent concussions is to stop tackling. It isn’t enough to have a commissioner say emphatically not to intentionally injure other players. The NFL may need to do a significantly better job incorporating evolving brain science into their rules, equipment, and support after players leave the game.

Tony Dorsett is one of three Hall of Famers and over 300 former NFL players who are suing the league and helmet manufacturer Riddell for damages due to in-game concussions. Dave Duerson’s family has their own lawsuit to force these institutions to take responsibility for their role in chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the progressive degenerative brain disease that leads to memory loss, aggression, depression, and dementia. To their credit, the NFL under Goodell is taking concussions more seriously, but the legal and economic implications are significant barriers to being more proactive about change.

Suicides of players like Duerson and Seau haven’t deterred some fathers from encouraging their sons to play the game. Others — like former NFL quarterback Kurt Warner — are more cautious.

Informed by his own experiences, Warner is taking a conservative approach with his own sons, one of which has already suffered a concussion playing football. In a statement that drew backlash from his peers, Warner told Dan Patrick that he would prefer his kids do not play football:

It scares me as a dad. I just wonder — I wonder what the league’s going to be like. I love that the commissioner is doing a lot of things to try to clean up the game from that standpoint and improve player safety, which helps, in my mind, a lot. But it’s a scary thing for me.

When a potential Hall-of-Fame quarterback hesitates to let his sons play his game, and when 8-year-old boys can spot unusual stats trends from the backs of baseball cards, professional sports need to endorse new traditions.

Talk to Your Kids

For sports geeks trying to infuse their geeklets with a preference for Sunday afternoon armchair quarterbacking while wrestling with dark side of sports, the only absolute is conversation. Here are four things to bring up with your kids while sitting on the couch or sideline watching a game together.

1) Expect help from your team
Seau’s suicide prompted new Bears wide receiver Brandon Marshall to turn the conversation from inevitable brain damage to leveraging community to provide better supports for mental health. “In sports,” he wrote in a Chicago Sun-Times editorial, “those who show they are hurt or have mental weakness or pain are told: ‘You’re not tough. You’re not a man. That’s not how the players before you did it.’”

When participating in sports, your child’s team includes more than the other kids who share the field, or the coach who guides the development of their skills. It includes family, non-sports friends, relatives, mentors, and domain experts. Speculate about the input A-Rod might have received from his own team in making his decision to take steroids, and where else he might have looked for better support. Make sure your child understands that a strong and diverse network is more resilient and usually more intelligent, but that it only brings dividends if they use it.

2) Good doesn’t excuse the bad
The criticism to Warner’s comments about his sons playing football might be summed up as, “You should be grateful about what football has given you.” It is not impossible for one to be both grateful and concerned. Acknowledge the many charities and causes that professional athletes are put in the position to endorse, and then ask whether those efforts could be directed toward addressing the warts of the sport.

3) Look harder for role models
The criteria for heroism shouldn’t be eclipsing the 50-homer mark in a single season. Sometimes, it is as simple as giving an honest answer, like Dirk Hayhurst did for Joe Gullo. The minor leagues are filled with stand-up and accessible players. Go to the smaller ballparks and find some.

Better yet, look for peers at the local level, someone with whom your kids can open a real dialogue. For as much athletic success Mesa Prep freshman Paige Sultzbach is bound to have over the next few years, she is probably looking for support from her network after the school’s opponent forfeited a championship game because the second baseman is a girl. It’s possible that those providing inspiration are also going to need some back.

4) Expect changes
When August rolls around, I plan to break out a new Peyton Manning Broncos jersey (after my Chicago Bears beat him, of course) and share his comeback story with my kids. I’ll enlist their help if GeekDad sports creates a fantasy football league, and I’ll scrimp for enough funds to take them to a live game in the fall. I will do so, however, with an eye on Tony Dorsett and the Duersons, and an expectation that the NFL will address their valid concerns.

If not, I’m sure my kids will help me point our antenna in another direction.

It rained during the early part of the week here in Atlanta. My five-year-old, Decker, is quite used to riding his bike outside after school or kicking the soccer ball around the yard. I was worried that he’d be a bit antsy having to stay indoors, especially given that he might not be earning as many points with his GeoPalz device. But even with the rain, he still managed to keep his daily 10,000 step goal thanks to the iBounce.

While I’m not a fan of outdoor trampolines, this triangle-shaped personal trampoline has been a huge hit in my household. With its big green handlebars that are tacky to the touch and easy to hold onto with tiny hands, Decker has had zero accidents in over a week’s worth of jumping and jumping and jumping. That said, I’ve told him that if I catch him jumping on it without holding the handlebars, he’ll lose it for a week.

By itself, he’ll get on it and jump for two or three minutes at a time. You’d think that wouldn’t be a lot of jumping, but he’ll be almost out of breath when he finishes a good round of jumping. But the iBounce also comes with an iPad mounting bracket and a free iPad story app that provides additional incentive to get back on and keep jumping. The young kangaroo, RompidyRoo, guides the jumper on an adventure to find Mr. Fuzzy (a teddy bear that’s gone missing) that involves jumping, counting, and observing items on the iPad’s screen. Decker has done the app a few times (you can also view the video with a DVD player if you don’t have an iPad or choose not to install the mount), but he much prefers just to get on it and bounce at his own pace. Right now, there’s only the one story, so I’m hoping they’ll release more soon as my 2-year-old, Sawyer, has quickly figured out from watching his big brother how to hold the handles and jump. He’s much more likely to enjoy the app stories than Decker, so I’ll be keeping my eyes open for more stories to be released.

As far as jumping goes, the iBounce is very sturdy. If you follow the instructions correctly, the jumping pad will be nice and tight and capable of supporting up to 80 pounds. A soft padded skirt covers the three bungee cords that are wrapped around the metal braces that form the structure — the cords are also threaded through the metal eyelets in the jump pad, and it’s readily apparent that the material is strong and the pad is not going to tear or the cords break. Decker and Sawyer should be able to jump on this thing for years to come without any worries related to the materials used in the iBounce’s construction.

A word of warning to parents who don’t like to assemble things is in order here, however — the iBounce took me about 45 minutes to put together. The instructions were easy enough to follow, and Decker was a good assistant when I needed him to hold the three pieces of the frame so I could secure them together with the bolts. You’ll want to make 100% certain to tighten all of the bolts down after the assembly is done but not until then… the instructions will tell you exactly when to tighten everything down, so be sure to read them carefully before you begin so you’ll know what’s coming. Wrapping the bungee cords through the jump pad can be done solo, but it would have helped to have another adult help as you want to keep tension on the cord as you thread it around and around the frame. Assembly probably would have been about 10 minutes faster with another set of adult hands. That said, when I finished the thing was solid with no loose parts. After more than a week of jumping, all of the bolts are still tight.

While I’d much prefer Decker to be outside running and riding his bike after school, the iBounce has turned into a nice little afternoon activity. I’ll give Decker a challenge to do 100 or 200 jumps in exchange for 20 minutes on the iPad, for example. Rather than send him to time out, I occasionally offer him the option to go jump for a few minutes rather than send him to his room — just a little extra energy burn to help with bedtime.

Note: JumpSport provided me with an iBounce for testing purposes.

The standard answer here is pretty easy. Because of the provisions of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA), any site that collects personal information cannot offer services to customers under 13 years of age. As a result, almost any popular web site has clear terms of service that state that nobody under 13 can have an account — notably Facebook, Google, and iTunes.

Not that most people pay close attention to that.

So, of all the possible accounts, iTunes makes me the most nervous — all digital music does — a consequence of growing up when an album collection was a tangible thing. I live in constant fear that I’m going to suddenly and irrevocably delete my whole music library.

For my son, it’s the logical place to start giving him some ownership of his own digital life because that is where he has made the greatest investment (for my daughter it a was a Nook attached to her own B&N account, but that’s another post).

Until now, Bubba has used Home Share to move songs from my library to his (aging, highly restricted) white iMac. From there he has synched the songs, first to iPods, then to his hand-me-down iPhone.

I was worried that in the process of creating the new account I would: delete his existing library forcing him to reload everything, delete my library forcing me to jump off a high building, break his computer, break my computer, and destroy the internet. I admit, the music stuff makes my jumpy.

Setting up the account had a few twists and turns, but we got it done. We used his school email and my credit card to create the account, and pretty quickly got his computer iTunes and his iPhone switched over to the new account and synched. The songs he had imported via Home Share from my library didn’t disappear, and the internet didn’t break.

He knows that I will see any purchases he makes on my credit card statement, but the whole move is premised on trust that he will use this access wisely.

One minor headache — his older model iMac is not compatible with OSX Lion, so no iCloud on his desktop. A pain because he wanted access to the calendar that I keep of his sporting events. Our workaround — the shared calendars do appear on his iPhone, so he just tracks that info there.

A couple of months into the arrangement, I still feel pretty good about it. I expected to be peppered with requests for permission to buy music. Not so much. He mostly listens to Pandora. Instead he’s used the account to acquire quite a few free apps. This flies under my radar because I’m not being charged anything. And there are plenty of free apps that could help him to avoid restrictions or controls that I have set up (limited calls and texts, for example).

So I still have to ask him to turn over the phone from time to time, so I can have a look at the apps. Not ideal, but part of the process.

Do you have thoughts about the age at which you will begin turning over the digital controls to your kids?

Yes I cleaned it up!

It appears that lots of sugar and the anxious excitement generated by partaking in a covert operation like toilet papering a house late at night puts adolescent boys into a hyper agitated state.

Who knew?

These boys were jacked up like firecrackers!

Having run out of planned activities and hoping to quell the WWE Smack Down going on inside the tent in the backyard, I had to come up with something.

Luckily Motorola had sent DadLabs a number of Droid RAZR phones for us to use in a Mother’s Day shoot.  They had just arrived the day before so I had access to multiple phones.  These were the sleek new RAZR’s pre-loaded with multiple apps and games.  The folks at Motorola touted their durability and scratch resistance so I decided to test these claims, as well as give this wild bunch of grade schoolers a 30-minute cool down period before calling lights out. For a digital midnight snack each kid got to play on a phone, as long as they were quiet and remained on their sleeping bag.

The boys were delighted and settled into a nice mellow gaming mode and the phones held up well in the hands of 9 year olds.  But the thing that amazed me the most was the ability of these boys to navigate the user interface of the phone.  None of these kids have phones and yet they were able to manipulate the device as easily as I do, and I have Droid!

Certainly some of this can be attributed to the simplicity of the Droid platform, but I felt something else was going on.

And then it hit me!

We truly are raising a generation that will blow our minds with the things they will create using technology.  As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in the his book “Outliers,” it takes approximately 10,000 hours of doing a specific task or activity to become truly elite and an expert in that field.  Up to now, very few folks get to the 10,000 hour mark in any pursuit and usually it is not until much later in life.  Furthermore, there almost always exists some anomaly in an environment that allows an individual to log such hours in practice of a certain task. One of Gladwell’s examples is Bill Gates, who had voluminous and constant access to computers in his early teen years.

But as technology becomes ubiquitously embedded within our daily lives, our children will reach this threshold much earlier than any previous generation.  There will be lots of little Bill Gates running around.

So just imagine what wonders this “techxpert”  generation will create with the expertise they develop.  I am not sure we can fathom the pace of change that is about to occur.

This epiphany also helped me realize the extreme importance of teaching our kids the value of a balanced life.  All tech all the time is not a full life and as technology becomes ingrained in the day to day we must consciously work toward introducing and enjoying the no tech part of existence.  While not a completely new task of parenting, monitoring screen time is becoming more of an issue.

In this high tech world one of our crucial jobs as parents will be to do things like modeling strong personal relationships, stressing the importance of the act of just visiting face to face and introducing the wonder of the natural world to our kids.

After the 30 minutes of game time had passed the boys were calmed, I gathered the phones, declared lights out and sat on the deck and listened to increasingly waning conversation and giggles until all the fellas drifted off to sleep.  It took about 15 minutes.  Not bad, from pure pandemonium to deep sleep in the span of 45 minutes!

And as I sat there listening to snores and distant coyote calls I considered our new duty as parents and was pleased with the balance of life that had been achieved on this evening.  The boys really enjoyed the technology of laser games and Droid phones and they reveled in the camaraderie and excitement of toilet papering a cousin’s front yard.  But I imagined they really dug falling asleep, in a tent, in their buddies backyard listening to the soft gentle sounds of the woods at night and being 9 years old.

Our kids will amaze us with the technology they will create as we grow older; let’s make sure we amaze them with the simple things in life.

Disclosure:  Motorola provided all of the phones used during the evening and purchased additional Mother’s Day video content from DadLabs.com.  But the idea to toilet paper our cousin’s house was all mine!

A typical morning's creative session

Kids seem to have an endless supply of creativity. Drawing, painting, writing, building, coloring, storytelling – anything can spark it off and it can lead to hours of fun. And stacks and stacks of art of all forms decorating your house.

We currently have an entire sofa dedicated to displaying a permanent exhibition of crazy Lego buildings and vehicles – which we can “never take apart again, because I want to keep them forever.” Several walls, both in her bedroom and ours, plastered with paintings and drawings, and sketch pads full of many more. There are cardboard box models on top of wardrobes and shelves and boxes full of homemade birthday, Christmas and Easter cards – complete with enough “I love you” messages to melt to stoniest of hearts.

"Blu-tac" holders production line

There was a time when I dreaded the sound of scissors snipping away at yet more paper, followed by the noise of Sellotape being unrolled to stick the paper back together into some new configuration. However, since Caine’s Arcade left me in tears of joy at the unbridled passion, I promised myself I’d never again try to stifle my daughter’s own creative urges for the sake of having to do a bit of tidying up. Just the other night, we witnessed the birth of a whole new product range that we never knew we needed. Those scissors had been at work again and the tiny strips of paper they produced were used to wrap bits of Blu-tac up into handy, ready-to-use “Blu-tac Holders.” They came in many different sizes – fat, thin, long, wide – to suit all purposes, one of which turned out to be an innovative new fencing system or possibly a Spinal Tap scaled Stonehenge!

In an effort to try to curb the art overload and also make it much easier to actually admire them, I’ve embarked upon a grand digitization of everything I can. If it’s letter/A4 sized, then on the scanner it goes – with a resolution of at least 300dpi. If it’s bigger than the scanner, then a photo will do nicely. I always use the DSLR, at it highest quality settings as you can’t get those pixels back later. Sculptures of all kinds are filmed from all angles in HD. I’ve been looking for an app similar to 360 Panorama or Photosynth that can create spinnable models, similar to the way QuickTime VR ones used to work for this, but with no luck so far. If you know of one, please share it in the comments.

Once all the paper has been turned into pixels of some kind, it’s time for a bit of tweaking and tidying up. When scanning pencil or felt pen drawings, sometime the lines can get a bit bleached out and stuff on the other side of the paper can show through. A painting can sometimes crinkle up the paper – hopefully the scanner will have flattened it out, but it can still leave shadows and off-white areas. Photoshop (or your pixel-editor of choice) is your friend here. If the masterpiece is predominantly white, you can use the Levels command to remove the worst of the shadows and bleed through. Simply move the pointer at the right hand end the left until you’re happy with the way it looks – there will usually be a big spike in the histogram there to help you judge the best place. While you’re there, you can also boost the mid range colors if you need to by moving the middle slider or if the lines are getting a bit washed out, bring the left along to boost the blacks. If the lines are looking a bit thin, you can fatten them up a bit by duplicating the layer and then applying a small Gaussian Blur to the new layer, then changing its Blending Mode to either Multiply or Darken. This will also boost the colors, so you may need to vary the opacity of the layer until it looks right. After all the tweakings are done, I saved them out as jpegs, again at the highest quality setting, before importing them all into iPhoto.

"The Self Portrait of Dulcie" before and after tweaking

Speaking of iPhoto, that’s also where all the photos of the larger artworks end up when they come off the SD card. The basic tools within iPhoto’s Edit pane are perfectly fine to adjust the photos to get them just right – the Rotate and Crop tools fix any wonky photography and the Retouch tool can be used to remove any creases, hairs or other blemishes that might spoil later viewings. The Adjust tab is full of sliders to tweak the colors to your heart’s content. I usually find boosting the whites and mid-range in the Levels panel very helpful as with the scans. Saturating the colors can also give the image a brighter, more intense feel, as can increasing the Definition (which adjusts the contrast between adjoining areas). Another useful one here is the Shadows slider – moving this one up works on the darker areas, bringing some more color and detail back into the photo.

The videos don’t usually need much tweaking – just trimming the beginning and end, then maybe adding a title. I’ve just got the iMovie app for iPad and it makes this process a breeze – although getting the videos on to the iPad in the first place was a bit tricky. Turns out there’s a little checkbox in iTunes’ photo sync panel that just says ‘Include videos’! Once your videos are there, all you have to do is grab a clip and drop it into the timeline, then simply tap it to bring up the handles and drag them to the required point. Adding a title is just another tap away and there are several themes to choose from, each with their own fonts, styles and transitions – and you can switch between them easily. You could even go to town on this one and put together a showreel containing videos of all of the large format art. When you’re finished, a tap on the Share button can send the video up to the cloud or back to your computer. If you find that the file size of the videos generated by iMovie to be quite large, run them through QuickTime or Handbrake to shrink them down a bit.

Once everything is back in iPhoto, there’s one final step to do before the grand opening of the exhibition. All artwork deserves to be titled, and coming up with those titles is another great creative outlet for the little artists. Encourage them to say what they see or maybe what they were thinking about when it was made. Group similar pictures together and create a series. Talk about how famous artists titled their works and see what they come up with – sure, they might copy at first, but they’ll soon get the hang of it. And remember, there is no wrong answer!

Last thing to do is to grab some popcorn and start the slideshow…

[ click the images to enlarge ]

Children look at food and nutrition differently than adults. Sometimes they don’t even look at it, they just breath it in without even chewing. Some are picky and have roulette wheels for appetites. But whatever the case, the food groups look different in the eyes of a kid.

For starters, the idea that 5-6 categories can encompass ALL foods is kind of dumb. The food groups are kind of like a “See Jane Run” simplification of nutrition. But since dumb is commonly a passing grade in this world, let’s just go with it.

Not all of these categories and examples will apply to every child’s preference and opinions. For example, some kids might consider M&Ms more properly placed in the Portable category rather than Chocolate. Some may not like peanut M&Ms, considering them “healthy.” And some may not like chocolate at all, in which case, check for a battery slot, your child may not be real.

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You can’t eat Facebook…
We’ve tried. Not good. Kinda chewy, too. Let’s just use it for social interaction, okay?

Instructional Diagrams are good enough to eat!
You’ll really wish you could eat these… except for the ones about poop. Eh, maybe even then.