Lotus Carroll

I've been doing a lot of research lately on activities and programs in my local area that are geared towards kids.  In large part, this is because I've been doing a job that involves listing such things as a resource for parents, although I'd have been doing it regardless.  This is because my son gets horrible cabin fever if I don't engage him in activities outside the home, and the more antsy and wound up he gets, the less my sanity holds together.  I'm sure you would have guessed it, but 99% of my research is done online.  I don't use community fliers, mailings, magazi  Read more >

When my son was an infant I scoffed at the AAP suggestion that no child under 3 should watch any TV at all.  We let our son watch Baby Einstein videos and as he got older, other children's programming like Sesame Street, Super Why, and Word World.  I felt that because we interacted with him and engaged him with many other activities on a regular basis (one-on-one play, singing, book reading, imaginative play, etc.) that he would be fine.  He is about 3.5 years old now, and I've been paying special attention to his behavior as it relates to television exposure.  Read more >

Last November I experienced an event that almost gave me a heart attack: my computer's harddrive gave up on life and checked out.  Realizing I hadn't backed up documents or photos in quite a long time put me in a paralyzing state of anguish.  I knew that all my favorite photos were on Flickr, but so many photos and videos were saved only on my computer, and an insane amount of documents lived there, as well.Every time I thought of all the precious memories my family would lose documentation of, I felt sick to my stomach.  Read more >

As I was growing up, my parents were taking photos of our family, having them processed and printed, and putting those photos into albums.  The number of books and cases on their shelves grew as the years passed.  Now, a favorite thing for me to do when I visit my them is to pull out those old albums and go through them, enjoying those captured memories.  Read more >

We have an old XBox and it has served us relatively well for several years as both a gaming system and a DVD player (when our actual DVD player bit the dust).  Unfortunately, it rejects DVDs *frequently* due to some type of coding on the disk that clearly isn't compatible with our *coughdinosaurcough* old system.  Read more >

When I was a kid, my parents let me watch all kinds of television programming that most certainly was not designed for children.  No, really, I saw Eddie Murphy's Raw when I was in grade school.  Read more >