Every Halloween I like to blog about the costumes we're wearing and how we made them. I usually feature each member of the family, but this year I have to make it a one-man show.
This year, The Pea decided to go all out for her high school's Spirit Week, which is held the week before Halloween. For each day of Spirit Week, classes (freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors) are assigned different themes, and students dress up in that theme. Every day, each class nominates two students to represent their class in a costume contest. Each day, Pea came up with a costume each day that got her nominated four days out of five, and won Best Costume twice (today's results aren't out yet, so hopefully she'll get a third trophy!).
There's no point in featuring anyone else's Halloween costumes. Mine is a store-bought Pooh onesie. 3Po and Jammy haven't even started planning their costumes. They'll probably wear one of The Pea's costumes. Alfie isn't even wearing a costume. This year, all the oohs and ahhs belong to The Pea. She totally deserves it.
Showing posts with label kids. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kids. Show all posts
Sweet memories of the Musem of Ice Cream San Francisco
As a child, I always wanted to visit Willy Wonka's factory; today, I finally got the chance. I first heard about the Museum of Ice Cream (MOIC) last summer, but since I had no plans to visit New York, I had to watch enviously as visitors sniffed wallpaper, sampled ice cream, and buried themselves in sprinkles. When they announced their latest pop-up installation in San Francisco, I knew I had to go. If you like ice cream and selfies, this is the museum for you! Keep reading to get the inside scoop (yes that's an ice cream pun!) on San Francisco's latest destination for the cool (another ice cream pun!) set:
Easter Bunny photos through the years
We used to make a big deal out of Easter when the kids were small. Every year, we would attend multiple egg hunts -- community egg hunts, egg hunts at friends' homes, egg hunts at our home. At some of the bigger events, they would get to see the Easter Bunny, and they would treat him like a big celebrity. But for some reason, I never made a big deal out of Easter Bunny photos. The Easter Bunny was not a big part of my childhood and I've always found him a bit creepy (as you can tell from the photo below, Baby Pea agrees with me).
25 Easter Egg fillers for teens and adults
Easter is just 1 week away! Now that the kids are teenagers, we no longer attend Easter Egg hunts, but we still like to keep the celebration going with our own egg hunts in our back yard. Easter Egg fillers graduated from candy and stickers and erasers to Lego minifigs, dollar coins, and Disney trading pins. There are lots of teen and grown-up trinkets that can fit into an Easter Egg! Who says the little kids get to have all the fun?! Here are some ideas for Easter Egg fillers that grownups will love:
Missing: Teen Brains
Part of my job as social media manager for a diabetes nonprofit is to attend and recap educational events featuring medical professionals or other experts on diabetes. Most of the time the information shared is relevant only to people with type 1 diabetes, but many times I come home with pearls of wisdom that apply to anyone.
My latest a-ha moment came during a talk by a clinical psychologist who works with teens with type 1 diabetes. He was talking about getting teens to manage their condition more diligently. He said that teens are pretty much developmentally incapable of thinking about the long-term health consequences of diabetes because part of their brain is missing. That prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that deals with executive function, attention, is not yet fully developed in teens. It won't fully develop until their mid-20’s, and even mid-30’s.
My latest a-ha moment came during a talk by a clinical psychologist who works with teens with type 1 diabetes. He was talking about getting teens to manage their condition more diligently. He said that teens are pretty much developmentally incapable of thinking about the long-term health consequences of diabetes because part of their brain is missing. That prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that deals with executive function, attention, is not yet fully developed in teens. It won't fully develop until their mid-20’s, and even mid-30’s.
Celebrate the holidays with Disney's Viva Navidad street party
Parades are one of the most popular attractions at the Disneyland Resort. Every day, people line the sidewalks of Disneyland Park's Main Street USA to stake out good viewing spots. It's not unheard of for people to get settled 60-90 minutes before the parade begins, taking turns with family members to get food or go to the restroom. We've done this many times, but now that the kids are older, they prefer to take advantage of decreased attraction wait times during parades. Besides, they've seen all the current parades anyway... or so we thought. At our most recent Disneyland visit, we discovered one of the resort's best-kept secrets: Disney California Adventure's Viva Navidad Street Party. It's festive and fun, and you can arrive with just five minutes to spare and still get a great viewing spot!
How to make a candy lollipop centerpiece
Halloween is my favorite holiday, and part of the fun is gathering insane amounts of candy that I would never let the kids have any other time of the year. Over the years, the kids have graduated from cute little treat bags to gigantic pillowcases, and those longer legs meant greater stamina for collecting candy on Halloween night. So we've ended up with far more candy that even I would let them have. The solution? Candy crafts to the rescue! We've used candy for gingerbread houses (which no one eats), candy wreaths, and candy centerpieces like the one in the photo.
Lollipop trees make great holiday table centerpieces. They're also a great way to display the candy given out at the doctor's office or school front office! You'll need a 3- inch styrofoam ball, a 4-inch decorative flower pot, and a LOT of lollipops.
Simply stick the lollipops into the styrofoam ball, all the way around. If your styrofoam ball is dense, don't use the lollipop sticks to poke holes into the ball, because the sticks will bend. Use a metal skewer instead. You don't have to stick the lollipops all the way in; just an inch or so will do. Try not to leave any space between lollipop heads. When you've covered about three-quarters of the styrofoam ball, rest the ball on top of your flower pot.
Ten Ways American Girl promotes inclusiveness and celebrates diversity
Ten Tips for Surviving Braces
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| The start of a perfect smile |
3Po and Jammy have begun a rite of passage affecting teens and tweens all over the world. No, I'm not talking about their first crush (already happened). I'm not talking about smoking (never going to happen). I'm talking about braces. For the next 18-24 months they'll be visiting the orthodontist, craving popcorn, and slowly but surely, developing a killer smile. It's going to suck, and at times it's going to really suck, but the results will be worth it. I know, because I had braces myself.
Seymour Marine Discovery Center
My cousin Angie has spent the last 6 or 7 years getting her PhD at the University of Santa Cruz. During that time, she worked as a docent at the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and she has been urging us to visit, but for one reason or another, we never got around to going. Wouldn't you know it, now that she has graduated, we finally got our act together and visited for the first time!
A letter to the parents of the losing soccer team
To the parents of the opposing team,
My sons' soccer team played your sons' soccer team today. It's a game that you might not want to remember, because the score was 12-0. The gap would have been wider, but our team's coach instructed our players to stop scoring. Possession was 90%-10% in our favor, and 90% of the match was played in your half of the pitch. To put it bluntly, it was a thrashing.
Art that's educational and fun: Art In Island 3D Museum
Art can do many things for many different people. It can inspire. It can educate. It can spur people to action. It can calm them down. It can do all of those things, but art doesn't have to do any of them to justify its existence. Sometimes all art has to do is entertain!
Entertainment, not education, was foremost on our minds when we visited Art in Island, a 3D art museum in Quezon City. Unlike most art museums, visitors are encouraged to touch and explore -- in fact, that's where all the fun comes from! But we also managed to learn a thing or two about optical illusions and how your brain works.
Palo Alto's Magical Bridge Playground: a place for everyone
One of the reasons I love living in Palo Alto is that we're living in a place that values innovation and change. Traffic lights and potholes and internet access (hello, city council, when are we getting city-wide free wifi?) notwithstanding, Palo Alto and Silicon Valley is always on the cutting edge. And we're not just talking hi-tech: check out Palo Alto's newest playground, the Magical Bridge Playground. It's the only playground in the Bay Area designed to accommodate kids of all abilities, and one of the few playgrounds in the country that is 100% wheelchair accessible.
I've already published write-ups on the playground on Silicon Valley Mamas, Red Tricycle (the article even got picked up by SF Gate!), and Mommynearest, but I had a few more photos of this wonderful playground that I wanted to share.
5 Things Tweens and Teens Will Love about the Children's Creativity Museum
Today I took the kids to the Children's Creativity Museum for a blog event. It has been a couple of years since we last visited, so I wasn't sure whether they would be bored. They did want to go to the Animation Studio exhibit, so I figured we could stay for a couple of hours, have lunch, then leave.
We ended up staying at the museum for SIX HOURS. I guess playing with cool technology never gets old! It's true that a large portion of the museum appeals to younger kids (the puppet theatre, the soft play area, the art center, the reading nook), but there's still so much that kids of all ages will enjoy. Here are our top 5 choices for exhibits at the Children's Creativity Center for older kids:
Good bye, grade school
Yesterday we said goodbye to the end of an era. The Pea has graduated from middle school; next year she'll be starting high school. 3Po and Jammy have graduated from grade school; next year they'll be starting middle school. We've closed the chapter on the elementary school years.
Parenting Advice for parents of grade school kids, from a 5th grade graduating parent
In less than three months, my oldest will be graduating from middle school, and my youngest will be graduating from grade school. It's the end of an era. My kids are growing up.
Even scarier is the speed at which everything happened. Those nine years seem to have gone by so quickly, and the four years I have left till The Pea graduates high school will pass even more quickly. It will go by in the blink of an eye, and I'm actually starting to panic.
Must-have items to take with you while Trick-or-Treating
Costumes? Check. Trick or treat bag? Check. House keys? Check. Phone? Check. You may think you're all ready to go out trick or treating, but consider this: you're going out walking, in the dark, with a group of excited kids who are likely to consume large amounts of candy and get even more hyperactive. Unless you want the evening to dissolve into tears and tantrums (or an early abandonment of your trick-or-treat plans), you'll want to bring a lot more than that.
This is our 14th year of taking a child trick-or-treating on Halloween night, and over the years, I've amassed a must-have list of items to have with me. Here's my list of items to pack in your Halloween night purse to make trick-or-treating less stressful and more fun:
Halloween Costumewatch 2014: Chinese Dragon
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I don't mind spending on Halloween costumes -- it's my favorite holiday, after all -- I try to encourage the kids to alternate between buying a costume one year, and then making or assembling it the next. I've been kind of lax in enforcing it with the boys, so this year I redoubled my efforts to get them to make their own costumes, and save a few bucks in the process. As it turned out, I think I spent more on raw materials for this year's costumes than if I had just bought costumes from a store.... but we did have a great time making the costumes, and they ended with kickass costumes that will blow those generic store-bought costumes out of the water!
Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival
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I've just realized that this blog is over 8 years old and has absolutely no mention of the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival. This is a serious omission, because the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival is our favorite festival in the entire region (I did write about why I love the HMB Pumpkin Festival over on Silicon Valley Mamas a couple of years ago). We've attended the festival every year for almost a decade, and despite the crowds and traffic, we can't wait for the next festival to arrive.
Halloween Boo Bag Printables
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